Slashdot Mirror
DOE Pumps $126.6 Million Into Carbon Sequestration
RickRussellTX writes "The DOE awarded $126.6 million in grants today to projects that will pump 1 million tons of CO2 into underground caverns at sites in California and Ohio. Environmental groups call carbon sequestration "a scam", claiming that it is too expensive and uncertain to be competitive with non-coal alternatives like wind and solar. I just hope nobody drops a Mentos down the wrong pipe."
..."claiming that it is too expensive and uncertain to be competitive with non-coal alternatives like wind and solar."
Why can't we do both? Damn environmentalists meddling again. Never wanting to compromise or find some benefits in alternatives.
Carbon sequestration is like burying a ticking bomb in your backyard. A much better solution is carbon mineral sequestration - turning the carbon into rocks of some kind. That way, unlike underground sequestration (which has the potential to leak straight back into the atmosphere), the carbon stays where it is put.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Actually, my main concern is "what if it escapes?". Considering that CO2 is heavier than Oxygen, I wouldn't like to be anywhere near (i.e. within tens of km if not more) a site that stores thousands of tons of CO2.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
That's the main problem with environmental groups. At their core, many of them are just as immune to rational argument and unwilling to consider proposals that don't line up with their pre-conceived notions as the fossil fuel industries and their pet politicians.
The arguments against sequestration are (so far as I've seen) just as bogus as the anti-nuclear waste disposal arguments. I'm glad that these groups recognize when there are problems with any given technology, I just wish their response to any attempt to address the problem wasn't a knee-jerk claim that the proposed fix was a scam and that the only solution was to abandon the technology and switch to moonbeams.
--MarkusQ
Hope you don't live near or at least this type of disaster doesn't happen there.
The USA: Dumping their problems into holes and sealing them off...since...forever.
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
By a quick calculation from Wikipedia, there are about 1.9 trillion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere.
What exactly is the point of this endeavour?
Can't we just plant trees? I heard that natural swamp ecosystems can be used to purify water better than our industrial plants. We could create a project that actually does something useful.
Help fight spam
I don't know exactly what can go wrong, but breathing CO2 is apparently not healthy. I'm hoping that someone comes up with a way to use salt/sand in some chemical reaction with CO2 to separate the O2 and create cheap building materials with the C.
That sounds like the kind of problem that needs to be solved. If it can be sequestered, it can be processed. If we can just make it into something useful without blowing up the planet at the same time it will be good.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
that's why all the plans involve putting it down somewhere. I'd oppose sequestration in huge towers outside of major metropolitan areas, but putting it deep down in the ground makes a lot of sense.
--MarkusQ
1. Grow Bamboo 2. Drop down old salt mine or other large hole. 3. ??? 4. Profit!
meh
I like how 'environmental groups' is a link to a single source: Greenpeace.
As we all know, they're the kind of people that we can have a good intelligent discussion with, right? Of course, anyone that doesn't fall in line with their philosophy is some sort of heretic, even if they happen to be one of their own founders that disagrees with a long-standing platform of the organization.
I'd have a lot more respect for them if they also condemned Al Gore and his pimping of useless carbon credits that happen to fatten his own pockets...
"We'll need 2000 crickets, 4 cans of Easy Cheese, and the fluid from 18 glowsticks for this plan to work...." - ph0n1c
"many of them are just as immune to rational argument"
Your statement hinges on the fact that coal industry has indeed given any rational arguments to support the burying of CO2 (A very literal way of 'burying your head in the sand', don't you think?). Let's step back and look at the problem. The main issue we have the moment is global warming being caused by an excess of greenhouses gases, predominantly CO2 in the atmosphere. We need solutions. Renewable energy is a solution. Cutting back on energy usage is a solution. And yes, even sequestration is a solution. However, what are the best and most effective solutions to take? Cutting back our usage can be done now and it can have significant effects in the area of reducing CO2 output. Renewables are already a proven technology and lack only significant funding to make them more common. That said, in many countries and states funding is significant and renewable energy targets are set to be met. Now let's look at sequestration. Is it proven? Only in laboratories. Which if you consider the scale and possible ramifications of the process is a fairly useless sticking point. Is it safe? Well you decide for yourself. Pumping millions of tonnes into underground caverns? Versus building windmills, hydro plants and solar farms. Does it solve our problems? In the short term it prevents CO2 from immediately going into the atmosphere but burying it can't continue indefinitely, and it does nothing to reduce our reliance on coal - a finite source.
The idea virtually is a scam, it's the coal industry asking for grants and subsidies all across the world to support a dying business instead of looking the facts in the face and realising that renewables are the way of the future. No amount of exaggeration (Moonbeams?) on your part will change that.
"Cutting back on energy usage is a solution."
What you really meant to say is that massive depopulation of the earth is the solution, since at this point we can only reduce the rate at which energy consumption grows, not the overall rate at which energy is consumed.
Hey neat, we're making our own Balrog.
I wonder if Greenpeace realizes the choice isn't between coal plants with sequestered carbon and windmills. In reality, barring some fortuitous breakthrough in solar power, as oil gets more expensive the choice will be between coal plants with this technology and coal plants without it. I believe Greenpeace has completely overestimated the average person's willingness to make lifestyle sacrifices for the sake of atmospheric carbon reductions.
I wish organizations like this would try to be part of the solution instead of just trying to limit our options. You can't accuse the coal companies of proposing a technology that isn't economically feasible on the one hand and then propose wholesale conversion to technologies that are even less economically feasible.
We wouldn't even have this problem if the very same people hadn't killed the nuclear industry through scaremongering and excessive litigation.
Quick chemistry lesson - splitting the C from the O2 would take as much energy as was gained by putting them together, and that's in an ideal, 100% efficient world.
A much more practical solution is to find a way to get the CO2 to combine with something to form an insoluble carbonate.
