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You are so passionate in decrying the whole nuclear industry that either unintentionally, or by design, you are perpetuating several far worse by virtually any standard. Excepting the "Oh no! Radiation is invisible so it scares me" standard. Show me the numbers proving solar and other RE sources alone can power worldwide demand 24*7, (for bonus points, with technology from the 60s and 70s like you seem to be requiring of nuclear). What is the cost per KWh? Where do all the raw materials come from? What are the environmental costs of that mining, manufacturing, and disposal? How much land is used and what other functions are thereby displaced? What wildlife habitats are disrupted? Show us the math, or shut up. I'll even go first.

I'd prefer not to include Chernobyl since it was literally a catastrophe waiting to happen. A reactor with no containment building, really? Nothing like that ever got built outside the Soviet bloc. Even if included, deaths per gigawatt hour from nuclear barely amount to a rounding error when compared to fossil fuel.

I'd say as things are, coal is just as long term a solution in Japan as the nuclear plants. There just aren't that many workable alternatives. Natgas plants perhaps, but recent investigation suggests that methane leaks in production and distribution are probably enough to render greenhouse gas emissions similar in magnitude to coal. Nuclear power has risks of course. Unfortunately the world has magnified those risks a great deal by collective failure to deploy newer and safer reactor technologies. Case in point: Fukushima Daiichi. Generation I plants with known serious failure modes. There's no earthly reason Gen I plants should still be in operation. For comparison, how many businesses are depending on 1960 era computer systems, and how many people drive 1960 cars as primary transportation?

Apportioning the blame for this, in my opinion divides roughly in thirds between corporate sloth/greed, government fecklessness and societal ignorance/paranoia.

Energy policy for nerds:
http://www.withouthotair.com/

As xtal points out, the important thing most people don't get about the numbers is the sheer size.

It is, it turns out, actually possible to get usefully large contributions from what are considered green sources. But you need nation-sized installations.

However geothermal is based on stored heat in rocks. That stored heat is good a few decades at best. Try and at least run the numbers. If you don't believe that BOTE calculation, do your own.

You mite want to read this. The section on geothermal is accurate enough for our use.

Yes there is geothermal, but if you run the numbers (I have) its easy to see it really is only a very regional solution and not a very sustainable one at that. In NZ as posted below uses geothermal. But the outputs had to be reduced because it was reducing the entire area activity. Sooner or later the rock lower down cools down. Same thing for the few plants in the US. Closed loop systems have their own issues. In particular you get a few decades before that cubic kilometer has cooled down.

Seriously it gets tiresome that so many *know* the solution but then won't do even the most basic analysis on that claimed solution.

Can nuclear work for a while (100s even 1000s of years)? Yes. Can we do it safely?That is a much harder question to answer. Technically i am somewhat pro nuclear. However that is not the same as saying i trust the companies or governments or even the IAEA for that matter to do nuclear safe. And we still are not dealing with the waste we already have.

Ok, I haven't read TFA (hey, this is /.) but I've read a book addressing this topic: "Sustainable Energy — without the hot air", available for free on the web at http://www.withouthotair.com/ but well worth buying IMHO.

Nothing too surprising: renewable energy alone won't be able to address our current energy consumption level, so must be go with a reduction of our footprint (better efficiency when possible, but also less consumption too). Big problems are storage, and the large investments required to move to renewable in a big way. "Investment" here means money obviously, but also energy and that may create an "energy trap" if we don't anticipate enough the switch.

The author is a physicists at root. He doesn't address the economics of such a transition (big topic, but not his cup of tea) but focus on the physics part. This may be seen as a big limitation, and in a way it is, but the positive side is that he focuses on more solid ground where reaching a consensus based on core physics principle is possible (among people of good will at least). He's very good at illustrating in a simple yet solid way the opportunities and challenge of renewable energy sources. He also puts some boundaries on possible efficiency gains for different domains (transport, heating...) and this too is well explained and very informative.

Highly recommended.

http://www.withouthotair.com/ Great book which performs a detailed analysis and discussion about energy usage (written by a Physics Prof who is also chief scientific advisor to the UK Government's Dept of Energy), freely available for download as a PDF (Off-topic: he's also the author of a brilliant textbook on Information Theory, also available as a free PDF)

Beyond that, the way I see it, is if I have the choice between letting the left soft-kill me because we just *have* to reduce population, or dying off because the planet can't sustain my modern way of life, I'll take my gamble on the latter.

