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Long-Term Carbon Storage
zebadee writes "The UK has given £25 million ($45 million) in funding toward storing CO2 under the North Sea. The article at the BBC
has a discussion on how this will be achieved. Basically gases produced at the power station will be pumped into old oil and gas fields for long-term storage. This has the added effect of pressurising the wells, allowing better recovery of the contents."
An additional £25 million ($45 million) in funding will go toward adding the obligatory gin.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
Finally they found some money to put it somewhere.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." - C.S. Lewis
Can't the CO2 just escape through the holes made to extract the fuel?
On a less serious note, those fossil fuel guys are planning this because they know that years from now we'll need that carbon and they can charge us to have them drill it back up again.
Don't blame me, I voted for Durga.
At first I thought it said "Long-Term Carbon Shortage"... I was like, WTF?!
If we ever need to adjust the Earth's orbit, just stick a big drill down into the pocket, and WHOOOSH, just like that.
My other Sig is
Given how the article talks about how expensive carbon sequestration is, nuclear plants seem to be a better option for producing electricity. You're not going to be able to separate out 100% of the carbon dioxide from the waste stream anyway.
The example of reducing the emissions from steel plants is very interesting. I'm sure there are ways to refine steel that don't release carbon (e.g. electrolysis), but using coke would probably still be much cheaper even with the costs of removing most of the carbon from the flue gases. Getting steel plants to implement this without being wiped out (by carbon emitting overseas competitors) or supported by massive government subsidies sounds very tricky, though.
I really think the best first step for reducing green house gases is to stop producing more coal fired power plants, and schedule the eventual closing of the current ones. The amount of damage done to the atmosphere by the remaining oil to be extracted is probably manageable, but there is enough coal (and tar sands, oil shale, etc.) to cause much more severe problems.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
Depends on location. From my post "Rural Alaska nuclear power gets legislative backing":
"Because of Galena's inaccessibility and the necessity to ship diesel fuel by barge, residents pay from 20 cents to $1 per kilowatt hour, while the national average is less than 9 cents. With nuclear power, residents could pay a third of what they now pay to power their homes, Yoder said.
If it's feasible in Galena, nuclear power could be used to lower energy costs throughout rural Alaska, state lawmakers said.
"Nuclear power is something folks might frown on, but it's self- contained," said House Speaker John Harris, R-Valdez. "It has a lot of potential for areas" that have high fuel costs.
KOA
Wasn't this a plotline in some old Seagal movie?
The idea of hiding the CO2 underground makes me uneasy. There's no guarantee that the CO2 is going to stay put. Suppose an earthquake ruptures the chamber. What then? If the CO2 comes out, it will kill anyone in the vicinity through asphyxiation.
p
http://www.snopes.com/horrors/freakish/smother.as
Google for "carbon dioxide lake deaths" to learn more on why this is a dangerous idea.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
Nature came up with its own long term carbon storage system long before we did.
It's called "diamonds"
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
That episode with the giant ball of garbage that New York launched into space as "Long-Term Storage", but fell back towards New New York a thousand years later. Sound like a possibly similiar situation.
Why choose to begin fixing our problems when we can instead sweep them under the rug? Or in this case, the ocean? It's not as if it'll still be there in 20 years when we've run out of storage space!
Anyway, my point is that the effort here is aimed at the problems caused by inefficient and polluting industrial processes - rather than fixing those processes instead, which would be a much more desirable goal.
I'm also wondering how much this will figure into any carbon emissions trading schemes that are going on in Europe..
My reaction was "Cool!".
A DVD/CD made from nanotubes would be able to withstand much higher rotation speeds, meaning faster I/O.
Imagine a 200x drive!