How much CO2 is generated in the process of accumulating, pressurizing, and delivering it? When you have worked through all of the ripple effect, I bet they generate a pound of CO2 for each pound they sequester.
This is no different from Wile E. Coyote's electric fan-powered sailboat.
Or the ethenol believers who conveniently neglect the big fire they have to put under that still.
I didn't know the Department of Education was interested in carbon sequestration... Sounds like a euphemism for larger class sizes.
/. editors, please spell out acronyms.
Seriously,
One way CO2 is being sequestered now is with enhanced oil recovery (EOR). Even though it sounds like you're just pulling more hydrocarbons out of the ground (e.g. bad), think of it this way: if you're pumping more CO2 into the ground then produced from combustion of the oil taken out, you've just made all that oil carbon neutral.
we have 100's of years worth of coal. why can't you people understand this fact.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Bamboo rots. Gives off methane and CO2. Methane is almost 30x as bad a greenhouse gas as CO2.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Guess it's time for the IANAC moniker? I am not a chemist?
Either way, if someone can find something useful to do with CO2 it would dull the pains we currently are having with it, and that was my point.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Personally I'd like to know if an earthquake or shifting in an inconvienent place would cause CO2 leakage.
but perhaps not a sustainable environmental model.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
that's why all the plans involve putting it down somewhere.
If it was stored in gas form at atmospheric pressure, it wouldn't be a problem (it would just be silly). The problem is that if it's stored in highly compressed or solid form, then if something goes wrong and it goes back to gas, it *will* go up and escape, potentially killing anyone in the area.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
"Laugh while you can a-monkey boy!" - Dr Emilio Lizardo
Hundreds of years if our current consumption levels don't increase. Since energy consumption increases exponentially...
We also don't have enough "underground caverns" to fit hundreds of years worth of CO2. In addition searching and mining for more and more coal resources is going to have detrimental effects on the environment as a whole. All my points still stand.
To get horses to jump over fences, and they want to do it with elemental carbon? Craziness, I say!
Not except in some green fever dream.
We will need everything we got including wind, thermal, biomass, nuclear, and good old black gold just to keep up with the inevitable buildout of the third world.
And you if think enough wind farms, biomass farms, and solar panels to supply our demands won't harm the environment as much as oil and coal, you are naive.
Everything we use for our energy supply will have costs to the environment. We must be smart. Scrub the smokestacks, reclaim the mines, kill the birds but try to minimize, plow over the forests for more farms, but use the best techniques and preserve the remaining forests smartly with corridors for animals.
There is no choice between a dirty hydrocarbon past and a clean green future. There is no such thing. There are no free lunches in anything.
It looks as though we are going to need sequestration from the atmosphere based on what is becoming understood about the sensitivity of the climate to grenhouse gasses http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/TargetCO2_20080317.pdf
In my opinion, a solid is much more compatible with storing carbon in the Earth than a gas, but even if we are to store a gas, it does not make a whole lot of sense to use up what capacity there may be on burning coal. Coal is already nicely sequestered.
Hydrocarbons contain much more carbon by volume than CO2. Replacing the hydrocarbons with CO2 would still represent an outflux of carbon.
That's exactly the sort of thing I mean. Carbon sequestration is an idea. There are arguments for and against it, and each of these arguments will have some degree of merit and applicability. If you are being rational, that's all that matters. I am making no assumption whatsoever about where the arguments come from, but you immediately attribute them to the coal industry. I fail to see how this is productive.
Not in and of itself, surely. The things most people mean by "renewable energy" simply aren't up to the task, and most have not-so-hidden costs that make them worse than the alternative (and given how bad fossil fuels are, that's saying something. If you're talking about nuclear, space based solar, or sacrificing most of the world's deserts to do molten salt solar I might buy it, but I doubt that's hat you're thinking.Not unless you are going to impose your plan through the use of force, and are willing to kill a large number of people in the process. Tem million uppies switching to compact florescent bulbs isn't going to do it.
I fear this (and only this) is the real objection. Which (if true) is sad since a) it would be better to focus on solving the actual problem (HCGW) and not get distracted by red herrings (reliance on coal), and b) the very fact that fossil fuels are finite resources is a good thing.
We'd really be screwed if there were effectively unlimited supplies of coal that could be profitably mined at today's prices. Global Warming would then be truly impossible to prevent. Luckily, supplies are limited and thus prices will continue to go up and up until alternative are much more attractive. That is what will send the fossil fuel industry packing, leaving them on the discard pile with slide rules, steam shovels, and buggy whips.
Flip, yes, but not entirely an exaggeration. Some of the "alternative energy sources" that have been proposed over the years actually yield, in the best case, less energy than the Earth gets in the form of sunlight reflected off the moon. But I will concede that such flippancy is counterproductive and detracts from my main point.
--MarkusQ
The idea virtually is a scam, it's the coal industry asking for grants and subsidies all across the world to support a dying business instead of looking the facts in the face and realising that renewables are the way of the future. No amount of exaggeration (Moonbeams?) on your part will change tha
The fact of the matter is that right now there is no alternative energy technology that competes with coal. If there were, people would be using that. But it doesn't exist. You can say that coal has a future, but until you produce a few trillion watts of 24x7 reliable power from windmills on a calm day and solar panels on a cloudy day, then, alternative energy doesn't have a leg to stand on.
Even already in Texas, which mandated alternative energy, customers in ERCOT are looking either at blackouts when the windmills don't go, or, they import their energy from some place, that well, uses coal.
This is my sig.
Gas at atmospheric pressure in air is only one possible solution. For another, consider that at higher pressure, CO2 is denser than water under the same conditions. Thus, if sequestered under the sea it would be even more stable than the gas at one atmosphere in air case. There are other solutions as well.
CO2 is not as simple a substance as you seem to be supposing, nor are extrapolations from familiar situations always valid..