Forget AGW for the moment. If you accept that we're going to run out of fossil fuels at some point in the relatively near future, then I would suggest you skim read Sustainable Energy - without the hot air. Taken purely from the energy-use perspective, it makes a rational, scientific argument that our "modern way of life" is clearly not sustainable, and something is going to have to give. It's a less attractive gamble than you might think.

Shouldn't I not be able to go outside without a suit to protect me from the sun?

This has nothing to do with GW. I presume you're referring to the hole in the ozone layer. The reason that particular "chicken little" scenario didn't come to pass is that the politicians actually responded to the science in a timely fashion and banned CFCs. Your argument here sounds similar to people who complain that the Millenium Bug was a lot of fuss over nothing, ignoring the possibility that nothing particularly bad happened in 2000 because people spent a lot of time and money making sure that it didn't. The rational response to potential disasters is not to do nothing to prevent them until they're actual certainties - because nothing is a certainty until it's actually happened.

Shouldn't a major city/state be underwater by now? ... Shouldn't we be getting snow in July in Atlanta? Or was it that it was never supposed to snow again?

People without scientific qualifications in the relevant discipline who make predictions that something bad is/is not definitely going to happen are probably loons, and their opinions should not be given equal weight. I honestly don't know where you heard this unless it was from James Lovelock, who is, unfortunately, a bit of a loon.

And being a man of science, who needs to see evidence with my *own* two eyes of something before I believe it, without actually becoming a climate scientist myself, there's no way for me to determine who is right and who is wrong.

Wait, what? Are you honestly saying that you aren't willing to accept any scientific findings unless you've personally repeated the experiment yourself?

For an excellent review of the climate change issue without the "hot air", check out http://www.withouthotair.com/ "David MacKay FRS is a Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge. He studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge and then obtained his PhD in Computation and Neural Systems at the California Institute of Technology. He returned to Cambridge as a Royal Society research fellow at Darwin College. He is internationally known for his research in machine learning, information theory, and communication systems, including the invention of Dasher, a software interface that enables efficient communication in any language with any muscle. He has taught Physics in Cambridge since 1995. Since 2005, he has devoted much of his time to public teaching about energy. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society. Nine months after the publication of 'Sustainable Energy - without the hot air', David MacKay was appointed Chief Scientific Advisor to the Department of Energy and Climate Change."

Unfortunately for our society, the original poster is mostly correct. Please read this book: Sustainable energy without the hot air. The author is a big proponent of sustainable energy, but reading the calculations on energy density you begin to realise what a huge problem we are facing. The book is a free download, or you can buy the dead tree version. There's no reason to not be educated on this issue.

1. Biomass can only meet a small amount of our energy needs. If we devote 75% of land to growing biofuels, and burn it all, we get about 10% of our current energy consumption.

2. Nuclear does not look promising, but it is an interesting one. Currently we get less than 3% of our daily Western life energy from nuclear plants. Nuclear would last 1000 years if we each used 0.55 kWh per day. But we don't - Westerners use about 250 kWh per day. We would need to ramp up production 40 times to cover our current daily usage. If we tried to cover all of our energy needs with nuclear, we will run out in of (currently known) recoverable reserves in 25 years. Ocean extraction of uranium is possible, but currently costs 10 times more than mining ore. Maintaining our current life styles on 10x energy cost isn't feasible: we would need some major technology developments here...

(Figures from Sustainable Energy without the hot air. Read it, it's free to download and full of interesting figures.)

Lack of interest, lack of expertise, laziness, you name it. I would love to read some non-partisan assessment of the options regarding energy generation, including an objective estimation of the price and risk of each technology, and in fact I believe from the heated and mostly sterile "debates" (read: partisan bullshit) on sites like slashdot and others that such a study is indeed badly needed. However I personally feel totally incapable of conducting it.

The best attempt I've been able to find so far, way ahead of anything else, is this one. Interesting read indeed. At least this gives you the feeling you're listening to some reasonable, good-mannered and benevolent person, not the hateful raging lunatic that abound of slashdot.

