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Fracked Shale Could Sequester Carbon Dioxide
MTorrice writes "The same wells that energy companies drill to extract natural gas from shale formations could become repositories to store large quantities of carbon dioxide. A new computer model suggests that wells in the Marcellus shale, a 600-sq-mile formation in the northeastern U.S. that is a hotbed for gas extraction, could store half the CO2 emitted by the country's power plants from now until 2030."
Will it help slow down our oil consumption? and deforestation? and air/water pollution? No? There is your answer.
There's something ironic about extracting oil, burning it, and then putting the resultant CO2 back in it's place. Unfortunately, if this is only in the computer model stage it will probably be 2030 before it even has a chance of getting implemented.
That is, unless we come up with some catchy slogans to rally behind, I suggest: "Make the world a soda, carbonate our shale!"
If history is any indication they'll go bananas:
(B)uild
(a)bsoletely
(n)othing
(a)nywhere
(n)ear
(a)anything
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Let's store the next 30 years worth of excess carbon dioxide in huge underground chambers
so that instead of gradual climate change that the environment can adjust to and compensate
for we instead have a massive catastrophic climate change when one of those chambers
springs a leak.
What could possibly go wrong?
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
plus how much energy (that comes mostly from fossil fuels?) will it take to pump the carbon dioxide back into the shale? and how much energy did it take to get the natural gas out in the first place? and how much carbon dioxide did that produce?
I remember reading that a majority of the energy used in the USA is for concrete production. Switching to locally sourced geopolymers will reduce the amount of power we need and drop us from the top per-capita energy consumer to one of the most "green" nations in the world.
It is definitely better than messing around with mercury-filled bulbs and pumping CO2 into the ground.
So the way environmentalists will go with this is to say no.
Sure, all you have to do is collect it, transport it and store it. And I'm SURE companies will be *lining up* to take on the extra expense. Easy peasy.
What is with all this fracking schist?
Hire me...
How so?
This plan will never happen. Carbon capture would require capture and transportation which would be expensive enough to seriously hinder the use of fossil fuel based power plants.
Because pollution is something that never ever existed anywhere and was entirely made up by Liberals, rather than being produced by corporations?
If you bother to read TFA you will see what a petrochemical industry researcher says about this computer model: "the model does not consider several important factors, including the buoyancy of the gases, the heterogeneity of these kinds of formations, and the presence of water and other fluids, all of which will affect how much CO2 will be absorbed by fractured shale".
But you are confident that one grossly simplified computer model, without any field data to test it, is the answer?
Tell me, AC. Are you similarly convinced of the accuracy of the very thoroughly researched and comprehensively supported global climate models? Do you denounce those who doubt these models with the same profanity?
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
As a few others already pointed out, there is to be no clamor. The problem of pump and dump does not change because of this, and the potential for more extreme problems grow.
Let me give an example to clarify. Landfills were seen as a great savior. Bury the trash, especially in colder climates and build ski resorts on top of the fills. Michigan did this. The first year was cool, a new village sprouted up around the fill and ski fans flocked in. Then the seepage contaminated the water supply of not just the small village, but water supplies for hundreds of thousands of suburbanites and it all closed down. Nobody wanted to ski in turd smelling snow, let alone live near it or drink the water from the areas around it.
The better solution would have been to extend and grow recycling operations, limit massive dumping by large companies to paid officials to look the other way, and help society be more aware of their impact. You know, kind of like we started to do in the early 70s and forgot about due to massive add campaigns and cheap toys.
What will pumping CO2 into the ground get us? Temporary reprieve from increasing CO2 levels (with thinning green areas to process that back in to Oxygen)? What happens if the well leaks? Massive deaths from O2 starvation?
Now if they could remove the O2 and put that back in the air and dump the remaining Carbon down the tubes, well in a few million years we'd have lots of diamonds. They won't or can't, so there is no use in investing lots of time and effort into this type of project.
Society needs to stop accepting bandaid fixes to problems that people are creating in order to make massive profits from society. The people making profits should be re-investing that into making society at least remain stable instead of constantly shitting in the wells.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
The wiki article linked says "The Marcellus covers several times more area,[138] stretching 600 miles (970 km)", which is to say the linear measurement is 600 miles. The summary is wrong. I think it's the first incorrect summary I've seen here in at least a half hour.
"Hey, if we screw the environment, we can store a little of the pollution we cause for a while!"
A while!?!? this is "from now until 2030"!!! (well, half of it).
Or we could store a percent of all CO2 emitted by the country's power plants until 2363!!!
I have no idea why they used those figures. How about, "it could store as much CO2 as the country's power plants produce in 3 years".