--MarkusQ
What we don't have is 100's of years worth of atmosphere to pump greenhouse gases into without it making a very visible difference.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Sticking them in the ground is not a sane nor rational plan for, as you put it 'managing atmospheric gases'. However, this seems to be a common theme at the Department of Energy. Waste problem? No problem - bury it in the ground and hope we are dead before the chickens come home to roost, so to speak. The simple fact of the matter is that while man might dump 8 gigatons of carbon into the environment, the biosphere is churning through nearly one hundred times the amount I'm afraid this smells of made up statistics. Perhaps you have a source? Most atmospheric CO2 comes from fossil fuel emissions. If you are going to manage atmospheric gases, then manage them. Otherwise, quit moaning the about the threat of GW This confirms your status as a skeptic, which is generally to be encouraged, but you're completely out of your depth and it shows. 'Managing' atmospheric gases does not mean hiding them like a corpse or feces and hoping no-one notices. It means reducing consumption, primarily, as this reduces overall emissions. Increasing emissions while relying on unproven technology to be your saviour is extremely juvenile and short-sighted.
If they had a workable model for storing the CO2, long-term, this might be possible, but as of now, it's all smoke and mirrors. 'Hey, look - the US is no longer dragging it's feet on CO2 emissions!' Which is of course, untrue. It's like designing a car around a power source that has not yet been invented.
The American generating plan through 2030 is...coal, and lots of it. New scrubber technologies and filters. Of course, many plants have not even complied with current standards, let alone new ones. After all, who wants to lower profitability in the name of infrastructure investment? Paying fines for being noncompliant is cheaper than making the plants compliant since your enviornmental laws are so toothless - and that's in comparaison to other first world nations, who for the most part also have extremely lax laws.
Wouldn't it be less expensive to pump CO2?
$126M buys 126000KW, i.e., 126MW of installed wind power. At a power factor of 30% this produces 38MW of power.
A coal powered plant would produce 300000 Tons of CO2 a year to generate this power. Three years of operation would mean 1M tons of CO2 not released into the atmosphere.
For a gas-powered plant, it would be 6 years. For an oil powered plant, 4 years.
A 38MW plant is not really much power, and is a drop in the bucket. On the other hand the research benefits from this project are not easily quantifiable. So I'd go with the research on this one!
References:
http://www.seen.org/pages/db/method.shtml
http://www.windpower.org/en/tour/econ/index.htm
All bow to his Noodliness!! His Noodle Appendage has touched me!
It depends on how they are sequestering it. Underground or underwater sequestration implies injecting it in gaseous (CO2) form. Mineral sequestration implies reacting it with something else to form a mineral (like CO2 + calcium = limestone + oxygen gas).
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
A much better plan would be oxygen sequestration... then you could sell it back to people when we run out!
But really, carbon credits seem to be a good idea. Without such a carbon economy, what's really to stop people from sucking up all of the oxygen and pumping out carbon dioxide on a massive, teraformational scale?
strange as it may seem I'm beginning to wonder if instead of recycling my newspapers I should sequester their carbon - send them to the dump ....
Doesn't nature provide carbon sequestration in the form of Wood? Wouldn't cutting down a forest and building stuff out of the wood, meanwhile letting the forest regrow, effectively remove carbon out of the system?
Seriously. How about c.f. the $110 million awarded to the MPAA? This carbon program is chump change.
This may not be the brightest idea out of Washington, but it is by far not the worst.
Could someone please check to make sure there aren't any missing government laptops in the caverns.
...humans need water to live. So go stick your head in a bucket of it.
Too much of anything is as bad as too little.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
not if the C02 is put in there under enough pressure. though unsure if that much pressure is feasible.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
if sequestered under the sea it would be even more stable than the gas at one atmosphere in air case.
However CO2 reacts with water to form acid. Because of this the world's oceans are acidifying. This acidification creates more problems, for instance it eats coral reefs and the shell of shellfish, and who know how many fish can't live in acidic environs?
FalconShould there be a Law?
I disagree with your calculations, even though I don't really follow...at all. I seriously doubt that they are that "frigging nuts".
Orbis terrarum est non altus satis
The arguments against sequestration are (so far as I've seen) just as bogus as the anti-nuclear waste disposal arguments.
Oh really? And if the arguments against nuclear waste disposal are bogus I suppose you wouldn't mind the waste being disposed of in your back yard.
FalconShould there be a Law?
And yet, a natural carbon dioxide is the least of our worries - its mostly unpredicatble. However, human emissions are predictable - and forecast to grow at exponential rates
... what happens when Africa decides to get air conditioning?
There's so many problems here I don't even know where to begin.
China now exceeds the USA in CO2 emissions. Part of this is economic growth, but a surprising share is because of a massive coal seam fire that is expected to burn for at least another 50 years. The coal fire alone already produces more emissions than all US cars combined. The Chinese are exempt from Kyoto...
SO, US EMISSIONS CUTS CANNOT POSSIBLY WORK BECAUSE THE CHINESE ALREADY PRODUCE MORE CO2 THAN THE USA. Even if we go to ZERO emissions, the net CO2 balance in the atmosphere will continue to grow. Given that China has more people than the USA and EU combined, it stands to reason that China will reach a point in CO2 emissions where complete and total sequestration by all of NATO will not be sufficient to halt an increase in greenhouse gases.
Now if you think China is going to suddenly see the light and change its act, think again. China is spending billions of buckazoids a year to commission ever more coal plants. She's also making Coal to Liquids plants and is investing heavily in oil exploration off of her own shores, off Africa, and is working to build ties to the middle east.
'Managing' atmospheric gases does not mean hiding them like a corpse or feces and hoping no-one notices. It means reducing consumption, primarily, as this reduces overall emissions. Increasing emissions while relying on unproven technology to be your saviour is extremely juvenile and short-sighted.
No. Managing atmospheric must include sequestration. Please see above, and while you are at it, also add carbon emissions for the developing third world
We have to be able to take CO2 out of the air, and put it somewhere. Sorry, that's just the case. Anything that doesn't include sequestration is just a fantasy.