I believe that if we had a more accurate picture of the consequences of trying to move to expensive energy-diffuse sources (wind, solar, geothermal, tidal, biofuels, etc), that we'd be thinking twice about our aversion to nuclear fission. The Green Party (of which I am a member) imagines a renewable future, and their platform explicitly forbids all nuclear development (including fusion). I think this is a disastrous and useless policy: it avoids technology best suited for drastically reducing waste by converting it into fuel (imagine radio-toxicity reduced to mere hundreds of years as opposed to thousands- the disposal problem essentially becomes a non-issue).

This is not a fantasy. Foundations for this technology were developed back in the 60's at Oak Ridge National Laboratories, and today we call this the Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactor (LFTR or even Molten Salt Reactor). The advantages are numerous: inherent stability (no meltdown possible), abundant fuel (thorium is 3-4 times as abundant as uranium), low start-up requirements (less than a couple tons of fissile material is needed- critical for scalability), proliferation resistant (U-233 is always contaminated with radioactive U-232), more than 100 times as efficient as the current fuel cycle, drastically reduced waste due to efficiency, considerably lower costs due to many factors, especially safety, and the list goes on. We need to be asking ourselves why we are not aggressively pursuing this promising technology. Cheap abundant energy is our best choice for both securing our future and dramatically reducing the prevalence of poverty throughout the rest of the world. The ability for our economy to provide the services we need is utterly dependent on energy.

In case you are not convinced that this path is necessary to avoid the most dire consequences of global economic collapse, I suggest checking out:

Energy lecture by a theoretical physicist: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeGijutBSx0

Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air: http://www.withouthotair.com/

Advantages of LFTR: http://energyfromthorium.com/lftradsrisks.html

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: http://energyfromthorium.com/essay3rs/

Our energy future is not a trivial concern. If we make the right choices, we will revitalize our economy, avoid the worst consequences of our ignorance, eliminate poverty, and live comfortably for thousands, if not millions of more years. Can you think that far ahead?

Renewable is med and long term much much much cheaper than anything we do and have right now.

Citation required. One with the numbers and sources.

To get the ball rolling he is one that is against this assertion. Sustainable Energy -- without the hot air [PDF warning] or the main website and i think the book in html.

Says the guy with an engineering degree and a MBA?

So you have *at least* these qualification then? Since you have made a statement in the same vein, which according to the book of angel'o'sphere is a minimum requirement for making such a statement.

According to "Sustainable Energy--- without the hot air," it's pretty much impossible to get anything but small gains in energy efficiency in aircraft.

I went to your "Sustainable Energy" link. The analysis is basically on a high school level. I'll trust NASA and Lockheed Martin over an author who is clearly plugging his book.

-Yes, I'm an engineer.

According to "Sustainable Energy--- without the hot air," it's pretty much impossible to get anything but small gains in energy efficiency in aircraft.

"Sustainable energy - without the hot air", available as a free PDF download.

I haven't read it yet, but I will given his credibility with the article and other book.

http://www.withouthotair.com/ or http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/

Here is a podcast of a lecture he gave at Cambridge on the topic of sustainable energy.

http://mediaplayer.group.cam.ac.uk/component/option,com_mediadb/task,play/idstr,CU-CSF-Lectures_2008-12_David_MacKay/vv,-1/Itemid,42

The big picture, the large scale energy consumption events in our lives, we only know to one or two decimal places. The whole research and decision making process, for a large group of Slashdot commentators like you and me, boils down to find an energy waste and fix it.

See:
http://www.withouthotair.com/ ; An outstanding accomplishment at viewing the energy situation using consistent units and definitions.

Because many energy usage problems require outside information, my experience is a pad of paper and careful collection of outside information is a big part of reducing energy usage. High quality local data (just a few points are needed) and outside data (got by copying it onto a pad of paper) are needed for energy analysis. I use Gnumeric for my spreadsheet. It helps to save results on the computer and on paper printouts as a specific energy usage problem is addressed.

For the last go round at measuring my home energy instances, I used a Kill-A-Watt meter (Frys.com in Northern California occasionally puts it on sale for under $20.). Note, the Kill-A-Watt will not measure a 1200 watt microwave oven (too much current) and it will not measure a 220 volt electric water heater.

While the Kill-A-Watt told me my refrigerator was an energy hog, it was not a whole lot of help at determining precisely what was wrong with the refrigerator that made it an energy hog. I did a couple of tests exploring various ideas: bad insulation, too many door opening events, weak door gasket magnets, dirty condenser coils, and an unfairly optimistic energy usage rating system. I eventually bought a new refrigerator. That key purchase required going to the store before my wife, copying all the energy usage and model info and price, and then shopping with the wife and a spreadsheet in hand to balance the wife's desire for style and design with energy usage and price issues solved in advance for many of the choices at hand.

