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Rising Cost of Carbon Capture is Killing the Great Green "Hope"
Rising costs have prompted new fears for one of the central planks of the Scottish Government's strategy for cutting climate pollution.
Longannet in Fife is earmarked for a pioneering CCS scheme. A report from two universities in Texas has argued that the difficulties in storing carbon deep underground have been hugely underestimated. It concluded that burial was "a profoundly non-feasible option for the management of carbon dioxide emissions."(The Herald) Scottish ministers want to keep burning coal in power stations by developing technology to capture and store the carbon dioxide they belch out. But new evidence from Norway suggests that this could cost nearly three times more than expected.
This comes on top of recent expert reports casting doubt on the feasibility of carbon capture and storage (CCS) - the great green hope of the energy industry. But technology is strongly defended by its backers in Scotland.
One of Norway's flagship CCS projects is run by the state-owned gas company, Gassco. But it has revealed that the estimated costs have rocketed from £0.4 billion in 2007 to £1.2bn now.
"The CCS costs are big and higher than we initially thought," said Sigve Apeland from Gassco. The company is trying to capture, transport and store 1.1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year from the Naturkraft gas-fired power plant at Kårstø.
Gassco told the environment company, ENDS, that the escalating costs were mostly due to the difficulties of actually capturing the carbon. It is a process that absorbs a lot of energy, which makes it expensive."This is only one example, but these kind of cost increases could kill off the prospect of having full-scale carbon capture working any time soon," said Dr Richard Dixon, director of WWF Scotland.
There is a pioneering scheme aimed at developing CCS at the Longannet coal-fired power station in Fife, run by ScottishPower. Both the Conservative and Labour parties have promised four CCS plants, but neither has said when.
A report from two universities in Texas has argued that the difficulties in storing carbon deep underground have been hugely underestimated. It concluded that burial was "a profoundly non-feasible option for the management of carbon dioxide emissions".
Patrick Harvie, the Green MSP, said: "The doubts about carbon capture and storage are growing week by week, and it looks increasingly like an impractical and unaffordable technology.
"It is wildly irresponsible to use the mere hope of a viable CCS option as an excuse for new coal plants, as both Labour and SNP governments have been doing."
The Scottish Government has backed plans to build a new coal-fired power station at Hunterston in north Ayrshire. But it is insisting that the plant starts up with one-fifth of its carbon being captured and stored.
Stuart Haszeldine, the ScottishPower CCS professor at the University of Edinburgh, pointed out that costs in Norway were always high. As CCS projects were developed, they would benefit from the economics of scale, he argued.
"It's entirely to be expected that the cost of capture will be extremely high for the first 10 or so projects in Europe," he said. "That is why these need support by national governments, as commercial companies cannot afford such expensive experiments."
According to Professor Haszeldine, the experience gained from experimental plants would as much as half the cost of subsequent plants.
For ScottishPower, which is owned by the Spanish energy company Iberdrola, the point of its prototype CCS plant at Longannet was to find ways of reducing costs. "That is key to the future of CCS, being able to capture CO2 effectively and efficiently without it being cost-prohibitive to ourselves or consumers," said a company spokesman.
25 Comments so far
Show AllI am Shocked, shocked I tell you.
The feasibility of carbon capture is being tested currently in the Gulf of Mexico. Doesn't seem to be going well.
RV
Right on!!!
CCS in conjunction with coal generation always seemed to be an absurdity. Basically it is like trying to reverse the second law of thermodynamics, and still have some usable energy left when you're done. The whole thing is a product of dumb people with MBA and marketing degrees, not engineers and scientists.
More forests and more algae are the only reliable ways to capture carbon.
Produce fewer, less-carnivorous humans to reduce the rate of CO2 generation, populate all available land with trees to act as a sink for the existing CO2, and get a lot more people growing food by hand to reduce the factory-farm runoffs.
I think Thermo-Nuclear is the only solution. Either the bomb to reduce the human population to sustainable levels or solar power, wind, rain, heat and light. Dispersing the populations among the farmlands would eliminate much of the transportation costs. Mankind thrived for hundreds of thousands of years without fossil fuels. Have we forgotten how?
I think that a great idea because surely this 'tower of babel' civilization has reached such unmanageable size that it is time to wipe out the majority and disperse the rest into the wind and getting rid of governments and organized religions along with it would cap off the end to a perfect day. Only, if nukes are used it would be best to move into the elite's neighborhoods to make sure you won't be snuffed out without a bunch of richies going with you.
Old News, Jeff Goddel explored this topic in his book, Big Coal showing that the phrase Obama loves to drop in his talking points, i.e., "clean coal" is nothing more than a pipe dream intended as political obfuscation for the lip service liberals who believe in his other marketing schemas like, "yes we can" or "change we can believe in." Neither slogan has any basis in science, reality, or even the truth, but the sheeple eat it up.
I have a better idea:
...Bury the entire "Carbon Capture" media campaign beneath ground where it belongs.
I’ve always thought that what they call “carbon sequestration” or “carbon capture and storage” would be more honestly called “oxygen sequestration” or “oxygen capture and storage.”
Consider that the proposed plan to clean up coal is (in simplified terms) to mine carbon (in the form of coal), burn it, capture the carbon dioxide and “store” it underground (assuming it’s even possible to capture and store CO2).
If you think about it you can easily see that there is no net change in carbon (since carbon starts out and ends up underground), but there would be a large net change in oxygen which would be captured from the atmosphere and stored underground (not to mention all the associated environmental devastation from mining and washing the coal, disposing of the ash, mercury pollution, etc.).