This is my sig.
Their mentality is quite common in the environmental movement. It is very much a movement based on problems, not solutions. That is perhaps one of the reasons it attracts cause heads that are passionate for awhile then move on. It is easy to scream about how fucked we are and point out why everything is bad, much harder to come up with realistic, workable, solutions.
So while Greenpeace may be one of the bigger, more recognizable names, their mentality is unfortunately all too common.
How about we solidify our carbon into blocks (such as adding calcium as previously mentioned), and then just hurl the whole damn thing directly into the sun, or into the void of space?
:P
I mean, it can't be that bad if it just burns up into nothing after contacting the sun..
127.0.0.1
CO2 conversion to O2 is thermodynamically unfavorable. Also, there ain't that much CO2 in the atmosphere to choke you to death, and it would take lots more suvs burning gasoline to approach that point(10^theverylargepower).
Hey! for a government that pays $410 for a toilet seat and $600 for a hammer, this is waaay too inexpensive.
Expect the cost to balloon upto $2.36 million per ten of CO2 they sequester.
After all, the money does not come out of congressmen's own pockets.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Perhaps you replied to the wrong post.
What kind of engineer? Sanitation enginneer? That's just utterly rediculous.
I have no idea, he's not my friend. He's the friend of the person I replied to.
No spud, you don't run electric space heaters, dryers and stoves off solar. The first thing you do is get rid of all the overconsumptive stuff.
Space heaters, whether electric or gas, aren't very efficient. Radiant floor heating is more efficient. Solar dryers are the most efficient as well, the oldtime version is the cloths line. And Solar cookers are quite good. As for overconsumption, when designing for off the grid living, the first thing that's usually focused on is conservation, people reduce what's needed and then what is needed energy efficient models are used.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Solar panels at $1 a watt appears to be just around the corner, if Nanosolar delivers. If these new printed solar panels can be manufactured and deployed on a large scale they should be a really great way to generate electricity during the day at least, which also happens to be when consumption peaks. If innovators can do something smart like this it sure seems like a lot better idea than clinging to fossil fuels until they are completely depleted.
The fundamental problem with fossil fuels is they are a finite resource. It took hundreds of millions of years to make the reserves we've burned through in a few hundred years. Sure you can keep coming up with more reserves...for a while...but they will inevitably run out. They simply aren't a sustainable energy source. Why squander money on fossil fuels research that is ultimately a dead end when it could better be spent developing renewable energy sources like solar and wind that will solve the problem for good.
Unfortunately there are big fossil fuel companies that are much more focused on maximizing their profits, and preserving their market share by locking the planet in to buying their product, than on doing what is right for the planet or the people on it. The greedy speculators currently driving up fossil fuels on the commodities markets are doing the world a giant favor, as painful as it is in the short run. Theyonly way to break the stranglehold fossil fuels had on the world, was for the greedy SOB's to make it so expensive everyone finally came to their senses and realize we had to do something different. The oil companies knew peak oil was coming and they knew they would get filthy rich if the planet was still addicted to oil when it happened, they did everything in their power to make sure we were and they reaping a bonanaza now at everyone else's expense.
Oil in particular has been at the root of to many wars in the last century. World War II in the Pacific was a fight over oil, the U.S., Dutch and British embargoed Japan's oil supply especially out of Indonesia so Japan took it back, by force. Pearl Harbor wasn't a surprise attack, the U.S. knew Japan was going to retaliate one way or another for the oil embargo. Two wars in Iraq were also entirely over control of oil. Multiple coups in Iran over control of its oil reserves sponsored by the U.S. and Britain, lead to the Shah taking power, which in turn led to the Ayatollah Khomeni taking power, and could well lead to a war between the U.S. and Iran.
@de_machina
You're obviously right - those durn scientists just want more money. Noone is actually concerned about the future of the planet, the glacial sheets or the potential for civilization-ending change, clearly, they just want funding. That is, I'm hard pressed to find any other motive that could possibly rationalize your argument and place it in the realm of the possible.
Out of curiosity, are you also one of the card-carrying members of the 'Ozone hole is a scam' club? My landlady a long time ago was my first close encounter with one of this kind - when she said the ozone hole is a conspiracy made up by scientists, my eyes almost popped out.
Sure there is, one is called Global Warming. And the Inuit in the Arctic Circle are paying for it, with their lives. Southeast Asia will pay for it when ocean level rise. People in Appalachia are paying for it. Try again.
FalconShould there be a Law?
This always seemed like more of a band-aide (and a poor band-aide at that) than a solution. It doesn't do anything to reduce the amount of carbon being produce.
The gates in my computer are AND, OR and NOT; they are not Bill.
That said, the pile released from burning fossil fuels is even bigger again. There's no way we could plant enough extra biomass to do the job of sequestering all the CO2 we produce.
There's one possible exception - algae in the ocean, but I'm reserving judgment on that one until it's clearer that it a) doesn't just replace one environmental disaster with another, and b) that the dead algae stay as solid carbon on the ocean floor, as promised.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Given the importance of finding less carbon-intensive energy sources, and that so many people are wedded to coal, you'd think that it'd be worth spending $125 Billion on the technology if we're really serious about the issue.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Carbon sequestration not a scam? Do you know what "sequestration" means? It means "hiding". It is exactly the same as "sweeping your problems under the rug". Now, I don't know if you have a huge lump of old rotting dirt under your rug, but personally, I sweep up or vacuum up dirt, and do my best to avoid messing the floor up in the first place.
They pick carbon sequestration, because industries are afraid to change their business model.
There are lots and lots of good solutions to this problem, that are thirsting for a little funding. Carbon sequestration just isn't one of them.
Citation please. Heck, I'll provide one. MIT's "Tech Review" says "Solar power cost about $4 a watt in the early 2000s". That's less than half of what you say.
FalconShould there be a Law?