The end result was a new refrigerator that has a 1.56 year payoff period.

One of the problems I am looking at now is "Does the gasoline burned by my wife's commute and my commute exceed the amount of energy consumed by the whole house?" It is another case of some outside numbers, some inside numbers and the outcome will be at best a 2 decimal place result. And what will I do when I find the result?

Just chapter 11 will do http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c11/page_68.shtml, or even just page 71 http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c11/page_71.shtml.

Summary: Gadgets and other devices on standby consume a tiny fraction of that consumed by heating, lighting, transport and other activities. The major energy savings come from better insulation, more efficient transportation, and just doing less. Whatever we do has to be on a big scale, and renewables/efficiency savings alone (for the UK), means a _lot_ of turbines/panels.

The rest of the book is well worth reading though, it brings what many of these debates lack - meaningful numbers in context, such as http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c10/page_64.shtml. The website is http://www.withouthotair.com/

Some real numbers and logical arguments, for anyone interested in this subject: Sustainable Energy -- without the hot air.

Who's the "they", though? I find the AGW case convincing, but I have come to the conclusion that nuclear is (unfortunately) our best option, and that cap-and-trade is going to be nowhere near as effective as a carbon tax. So am I part of "they"?

For a perspective on the challenges involved in replacing fossil fuels, I can heartily recommend Sustainable energy - without the hot air. Evidence-based reasoning, and he's quite pro-nuke, although he thinks it needs to be part of a wider strategy, and we're still going to face some lifestyle reduction until we make some technological improvements.

Here is another writer who is developing a nuclear reactor based low-CO2 future scenario. Read it carefully, his book is an interesting exploration, but not "the solution".

Thorium for reactors, and the larger context of using nuclear electric generation to replace CO2 emitting coal generation is discussed in:

Whole Earth Discipline An Eco-pragmatist Manifesto
by Stewart Brand

Here is an online book that organizes a huge spectrum of CO2 reduction schemes. This is worth reading for gaining perspective on just what fraction of the CO2 problem might be addressed using nuclear electricity generation.

David MacKay: Without Hot Air

http://www.withouthotair.com/

Just yesterday I wished to make some progress toward a low carbon lifestyle. I started up my van [ 243,000 miles at 22.7 miles/gallon x 7 lb of carbon per gallon of gas x 3 lb of CO2 per pound of carbon ] and thought oops did I just emit 224,000 pounds of CO2?

Well, it is an interesting conclusion, with major logical problems. This finding by itself is not adequate for the appropriate apprehension of the issue before us.

A quality effort to enumerate the entire energy and CO2 reduction issue is:

http://www.withouthotair.com/ ; A book by David MacKay

On the threat "otherwise we have to build 1 atomic power plant per day..."

I recommend Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Discipline An Ecopragmatist Manifesto". Mr. Brand favors emphasis on nuclear power and a number of other innovative approaches to dealing with the global warming problem.

The CO2 reduction task will require substantial changes to the American business and social system. We are in a formative phase right now.

Also, you can visit my "Put carts on the public bus" blog, for charts and dismal economic analyses galore:

http://lessco2essay.blogspot.com/

http://www.withouthotair.com/Contents.html

Can you tell that I'm sick of reading articles that talk about "enough energy to heat 5000 houses" and other crap units?

a far greater energy density that of gasoline....hydrogen.

Not if you calculate per volume, which is really what you want for a gas tank, unless the material is ridiculously dense. ('pedia says it's about 5-6 times worse). And that's at 700 bar, which means you're looking for a quite serious upgrade compared to the average fuel tank. On top of that, hydrogen molecules are so small they'll leak through the tank wall. And make sure your material doesn't get brittle from the interstitial hydrogen, or, you know, kaboom.

Apart from that, I totally agree that we should invest heavily in sustainable energy. A very very very good book on what choices we have is Sustainable Energy - without the hot air which does an excellent job of condensing the numbers flying around in debates into a decent background for prioritizing. (It's free to download).

It turns out that you can turn CO2 into fuel by exposing it to a titanium oxide catalyst in the presence of sunlight.

That's just another form of solar power, it's just you're using the sunlight to produce fuel rather than electricity. If it's more efficient than solar electrical generation (very possible) then it's a good idea, it's bound to be more efficient than biofuels, but whether it's more efficient than solar water heating, I don't know.