Think of coal as Nature’s perfect solution to genuine carbon sequestration – all we really have to do is to figure out how leave it in the ground.
Renewable energy is much more feasible than most people think – the biggest part of the solution is to stop wasting energy on gratuitous lighting and to use energy efficient appliances and entertainment devices (my wife and I were easily able to trim our demand to less than 10% of a typical household’s electrical energy demands).
Thanks for the factual and clear demonstration of the mythical nature of carbon capture. Oxygen sequestration it is.
Joe
Excellent points. That all they are doing is sequestering two "O"s for each C that was in the ground to begin with, never occurred to me.
Civilization cannot hope to grow continously on,
When our nourishing yolk of nature is almost gone.
Our thin shell of life is starting to weaken and crack.
Outside there is only emptiness, that is deep coal black.
Pumping carbon burnt with our oxygen underground,
Requires renewable energy for it to be sound.
Energy other than renewables from earth and sun.
Is sacred, for us to live on earth in the long run.
Carbon storage is a load of wishy-washy.
Hoping to feed us dirty coal cake trashy
Mashed with public relations baloney honey,
Stuffed with coal minings mountains of money.
Carbon storage might work at a very large cost,
But renewable energy is better, and no emissions lost.
Burn coal just only once and it still stays long unclean,
The return on renewables is always and forever green.
If you want to "sequester" some of the carbon out of petroleum before it is burned in cars or trucks, remove it from petroleum processes (e.g., from catalytic cracking units, cokers, or from deep deasphalting units) as so-called "heavy cycle oil", as petroleum coke itself or as asphaltenes. Pump these down a deep hole such as a mineshaft, or into a deep open pit mine lined with impermeable clay.
Call it "artificial coal". The implication is that coal itself should remain exactly where it is found.
Q. How fast have computers grown in 50 years?
A. They are on the order of 1 billion percent faster, and they do thousands of times as many things for us as before.
Q. How efficient have coal plants grown in 50 years?
A. They're maybe 30% more efficient.
Q. Why have computers changed so much compared to coal plants?
A. One reason is that there's a rather free market economy in computers where relatively ordinary people could screw better computers together and write better software. Coal plants are owned by monopolistic enterprises.
Actually, your comparison is complete apples and oranges. The improvements in speed of digital semiconductor devices you call "efficiency" and the thermal efficiency of converting fossil fuel to electricity have nothing to do with each other aside from the poor choice to use thr word "efficiency" for both.
Please learn some physics - especially some thermodynamics. The increased speed of computers over the past decades was a result of manufacturing methods and minturization - no physical laws have to be surmounted yet. In the case of the thermal efficiency of steam-turbine coal electric power, laws of thermodynamics would have to be bypassed. The maximum theoretical efficiency for combustion-electric power (if economics are no object) is about 50% to 60%.
And even your supposed "free market" in computer technology - hardware and software is a joke. What do you call Intel, Seagate, and Microsoft?
I believe in algae-based carbon sequestration. Assuming that we can grow algae diesel for $2.00/gallon someday soon in the high desert, (now why would I assume that?), at some point all oil and coal mining would become unprofitable. Beyond the point where coal mining pretty much ceases, we would build mountains from gigatons of the algae's leftover cellular husks. (Until the end of coal we would ferment the husks into ethanol.) We would then securely waterproof the new mountains. Our people-made lignite coal mountains would then sit and not break down for 100,000 years, and we would drive that 389 parts per million number back down.
I'd start with a demonstration molehill, if you want to contribute some leaf litter or other plant material with the atmosphere as its carbon source. Put the carbon molehill where it can be seen by everyone. Say how much more we'd have to do to get to 350, and how quickly coal mining overwhelms your efforts, but start somewhere, in your home's backyard if necessary.
It should come as no surprise that we lack an honest public debate regarding energy. It is a testament to the success of Edward Bernays' idea that the elites may prosper at the expense of people and planet if they would only co-opt the public debate and replace it with decrees from supposed experts who supposedly have the public interests at heart. But they don't.
Carbon capture doesn't work thanks simply to elementary laws of physics, what western whiteys continue to despise, like they despise all natural laws.
What chemical processes do you know of that take a stable compound, like CO2, and change it into something else without a significant input of energy? You can only do that with unstable compounds.
The easiest way to sequester carbon is to let nature do it but the whiteys don't want to depend on nature. They're hostile toward nature. And their lying to and misleading the people testify that they are hostile toward the people too.
You people who keep talking about getting rid of population should start with yourselves.
Aww, but I would never think of leaving without you.
"This comes on top of recent expert reports casting doubt on the feasibility of carbon capture and storage (CCS) - the great green hope of the energy industry."
Actually, CCS is the "great green hope" of the fossil fuel industries. Alternative energy supporters already know that the concept is bullshit.
q
It's more accurate to refer to "combustion industries". It's the burning that produces the carbon, not what's burnt.
Suppose we can capture the carbon, ...
Carbon, yeilds energy when we combine it with oxygen.
So we can burn it again in our power plants, ... Cant we?
Why would we stick it back underground again?
Burning generates CO2.
What we need to do is capture the existing CO2 via tree respiration. The tree takes in CO2, keeps the C, and emits the 02 for us to use.
If we then bury the body of the tree after it dies, we take the first step toward generating more coal (lignite coal, which still looks a lot like tree - rings and everything - is halfway to becoming "real" coal). Coal is sequestered C.