You wouldn't be able to have them in laptops, though, because of the gyroscopic effects.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Humans aren't the only organisms that will suffer from CO2 suffocation, you know...
sorta ot, but somebody mentioned "nucular" powa. why don't they make nuclear plants underground? can increase efficiency because waste heat can be recylced, would vastly limit contamination risks, all you need for inputs and outputs are a uranium elevator (one for ppl too) and cables for power, and if anything goes wrong just slam a 50 ton lead slab over the intakes and outputs, problem solves itself.
thinking some of the more stable coal or ore mines could be used for this, but it beats the HELL out of putting it it new jersey (im guessing when they designed 3-mile island they figured nobody'd notice).
oh, also of all the reactor plants, nuclear plants can be the smallest, i mean christ they have rather strong reactors on submarines with long duty cycles, just pull a few on the decomm'd LA and BF SSN and SSBN's and you could power a small city for cheap, those things are relatively low-maintanance, tho they do have integrated cores which means after the first overhaul you'd have to replace them (which you do for some plant reactors anyway).
anyone else want to add to this?
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
"Because of Galena's inaccessibility and the necessity to ship diesel fuel by barge, residents pay from 20 cents to $1 per kilowatt hour, while the national average is less than 9 cents. With nuclear power, residents could pay a third of what they now pay to power their homes, Yoder said.
I'd be that if the total costs of nuclear power were included it would be more than a third. The government subsidizes and protects the nuclear power industry. If they had to compeat in a true free market economy the costs of nuclear power would be much higher than they are now. Especially there in Alaska I'd bet wind genies could hold their own in a free market. There's potential for more power from wind in Alaska than there is in Minneasota, yet MN generates several gegawatts from wind, and continues to add capacity, Minnesota's wind-power industry is picking up speed. In Oregon, Windfall from the Wind Farm Sherman County, Oregon, 5 wind projects generate 255 Megawatts.
"Nuclear power is something folks might frown on, but it's self- contained," said House Speaker John Harris, R-Valdez. "It has a lot of potential for areas" that have high fuel costs.
No it isn't, with current technology nuclear power generates toxic and radioactive waste with half lifes of millions of years. New technologies such as pebble bed modular reactors, PBMR are reducing risks but those hazardous wastes still need to be stored somewhere.
FalconShould there be a Law?
What we *need* is giant balloons (filled with sunwarmed gaseous CO2) carrying food-bearing plants to float in the atmosphere. Using the abundant solar energy, the plants can be kept at the proper temperature to grow; they can be grown hydroponically using sun-melted frozen water (from the same place as the frozen CO2); they are right there in the sunlight; and the frozen CO2 all around them can be melted and fed to them (thus generating oxygen in the process, which, when bled off, can, at those altitudes, be zapped by cosmic rays and create more protective ozone.)
When the food-bearing plants are mature, segments can be split off and ferried directly by remote control back down to places on earth where famine is epidemic, thus bypassing corrupt governments. The fuel would be methane generated by using sunlight and water to compost non-food stalks and roots.
Seriously. Except for the obvious lack of political will to do this, it is only an engineering problem. At one stroke it will solve the excess-CO2 problem AND the lack-of-ozone problem AND food shortages anywhere on the globe.
Come on, slashdotters: find something technically wrong with this proposal. Can you?
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
Convert that nasty carbon to lovely breathable oxygen:
Carbon (6C12) + alpha (2He4) ==> Oxygen (8O16)
Trees do a pretty good job of it too. That is why environmentally conscious pr departments of big companies laud burning wood since it just returns to the atmosphere the CO2 that was sequestered by the tree in the first place. The next step is NOT TO BURN THE WOOD! Just let it keep growing.
Or even cut down the tree and plant another. You can even cut off most of the trunk and branches of some trees and you will get new trees coming out of the stump. Planting trees is one of the few ways I know that ought to require far less CO2 to plant than is sequestered. Pumping gas into a hole is not obviously going to sequester the gas as a solid, and sounds dangerous.
And here I thought this was going to be about how to haul smugglers off to Jabba's palace...
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
First off, bacteria already creates methane. These are bio waste compositers. But you now have something that is usable as a fuel. Rather than store it, it would be better to use it and simply cycle the CO2.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I have been wondering that if we create tents on the farm fields and pump CO2 in, if if would improve the crop yield and speed? One interesting aspect of it, is that we would be able to move the veggies to higher CO2 concentrations and somewhere down the road, perhaps move them to lower pressures. Perfect for Mars.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.