Sure, it's something, if it is even possible/feasible, but it's obviously not going to solve any issues, even in the near term.
The problem is we are un-sequestering it in the first place.
"could store half the CO2 emitted by the country's power plants from now until 2030." -- Yes, well, but that can't actually be done... Additionally, 2030 isn't very far away. If I'm going to sell my future humans down the river I would prefer them not to be alive right now -- Or more importantly: I would like to be dead long before they realize we rigged their short lot on the temporal lottery.
Here, let me demonstrate how bullshit the claim is:
Sunlight at Earth's surface could provide ALL of the energy needed by mankind for the foreseeable future.
See? It 'could'. However, CAN we overcome the greed barrier and actually do so? Not fucking likely. Could, Should and Would, CAN go fuck themselves. Let me know when these mother frackers commit a 'Will'......
Speaking purely out of ignorance, since plants consume CO2 and release O2 you'd think people would be researching ways to genetically engineer plants or algae or something that could live in an artificial environment and act as a filter through which CO2 could be continually pumped until it reaches a "safe" threshold and then released into the atmosphere. Think of an aquarium, where the water is continually cycled through a filter, except when the water gets clean it would automatically empty and be refilled with new dirty water. I think the idea of just "sticking the shit somewhere" is a bit beneath us, excuse the pun.
Buy your next Linux PC at eightvirtues.com
Will anything else remotely practical do any of the above? No? There is your answer.
plus how much energy (that comes mostly from fossil fuels?) will it take to pump the carbon dioxide back into the shale? and how much energy did it take to get the natural gas out in the first place? and how much carbon dioxide did that produce?
Does it matter?
The alternative is no sequestration. Pick your poison.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I listened to the NPR piece by Diane Rehm and it is SOOOO horribly biased. She only asks the one not very official spokesperson for fracking loaded questions and then cuts him off and lets the director of GasLand (and sequel) pretty much give a sales pitch on his movie. I'm not saying there aren't environmental consequences from fracking, but when the director of the documentary is saying the EPA, USGS, and other government studies showing the fracking isn't to blame can't be believed, then who DO you believe?
http://www.iogcc.state.ok.us/Websites/iogcc/Images/2009StateRegulatoryStatementsonHydraulic%20Fracturing.pdf
http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=3489
Now I'm not saying oil and gas extraction can't pollute the water supply. It can and frequently does. But even if there is contamination around fracking sites, it isn't due to the fracking itself, but poor environmental controls in the supporting operation. The key here is not to fight fracking, but to fight to keep all the processes associated with well drilling within the rules of existing environmental regulations.
Blaming fracking for well contamination is equivalent to blaming GM because your gas tank leaks. (Obligatory Slashdot car analogy)
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
The *cost* of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is way, way too high to do this. Even with cool tech, you've got to build the power plant right next to the sequestration site -- which means getting the fuel to the site -- which means building right of way, pipelines or rail, etc. Transmission lines too. Then you take the performance hit in the generation to run the sequestration equipment.
It's cheaper to build big wind in the breadbasket, lesser wind offshore, solar on roofs and in the southwest, bits of biomass and geothermal where it works, and use transmission to move it around. What about no sun or wind? Well, it's windy or sunny someplace nearly all the time in tUSA, but yes we'd have to use our ~21GW of pumped hydro storage differently, maybe build more, maybe use electric vehicles (EVs) for storage, maybe upgrade our infrastructure to change when we demand electricity [run electric hot water heater, air source heat pumps extra when flush with renewable generation so that we use them less when we'd be short]. All of that is way cheaper than CCS, and as a bonus it won't leak the carbon later, it doesn't require creating mini earthquakes, chopping off the tops of mines, figuring out what to do with the ash, the SOx, the NOx, the Hg, and other pollutants, the nuclear waste, how to deal with water shortage or water temperature problems, and on and on and on.
Look, I've been on slashdot 15 years or so. I know the community believes in nuclear power. The answer to CCS is the same as nuclear: it's too expensive. You can argue breeder or reprocessing or any number of other things, but the age of cheap gas has killed any nuclear renaissance, and the age of plentiful cheap wind in the breadbasket, plentiful expensive wind on the coasts [where electricity is expensive anyway], and plummeting PV costs means that nuclear and coal are dead for economic reasons, it's just a matter of time.