This idea reminds me of the episode of the Simpsons where Homer buries all of Springfield's garbage underground ...and we all know what happened there
i think the whole CO2 debate is nonsense anyway
SO all those scientists are wrong?
CO2 sequesturing should be a cheap alternative given CO2 is heavier than air. once it's in the ground it'll stay there
Oh really? Tell that to those living around Lake Nyos and Lake Monoun.
solar and wind on the other hand is hopeless at supplying base load. BASE LOAD you tree huggers. learn what it is.
And research is being done on storage, in "A Solar Grand Plan" Sciam says solar power can provide 69% of the US's energy needs by 2050. TFA goes over some of the research on storage. Base Load? Geothermal is a base load.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The simple fact of the matter is that while man might dump 8 gigatons of carbon into the environment, the biosphere is churning through nearly one hundred times the amount.
Citation please.
FalconShould there be a Law?
If all the CO2 ends up underground, won't the trees suffocate ?
Won't someone think of the trees !!!!!
Man, I would not want to live anywhere near one of these storage facilities.
On the other hand, from wikipedia "To further investigate the safety of CO2 sequestration, we can look into Norway's Sleipner gas field, as it is the oldest plant that stores CO2 on an industrial scale. According to an environmental assessment of the gas field which was conducted after ten years of operation, the author affirmed that geosequestration of CO2 was the most definite way to store CO2 permanently. [4]
"Available geological information shows absence of major tectonic events after the deposition of the Utsira formation [saline reservoir]. This implies that the geological environment is tectonically stable and a site suitable for carbon dioxide storage. The solubility trapping [is] the most permanent and secure form of geological storage." [4]"
This sounds pretty exact-opposite of what the greenpeace hippy terro... activists are saying.
Ace
AL Gore has no need for a new commission, his family's a large investor in Oxy, Occidental Petroleum.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Please at least add nuclear to your list. Nuclear can make the US self sufficient in energy, AND it is better than the bucketload of coal power you have and use.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Or you could take all your atom bomb, lower the grade concentration of U235, and use it in civil central. Just saying.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
There are ways to enrich spent fuel. I think USSR was pretty good at that and I presume technology wasn't lost. Any reactor fuel can be enriched and reused for the rod manufacturing using centrifuge based density separation. Appearantly relatively small loss of Uranium concentration in rods makes them close to useless. Problem is (appearantly) that it's cheaper to mine uranium than to enrich spent fuel. Right now we dump that fuel underground into either storage facilities or back into mines where it happily decays (or worse places). I think it's a major waste because fissile materials are only economical way for humanity to make a (controlled) matter to energy conversion.
But anyways, I think use of Plutonium for reactors is a very good idea. Unfortunately with Plutonium it's too easy to deliver power of atom into every home if you catch my drift. So I do not believe Plutonium can become available because it makes some people tipsy. Ok, it makes a lot of people tipsy... literally if you are stand close enough to be able to piss without a flash light.
On another note some Uranium deposits are so rich that they are impossible to mine. Even in Africa.
Panels are too expensive to manufacture. Currently there are 2 ways to deal with the problem none of which are economically acceptable for a house. Both use arrays of mirrors that focus on a single point which could be either high efficiency solar panel capable of operating under extreme temperatures or something that heats salt. As far as I know only thermal solar power has been applied, in two commercial power plants. There is a reason for that. Black pipe doesn't need to be replaced as often as uber high tech high efficiency solar panel capable of withstanding 600C or more. It's funny may be you could combine both since whatever solar cell missed can be collected as heat.
On the side note how long do you think it takes to pay off a mine or a rig? I takes fucking decades. 40-50 years? Ok may be not a rig since it's a portable mine. I suppose depends on type of mine but investment is sick. Sure it's viable now, but sun unlike oil will not run out any time soon which removes the need to move solar plant. Solar plants have a lot less moving parts (gas pressure controlled array alignment) than a rig and mirrors decay at a much slower rate than solar panels do. It's all about mass production. If there was a way to stamp low tech solar plants... All we need is mirrors. A lot of them. It's just technology is dumb as a brick and because of that solar power plant can last for a veeeery long time.
What a waste of money! Laughable.
Very fitting, considering global warming is a myth in the first place!
for just 10 seconds a day, we could reduce CO2 emissions considerably.
Do your part!
(Enviros are so gullible)
I disagree with your calculations, even though I don't really follow...at all.
Burning 1 gallon of gasoline produces 18 pounds of CO2.
OP is being generous - EPA estimates are more like 19.4 lbs per Gallon
It only takes 111 gallons to equal a ton
a 'ton' (idiotic 'short ton' in the U.S.) is 2000 lbs so 2000 lbs per ton / 18 lbs per gallon = 111 gallons per ton of CO2
or almost $500 of gas[oline].
$3.50 per gallon is about the current average price, so, I'll agree that the figure $500 is a little high. Perhaps $388 (say $400) is better.
For their 126M, they are going to sequester 100M tons [the heading says 1 million not 100 million], so they are paying over 126M per ton of CO2 sequestered . Are they completely frigging nuts???
By my math this should be $126 per ton, which is about 1/2 - 1/3 of the price of the gasoline required to produce that same amount of CO2. I think that's relatively inexpensive. (How much CO2 is produced to power the sequestering is another issue)
However. The amount of CO2 that is to be sequestered is a drop in the ocean, it's the equivalent of about 1/3 of 1 day worth of gasoline consumption in the U.S. or less than 1/10th of a percent of the CO2 emitted by gasoline consumption per year(which accounts for only a relatively small part of total U.S. CO2 emissions (approx 7Billion tons per year) ); so, by this standard, although the sequestering seems cost efficient, it is still a total waste of money because it is eliminating a mere 1/100th of a percent of the annual CO2 emmissions. Should we build 7,000 of these things for a cost of $882 Billion Where would we put them. California would need to find room for about 700 of them, L.A. would need over 300 , one for every square mile (yep, you'd have one in your neighbourhood)
Maybe if electric fusion can generate surplus, economical power, it would be wiser to just create gasoline from water and air? Hydrocarbons can store hydrogen in high densities much more safely and easily than via compression, and recycling carbon dioxide would result in zero net additional CO2.. Who knows, if the WB-series of fusors can be scaled up enough, maybe it'd eventually be cheaper to manufacture gasoline this way than by cracking raw crude?