You'd probably need a concentrated source of CO2 for that, so it would either reduce efficiency, by using some energy to concentrate CO2, or would use existing power plants outputs, meaning it's not carbon neutral.

Everyone should read this http://www.withouthotair.com/

10 trillion mirrors just sounds like a fantastic way to shred any spaceships we would ever want to send into space. Some scientists are already worried about the huge amount of junk up there, without this. I suppose space launches do produce a lot of greenhouse gasses, so not being able to, would be a good thing for climate change... While I'm here, anyone who wants to know about sustainable energy, read this http://www.withouthotair.com/

While I'm all for solar and wind, there are some really good reasons why they're not really the answer (for a great explanation of why, see Sustainable Energy - without the hot air ). You're close to the right answer, though. The industry that *should* be growing in leaps and bounds is energy. Solar should be a part of that (though, again not enough on its own), but nuclear needs to be there, though, and we *need* to figure out details of how to handle nuclear power long-term.

The really long term answer is fusion. One can only hope it's figured out in our lifetimes.

Or better, a real climate scientist.

David MacKay is a former Information Theorist. A few years ago, he started thinking in earnest about the world's energy problem, and produced the amazing book behind my first link. He's a great example of a smart, integre, generalist scientist who does whatever he thinks needs to be done, even if it has nothing to do with "his field". He is a great public speaker, and a lucid thinker.

Don't assume. If I had meant "fossil fuels" I would have said "fossil fuels". We have all sorts of limited resources that we need to deal with because we live on a finite planet. In fact I believe the current debate over cap and trade is about carbon emissions so the limited resource that is being dealt with is clean air.

But if you want to talk about letting the free market automagically deal with our limited fossil fuel resources, I suggest you take a look at Sustainable Energy - without the hot air by David MacKay. MacKay is a well respected physicist and mathematician. If you think he is a lightweight, take a look at his earlier book: Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms.

The problem with relying on the free market instead of acting intelligently is that you are staking our civilization on a bet that there will be a cosmic coincidence such that fossil fuel resources will dry up slowly enough to give us time to develop alternative power sources before the fossil fuels are effectively all gone. If, for example, all the world's fossil fuels were sitting in a tank ready to be piped out then we would be totally screwed if we relied on the free market to give us enough lead time to develop other energy sources.

Currently most of our resource allocation is decided by corporate officers who are charged with making money for their shareholders in the short term, not decades ahead. If we run up against a problem that takes planning on a longer time scale then we are totally screwed if we "do nothing" and let the free market do its thing.

As I said before, even though there are many problems that the free market is very good at dealing with there are also some problems that the free market makes worse. If you insist on relying on the free market to solve every problem then you are no better than a lemming running to the cliff.

One of the major benefits of this is that the batteries can be charged independently from the car being at-rest - basically, charge according to electricity supply rather than demand.

When (if) we finally start to make the major switch to renewable electricity and electric cars (the only long-term sustainable solution for personal transport), we will need to ensure that our load on the electricity infrastructure meets supply. This is a good step in that direction. That, or charging stations with really big capacitors - which is similar in concept.

Read David Mackay's Without Hot Air for more clear thinking.

Field of windmills stretching along 100 miles of coastline

That's great and everything, but have you ever done the maths for the yield of such windmills?

This guy has. He leaves you to draw your own conclusions.

You could have just as easily mentioned that the sun is eventually going to kill off all life on the planet. Neither fact is relevant.

The timescales most certainly are relevant. We're currently in a pretty serious situation with respect to global carbon emissions. Given that we selfish humans won't sacrifice our power requirements, fission almost certainly needs to provide some of our power in the short to medium term future. I don't know of any "renewable" resource that fits with your "inexhaustible over a timescale of centuries" requirement -- land is required to capture wind, coast to capture tide, etc. and the numbers don't add up (see e.g. http://www.withouthotair.com/).

I can't help but wonder about what would happen if a sufficient number of people in an area used heat pumps, long term.