(footnotes) I didn't bother to provide links, but you might check out "2012 Wind Technologies Market Report," the economics behind the closures of Vermont Yankee and Kewaunee, "Analysis of Drought Impacts on Electricity Production in the Western and Texas Interconnections of the United States," the recent output reductions at Pilgrim and Millstone nuclear plants due to the Cape Cod Bay and Long Island Sound water too hot for cooling, how Xcel Colorado electric utility is procuring 450 of MWs of wind and 170 MW of solar because it's cheaper than gas, coal, or nuclear, and on and on and on. We built loads of coal in the 50s and 60s, nuclear in the 70s and 80s, combined cycle natural gas units in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and now those will operate until retire, while being replaced with wind, solar, some new gas, and energy efficiency. Know why? It's the cheapest way to do things. CCS (and nuclear) aren't, not by a long shot. There's no reason to think that they will be, either.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
First off, do we have a proven or at least technically sound way to actually capture all the CO2 released from Coal plants? Next up is mobile sources like cars?
If a car emits 5 tons of CO2 annually, that means every day ~25-30 pounds of CO2 needs to be collected, pressurized and stored on vehicle. That's going to add up quick and it's not really something the average person can store up even to a weeks worth of I wouldn't think.
'At least' with nuclear the waste can be stored on site (but obviously we don't all have DeLorean's with Flux Capacitors either!)
The energy for pumping can be made green if it's electric. And even if at first all power comes from coal plants, unless we spend 100% more energy to store 50% of our emissions, it's a net gain isn't it? (or whatever the actual equation would be...don't take that as gospel)
That's a lot of 'IF's though...
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Well considering we already use man-made caverns to store compressed gas and it doesn't leak out... And considering the areas where fracking is occurring have also been areas where coal and gas have been previously extracted and thus is the location of a lot of existing coal and gas power plants so transportation should be relatively short.
Usually fracking is done very deep within the earth. So your worries about temperature increases are highly unlikely as well as not likely to increase the pressure in the formation very significantly. For reference the earth pressure at ~4000' depth (which is where a lot of the Marcellus shale is located) is well over 5000 psi. As far as the best solid sink of CO2, that would be limestone... http://www.columbia.edu/~vjd1/carbon.htm
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
There's something ironic about extracting oil, burning it, and then putting the resultant CO2 back in it's place.
That must be the most roundabout way possible to use that fusion reactor that's just 8 minutes away.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
This statement is deeper than it seems. Assume for the sake of argument solutions will appear that do not involve massive command-amd-control takeover of the economy (we've dodged several bullets already like the BTU tax from the 1990s.)
Under the admittedly cynical theory certain leaders are more interested in command-and-control for good ol' political reasons like kickbacks, general power, or even wistful longing for the long-failed Workers of the World Unite! socialost rhetoric-as-rationale, what could we predict as reaction?
Furthermore, as I've been saying for years, such a sution is ludicrous, akin to people in 1900 making judgements about 100-300 years in the future and shit what can we do now now NOW?!?!?.
And tech is advancing even faster. Delta between now and 2113 is far greater than between now and 1913.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Does it hurt to be so wrong?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Not really. Nobody's going to pay money to put carbon money back into the ground after breaking it out of there. The energy companies sure ain't gonna do it, and if the government tries, assholes will piss themselves in fury that money is being spent to "sequester" something that they don't think is a problem in the first place.
The use of the hole after the fact is the least of the problems with fracking. Just look at some of the major news stories about fracking from the past few weeks.
You are welcome on my lawn.
If the CO2 gets into the ground water (which is where your pumping it), it will turn the water acidic. Do you really want acidic water running through our limestone deposits?
So far, there is no proof to demonstrates that CO2 has any negative effects on the atmosphere or the ecosystem.
None? If you have convinced yourself of that, then there is nothing that can be said to disprove it.
The infrared absorption profile of CO2 is well-known. So is the reaction of CO2 and water. If you still persist in believing that global warming and ocean acidification aren't real, then you have probably invested yourself heavily in that belief in spite of the evidence surrounding you. No amount of proof will satisfy a zealot.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
If the CO2 gets into the ground water (which is where your pumping it), it will turn the water acidic. Do you really want acidic water running through our limestone deposits?
No, that's not where you're pumping it. Generall speaking the ground water is shallower than 500ft. Five Hundred. The depths that they're frac'ing are generally greater than 5000. Five THOUSAND.
how would the water used in fracking get up to pollute?
It doesn't go up. It goes down. The water pollution is caused by gunk leaking from waste water surface ponds. Solution: better seals on surface ponds, more inspections of the ponds, and bigger fines for violations.
Portland cement absorbs CO2 when it is being produced. It's a closed cycle.
It is also baked in a kiln heated to thousands of degrees, that is usually fired with either gas or coal. Cement production is a huge net generator of CO2.
Of course it matters. What if the sequestration process produces more CO2 than it sequesters?
You're just following the mindless, "We HAVE to do SOMETHING, NOW!" dogma. And that's a bigger risk to our lives than climate change.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."