Excellent points, and I'm all for restoring funding for basic research. However, the scale of the CO2 sequestering problem means it won't be economically feasible compared with almost any carbon-neutral alternative energy source (solar, nuclear, wave, wind...) If you think transportation and long-term storage for a few tons of a glass encased solid spent Nuclear fuel rods is a problem, try to picture this:
About 40 train car loads of coal are burned in a typical 500MW plant each day is a reaction that releases SO2/NO2,Mercury and radioactive material along with CO2(still not considered to be a pollutant by our Department of Environment). For simplicity, let's ignore that other lung rot and focus on, C + O2 ----> CO2 where each CO2 Molucule weights about 3.6 times as much as the carbon it came from.
So for sequestering, we have 144 train cars leaving the coal plant every day. Scale this up to the 3 burner megaplant being built in my home town which already requires over 1100 train cars every day and you'd have to have about 4000 train cars leaving the plant every day.
This all assumes we've overcome the magic alchemy of converting CO2 back to something easily transported without consuming more energy or sequesturing the carbon in a material that is even heavier than CO2 (e.g. carbonate rocks). Realistic estimates of carbon alchemy assume that is is acceptable to use 200% or 300% more coal to produce the energy if that energy is carbon zero.
We already have a choice of reduced carbon energy production and we ignore the elephant in the room represented by the biggest, cheapest and most practical carbon reduction strategy, reduced consumption. Carbon sequestering will be remembered as the biggest taxpayer funded boondoggle since corn ethanol.
Reference: http://www.carbonzerocoal.com/decarbonization.html
Awe,
Just compress it all down to diamonds and call it a day.
Oh wait, De Beers would hate that, Nevermind
Why? The problems we are experiencing have nothing to do with the amount of energy we use, but with where the energy comes from. If we were 100% solar for instance, what would be your argument for reducing consumption?
Reducing our consumption is nice, and will benefit in the short term, but the idea that the entire human population should be on an energy diet forever makes no sense.
... they have fallen for the last several years (not much, but by a similar amount to the yearly increase the previous decade or so).Why stop there? If you have read/know that, you also read/know that this is only TEMPORARY. Somewhere between 2015 and 2020, the warming pace will pick up again and make up for the lost warming decade.
It only takes one man to change the Wisdom of the Crowd to Tyranny of the Masses.
Imagine a world where all water is Perrier water.
No sig today...
And that's *today*, not in fifty years or whatever else the spineless countries are predicting...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Spain
No sig today...
"Versus building windmills, hydro plants and solar farms."
And how do you overcome BANANA environmentalists that stand in the way of ALL energy development. They especially tend to hate hydro plants because what they do to local aquatic ecosystems.
I also noticed you omitted Nuclear plants from your alternatives, but that's a whole different case of willful ignorance.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Is it me ir does this scheme seem a tad short sighted. It's still not a chemical equilibrium.
We might be better off without it.
I hope they put all that CO2 in the part of California that *doesn't* have earthquakes.
What erks me is that this was sceduled to be in down state Illinois where there is a lot of high sulfur coal and a lot of coal burring power plants in the area. The DoE killed the project and now its raising its head in California or elsewhere west. The whole freaking point was for Illinois Coal Fired Power Plants to use Illinois Soft Bituminous Coal which are higher in pollutants than the Harder Coal variety. This part of the country has been depressed since the mid 1980's or at least when "Regan's Trickle Down Theory of the Economics didn't trickle down". The technology could have really cleaned up the air quality and the Jobs could have really helped the area as well. Also the Coal Industry and State and Local Governments really layed the ground work ($$$)out for this. It was Cut short for PURELY POLICATAL REASONS based on location which back out of at the last minute on the project as part of the "BUSH Whitehouse's Energy Policy" what ever the hell that is.
If Carbon Sequestration meant that the Carbon was placed into a solid form, I might like it.
:(
Imagine:
coal --> energy + diamonds
That's not a bad formula! Or:
coal --> energy + carbon (bricks, fibers, nanofibers, etc.).
We could use that for building materials. No problem there. But:
coal --> energy + high pressure gas buried in an old mine shaft underground waiting to escape
is not a good idea.
"Wouldn't cutting down a forest and building stuff out of the wood, meanwhile letting the forest regrow, effectively remove carbon out of the system?"
Yes, but not a whole lot.
The phrase "a drop in the ocean" springs to mind - think of all those people who turn a bucket or so of hydrocarbon into atmospheric C02 every single time they go out of the house.
And that's just cars. Industry and household electricity consumption is way bigger than that.
No sig today...
Correction Matton Illinos not Marion Illinos. The Project has been known as FutureGen and more info can be found at http://www.futuregenalliance.org/
12 Kyocera 130 watt panels @ $610 each dlvd = $7320 Outback GFX3648 inverter,controller,charger, etc = $2800 Wire, breakers, cable, connectors, panels, etc. = $1600 42 KWH battery bank = $4100 Total = $15,820 This system will deliver about 5-6 KWH per day. Summer more, winter less; this is an average. Say it's 6; 6 x 365 = 2190 KwH per year. 2190 x $0.06/KwH from the grid = $131.60 per year cost avoided $15,820 / $131.60 equals a payback of 120 years, not including labor or the cost of my tracker, which is homebrewed. Generator (gasoline) costs about $1200 for a portable 7.5 Kw nominal. You can expect no more than about 500 hours runtime from these gensets, so the cost per hour is about $2.40 per hour for the generator. If you run it at 6Kw, it burns around 2 gallons an hour, maybe a little less. With gasoline at $3.60, it costs me about $7 per hour to run, maybe a little less. So my cost per hour is about $9 or so, say $9. That gets me 6 Kwh of power, for a cost per Kwh of about $1.50, or 25 times what grid power costs me. On that basis, assuming running a generator full time, the payback is less than 5 years. Of course one has to consider the circumstances under which grid power might not be available, and the payback becomes a few months, at most. Several points to be made here- Grid power is a SCREAMING deal compared to solar, based on today's costs. Even at TWICE the cost, grid power is a bargain, compared to other sources. However, grid power may not be available, and it's really nice to be able to have a refrigerator and a computer running when the power's out. So what are the best options? Over a short time, emergency generators deliver more power capability for much less money than solar does. Over the long haul, solar can provide a quiet source of electrical power; I expect my solar installation to last for the rest of my life. Having that capability and ability to be self-reliant is worth a great deal to me. That's why I bought a solar system rather than a new car.