This is one of the questions I address in my book, Sustainable Energy - without the hot air (available from amazon, and for free (pdf) on the web). The chapter on "Smart Heating" highlights heat pumps. They are definitely going to be one of the pillars of the post-fossil-fuel future. With a typical suburban population density, there is indeed not enough ground area for everyone to get all their heating out of the ground, if they are not careful to put heat back at other times of year. If people suck too much heat, without putting it back, then the ground will gradually become frozen. There is a similar potential problem with ground source air-conditioning, where people use the heat pump the other way round a lot, dumping heat in the ground (or sucking cold, if you like). Eventually the ground warms up, and the A/C doesn't work so well. This has happened in central London. There are two fixes: (1) ensure that annual heat sucking matches annual heat dumping (by matching winter heating to summer A/C, and perhaps even adding solar hot water panels to the roof, to get extra heat to dump during the summer); or (2) use a heat pump but with a different heat source, for example the air. As already noted, air-source heat pumps are not great if you have -40 degree winters. But in many countries with mild winters (eg Britain) I think air-source heat pumps are the best choice for green heating. Sustainable Energy - without the hot air also has an appendix on heat pumps in which the relevant equations are worked out from first principles. David MacKay Cambridge

I can't help but wonder about what would happen if a sufficient number of people in an area used heat pumps, long term.

This is one of the questions I address in my book, Sustainable Energy - without the hot air (available from amazon, and for free (pdf) on the web). The chapter on "Smart Heating" highlights heat pumps. They are definitely going to be one of the pillars of the post-fossil-fuel future. With a typical suburban population density, there is indeed not enough ground area for everyone to get all their heating out of the ground, if they are not careful to put heat back at other times of year. If people suck too much heat, without putting it back, then the ground will gradually become frozen. There is a similar potential problem with ground source air-conditioning, where people use the heat pump the other way round a lot, dumping heat in the ground (or sucking cold, if you like). Eventually the ground warms up, and the A/C doesn't work so well. This has happened in central London. There are two fixes: (1) ensure that annual heat sucking matches annual heat dumping (by matching winter heating to summer A/C, and perhaps even adding solar hot water panels to the roof, to get extra heat to dump during the summer); or (2) use a heat pump but with a different heat source, for example the air. As already noted, air-source heat pumps are not great if you have -40 degree winters. But in many countries with mild winters (eg Britain) I think air-source heat pumps are the best choice for green heating. Sustainable Energy - without the hot air also has an appendix on heat pumps in which the relevant equations are worked out from first principles. David MacKay Cambridge

Hi,

Have a look at http://www.withouthotair.com/ where Prof MacKay deals with this.

In practice you can mitigate the problem (which will only be a problem at all in dense population areas) by capturing solar heat in summer, eg excess not needed for solar hot water, and using that to warm the ground. Then the ground is a straight-forward heat-store, maybe a little like this: http://www.earth.org.uk/milk-tanker-thermal-store.html

Rgds

Damon

I'm pretty sure the GP's numbers are kilos of CO2 per person, per flight.

According to David MacKay's excellent book, an intercontinental flight uses about 12,000 kWh of Energy per passenger. Let's imagine the meeting takes about 10 hours. Unless your IT infrastructure uses 1.2 Megawatts, solely for this one video conference, there's no point in flying, CO2-wise.

The unavoidable energy requirement to concentrate CO2 from 0.03% to 100% at atmospheric pressure is kT ln 100/0.03 per molecule, which is 0.13 kWh per kg. The ideal energy cost of compression of CO2 to 110 bar (a pressure mentioned for geological storage) is 0.067 kWh/kg. So the total ideal cost of CO2 capture and compression is 0.2 kWh/kg. According to the IPCC special report on carbon capture and storage, the practical cost of the second step, compression of CO2 to 110 bar, is 0.11 kWh per kg. (0.4 GJ per t CO; 18 kJ per mole CO; 7 kT per molecule.)

In other words: It'll be at least 200kW per tonne, unless they think the CO2 will somehow magically compress itself to be stored, which is not going to happen. That, or they just invented a perpetuum mobile.

While it is nice to see someone trying to do something to reduce the worlds dependence on oil (even if it sounds like it's purely for profit reasons) renewables just aren't going to produce enough power any time soon.

I suggest people have a read of this before voting for this plan, it's quite an eye opener. In summary, the average person in the UK (which is the focus of the book) uses about half the power per person per day of the average. Even if we covered our entire windy island with turbines and ringed the entire coast with wave and tide generators we wouldn't even be close to providing enough power.

If we are to get off foregin (middle eastern) oil we need to go nuclear with fast breeder reactors and we need to start doing it soon.