I knew this sounded familiar - its the plot of a Beverly Hillbillies episode from September 1970.
http://www.tv.com/the-beverly-hillbillies/the-pollution-solution/episode/72982/summary.html
Jed: This fellow's gonna drill a tunnel through the San Bernardino Mountains, put in a great big fan, and draw all the smog out of Los Angeles.
Drysdale: Why, that's a preposterous idea.
Jed: Yeah. We like it too. (edit)
Good episode
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
"...I just hope nobody drops a Mentos down the wrong pipe..."
One of the best parts about this setup is that it can also desalinate water at the same time. Obviously that has tremendous potential in much of africa, and other parts of the world where both energy and drinking water are needed.
life is a tragedy to those who feel, and a comedy to those who think
This is interesting... $126.6 million dollars to remove 1 million T of carbon through sequestration.
A forest removes about 2 T a year of carbon from the atmosphere.
http://www.ucsusa.org/publications/catalyst/fa04-catalyst-forest-carbon-sequestration.html
It would take 500,000 acres to remove 1 MT of carbon from the atmosphere. (follow me so far?)
It costs approximately $68/ acre to plant forest.
www.alliancechesbay.org/pubs/projects/deliverables-77-7-2004.ppt
For $126,600,000, you could plant 1,861,764 acres.
This would remove 3,723,528 tons/ year of carbon. Roughly 3.7 times more carbon sequestration annually.
This DOE project removes one million tons once. Forests would remove 3.7 times more each year.
Tisha Hayes
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
So on one particular day, wind managed to provide 32% of electrical power. Nice, but I bet most days aren't that good.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
A decent size solar electric generating plant in the Nevada desert could be built today that could power all of America's electricity needs at about $0.05 KWH. All we would have to do is build it. But then we wouldn't need all those electric companies, and all the support personnel, etc. Of course it would require a plant the size of a small state like Vermont, but in Nevada or someplace in the Southwest. And of course it'd cost tons of money to build. But by all means let's keep finding new ways to pollute the planet, rather than finding a simple solution that just works.
I find your characterization flawed.
10,000 MILE footprint in the desert does bother me. Besides the animals and plants it would impact do you have any idea what that much of a heat sink would do to the WEATHER in the area?
I dont.
I do know that cities absolutely modify their enviroments and what we discussing is MASSIVELY more complex. For example FOrt Hood is 335 square miles and its enviromental impact is noticable. Weather CHANGES when hits it. Most cities have a differnce in tempature of a few degrees then surrounding areas but have a bigger footprint then their limits.
So as treehugger i would be concerned that not just Fauna and Flora might be changed/damaged but that we have NO CLUE what it might do to the surrounding environs.
Some Enviros absolutely would just care about the desert rat..and who can blame them, that rat has EXACTLY as much reason for life as you. I prefer to think of long term consequences and what we might have fix in the future that we mess up without giving due consideration to ALL the problems we might cause. The Law of unintended consequeces is my friend.
If it was stored in gas form at atmospheric pressure, it wouldn't be a problem (it would just be silly). The problem is that if it's stored in highly compressed or solid form,
In order to get it into solid form it has to be highly compressed, chilled or both.
Other alternative ways of getting rid of it are to react with an alkali metal hydroxide or put it into an actual greenhouse.
Any strategy to combat rising yearly CO2 emissions must be a multi-pronged approach. Let's say, hypothetically, that we were to successfully implement policy to reach Kyoto target emissions. Furthermore, let's go nuts and suppose that all industrialized nations do the same and play all green and eco-friendly. Do you know where that would leave yearly emissions in, say, 2050??
The answer is that yearly emissions would be through the roof! A little acknowledged fact is that the industrialization of underdeveloped nations (China, India, Africa and parts of South America, listed in order of importance) will exponentially increase emissions within the next 50 years, regardless of optimistically estimated reductions in emissions by the industrialized world. On humanitarian grounds, we can't oppose this drastic quality of life increase that comes with reliable power, and the only reasonably priced implementation for developing countries in the next 50 years is fossil fuels.
So, should we pump research money into making all sorts of carbon neutral technologies cheaper to the point of affordability and implement policy to reduce emissions? Of course! But, should we also put a little money into the hedge fund known as carbon sequestration, in case these technologies don't pay off quickly enough, and to combat the immutable increase in emissions spurred on by the industrialization of underdeveloped nations? Of course. Any solution to this hole we've dug MUST be multi-faceted.
As a side note, the amount of money being dumped into carbon sequestration is comparable to other technologies. The US DOE has programs with similar levels of funding for both photovoltaic and biodiesel research. Sequestration is only one of many technologies being pursued, and like a responsible investor, the government is diversifying its investments.
"...or shifting in an inconvienent place would cause CO2 leakage."
No, that's methane leakage.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Ooh, I like a man with no sense of proportion! I'd ask you to marry me, if I wasn't one myself.
Wood.
Organic molecules involve many carbon atoms. One way of removing carbon is to grow forests, cut them down and turn the wood into buildings.
Rather than spending megabucks to dump carbon into a hole, why not ship wood to the third world, so long as they don't burn it?
Wood is a lot safer than carbon dioxide stored somewhere, which can suddenly escape.
One of causes of unaffordable housing is the lack of it. Who wants to work for 30 years just to pay off a house? Meanwhile we hear that the rich are getting richer and everyone else isn't. Simultaneously people are driving around emitting carbon dioxide, driving the environment to ruin, trying to make ends meet. Raising real-estate quality in the third world helps the poor and reduces the environmental impact of our efforts just to live. Furthermore, industries that have been hurting from subprime can be rejuvenated. It just gets better and better.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Now if only we could find some sane and humane way of harvesting natural gas from natural digestive fermentation. Just imagine, an energy-self-sufficient Taco Bell franchise!
In all seriousness, what about finding a way of harvesting methane from cattle? They're pretty much farting all day long anyway, and that's an enormous amount of potential energy going to waste.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
And the Inuit in the Arctic Circle [guardian.co.uk] are paying for it, with their lives. Southeast Asia will pay for it when ocean level rise. People in Appalachia [washingtonpost.com] are paying for it. Try again.
And again, what's the cost of all of that? The costs are overstated, and, really all you have is some anecdotal evidence and you aren't considering the benefits side of the equation at all.
1. Artic ice is actually thicker and wider this year, so the inuit are fine for now.
2. Sea levels have risen 200 meters over the last thousand years and have been rising since the ice age. The IPCC says that AGW should accelerate sea level rise but this has actually NOT taken place. So, for now, we don't have to worry about SE Asia under water. On the flip side, if you lower global temperatures, growing seasons shorten, you starve a billion people, and, at the same time, they also die of thirst because all the fresh water gets locked up in our homemade ice age ice.
3. People in Appalachia, too, would benefit from the cheaper food made possible by a longer growing season on a warmer planet. They wouldn't have heating costs associated with a bitter winter that you will create by lowering planetary temperatures. And, best of all, if you get rid of coal mining, you throw them all out of work. So, other than starving them, freezing them, and throwing them out of work, being good about the climate does the appalachia people a lot of good.
This is my sig.
It only takes 111 gallons to equal a ton
at 0.68 gm/cm^3 and 1 ton ~ 907 kg. So 1 ton of gasoline = 616760 cm^3 and at ~0.000264 gallon/cc you need 162 gallons of gasoline to equal a ton.
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
That was then, this is now. PV panel prices have gone up significantly since that study.
According to "Tech Review" because of new silicon production fabs prices could drop by 50% by 2010.
His installed cost for materials alone was just over $10/watt.
Did he check for incentives, subsidies, or tax credits? DSIRE, Database of State Incentives for Renewables & Efficiency, is a database of what each state offers in the US.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The costs are overstated, and, really all you have is some anecdotal evidence and you aren't considering the benefits side of the equation at all.
Life is one cost, are you saying life isn't worth it? If so then why won't people lower their living standards, after all it's not worth it. As for the benefits it wasn't my aim to consider them, my aim was to show that even those who don't use coal are made to pay for it's usage.
1. Artic ice is actually thicker and wider this year, so the inuit are fine for now.
Oh really, that would surprise those scientists who have said the ice covering the Arctic Sea ice coverage has shrunken for the fifth year. Do you know more than they do? Scientist now say the Arctic will be ice free by 2030, decades before the models forecast. "Global Warming Is Rapidly Raising Sea Levels, Studies Warn". "Sea Level Rise During Past 40 Years Determined from Satellite and in Situ Observations". And Inuit's would either laugh or cry if you were to tell them they were fine. Oh and if it's not so bad then why is the government considering putting the polar bears on the endangered species list? But I guess you know more than the scientists, Inuits, and polar bears do, or more likely you're a troll.
I can't go on anymore with such nonsense.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Carbon is what all life is made of. To bury it in the ground as an inert salt is diabolical. If people want a problem to solve, why don't they tackle world hunger? $126M would feed a lot of starving kids. All the "concerned" followers bray about Carbon but you hear squat about the starving humans. The whole thing makes me nauseous. Global warming dogma is just a new fear porn, purpose made for those immune to religion. What is wrong with us, people?
Social Credit would solve everything...
it's pretty apparent that to be effective, this will have to basically rebuild the entire petroleum industry, more or less, in reverse, in order to bury as much carbon as we are now pumping up. Then we would need to bury some more to account for that generated in building all this infrastructure, and some more on a continuing basis to account for all the carbon dioxide generated in running the thing. other than that, it's clearly the magic bullet, though, if only those liberals weren't so wacky, eh?
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
"they"?
Yes, they. It's 92 minutes long, but the film lists who they are. The electric vehicles were here, leased and not sold, and when people attempted to buy them, they were pulled and crushed. See the sad story here. Someone pulled the strings to pull the electric cars from production, lease, or sale.
Try to buy an electric production vehicle. Get the words from those who leased them and wanted to keep them. Yes, somewhere in the backrooms power players, they pulled the Electric Vehicle. See who they are here;
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7202740060236675590&q=who+killed+the+electric+car&ei=HtYnSJXZFJGMqwPkgoCvCQ&hl=en
The truth shall set you free!
sorry did I fuckup entering the adress? this IS /. right? says news for nerds on top. nerds, as in smart people, where'd you find those? all the posts are from braindead/washed idiots taking mass media as-is.
back to the real world guys, plsss! http://www.junkscience.com/
I know full well that tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack
sorry, wrong site. i thought im in /. cuz it says news for nerds i.e. smart people - none such here, just a bunch of joe sikspacks repeating what the media toldthem, idiots
http://www.junkscience.com/
I know full well that tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack
CO2 is most certainly a green house gas. It absorbs infrared radiation from the earth and prevents it from radiating back to space. It looks like the wikipedia article on greenhouse gases is fairly comprehensive, try reading that instead of some crank web site.