1. Cost: The California study identified that in that state, coal fired power would cost 50% more with the addition of CCS, as I noted in my previous comment here. This is roughly in line with every authoritative study I’ve ever seen, i.e. the IPCC stated IGCC coal fired power with CCS would cost 25 – 49% more. (see: table 8.3a, IPCC Special Report on CCS September 2005). Thus this may be a fundamental problem but it appears that costs of this magnitude have always been described in the literature, and the literature is calling for rapid deployment.

You say your four fundamentals are the reason interest is waning recently that CCS will be part of the climate solution.

McKinsey (CCS: Assessing the Economics, Sept 2008) is stating lesser figures for the EU, citing costs between 30 – 50 Euros per tonne CO2 that would make mature CCS economical, i.e. $42 to $69 USD vrs your Guardian article quoting Royal Dutch Shell sources saying $100. $50 a tonne CO2 is said by Mark Jaccard (Sustainable Fossil Fuels, 2005) to be an addition of 3 cents per kWhr to the cost of electricity. The range between McKinsey and the California Public Utilities Commission studies just about duplicates the range found years ago by the IPCC on these reports are dated 2008.

2. Timing. George Bush and his Department of Energy did not get FutureGen off the ground. This means something? I thought Bush was the guy who is proud of his record of nothing done on climate on his watch. If whatever Bush had been standing in the way of is something that is wanted, i.e. solar and other renewable power subsidies that only were put in as an earmark when Congress was desperate to enact TARP, Bush and/or Congress get attacked for inaction. On CCS, delay is cited as a problem the technology has, rather than Bush and/or Congress and/or DOE blocked it.

“How can we expect to build hundreds of these plants when we’re having so much trouble building the first one?”.

Here’s what Marc Levinson from JPMorgan Chase said at the CCS Expert Meeting on Finance held in NYC May 2008, summarized by the author of the Summary Report of that meeting: “CCS has no positive purpose it only has another purpose to avoid another cost (putting CO2 into the air) and currently this does not have a cost in the USA. If there are to be any projects in the USA… the companies will go first to the Government for funding, such as FutureGen”.

Why would anyone expect otherwise, except of course for all the PR the coal industry has been putting out. Its one thing to be upset with Big Coal over their PR, but surely we can’t be expected to believe they’ve been actually trying to do something on CCS? When did an industry voluntarily choose to increase its costs 25 – 50% to install pollution abatement equipment, ever, anywhere?

3. Scale. People seem to think that by describing the scale as equivalent to the oil transport system of today this makes CCS unfeasible. A better analysis would be to describe the estimated cost in $ per tonne. There are 5,000 km of CO2 transport pipelines, 90% in North America, injecting 50 million tonnes of CO2 annually as part of enhanced oil recovery projects, according to the IPCC, so the costs are well known. $ per tonne is the way chosen by the IPCC to describe scale. (see: Figure 8.1 from Chapter 8 Cost and economic potential, from their Special Report on CCS). $4 – $5 per tonne as long as its less than 200 km is the way Mark Jaccard interpreted this data. The larger the volume per year in a given location, the cheaper it is per tonne.

Capture is the costly part of CCS, and people who magnify the transport cost should realize and/or acknowledge this.

You also throw in high level nuclear waste as if it is a comparable problem. Do you really think so? The 50 million tonnes of CO2 that is already being injected is being done with no particular care as to whether it will stay in the field for all that long, and that fact should be a more major problem taken on by the environment groups in that case. They aren’t doing it. I suspect the storage problem becomes comparable to high level nuclear waste only once it is considered in the CCS context.

Underseafloor storage has been identified by the NAS off the NW US coast for 100 years of US CO2. Bush has been cutting the NAS and all science research in the US back if inflation is taken into account. Nevertheless, scarce dollars are being allocated by the NAS into CCS.

The MIT study goes into a discussion of the problems of storage, but concludes: “it appears that geological carbon sequestration is likely to be safe, effective, and competitive with many other options on an economic basis”.

You characterize the MIT report as if they didn’t think CCS was viable.

“We conclude that CO2 capture and sequestration (CCS) is the critical enabling technology that would reduce CO2 emissions significantly while also allowing coal to meet the world’s pressing energy needs.” (Executive Summary, page x) The MIT study says they want deployment speeded up.

4. Trust: Could anyone trust Russia? Would anyone trust China? Well? I’m not sure what

the point is. If no one trusted Russia enough to pay them to sequester their CO2 no one would pay, unless a preposterous international agreement was signed allowing scams like buying a certificate from Russia that meant nothing for use in meeting national emissions targets were allowed. If Russia decides to kill the planet because, when every other country has reduced its emissions to less than one tonne per person, Russia declares it has decided to move all its carbon from the ground into the atmosphere I would suggest to you this would become a foreign policy issue of the type that caused the Cold War. It isn’t that applicable to whether CCS policy in the US should be oriented to cause a more rapid deployment or not.

I second the motion that you need to go back to basics and expose yourself to the very well established foundational science about the greenhouse effect. Weart’s online materials are an excellent overview.

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.html

to discover that CO2 is a global warming (so-called greenhuse) gas. Without it, the planet would be uninhabitably cold. With too much of it, it will be too warm for civilization.

There is no evidence that CO2 can cause or has caused warming in the past or present. The historical records from the ice age cores, which are good for trends and not absolute levels, and the last 200 years of real bottle data show that temperature is independent of CO2 and CO2 follows the lead of the temperature. Particularly, in the early 1800’s and in the 1940’s CO2 was significantly higher than now, about 440 ppm, and there was no warming at all. And in the ’40’s temperature declined while CO2 was high.

The unfounded assumption that human activities have completely swamped out or over-ridden natural climate factors is the basis for the global warming scare. The very low activity and long periodic cycle of the latest solar cycle confirms why the Russians think we are fools. The 60-70 year Gleissberg cycle has been around for over 200 years and we have just turned the peak and are on our way down. New England lobstermen and N Pacific fishermen are also well aware of the cycles of temperature and can track the solar cycles by the relative abundance of different species or thei catch levels.

So, get off the stupid we-must sequester-carbon routine. It is bogus. What we should be focusing on is being independent of foreign carbon and not shipping all of our money to other countries. Alternative energy sources are being developed anyhow, as the cost of fossil fuels will stimulate these efforts. Wind, geothermal, nuclear and solar energy going to thrive. Biodiesel, except for recycling, is a bust and should be abandoned immediately – it is stupid to burn food and drive up food prices on a wasteful and no gain strategy.

Logging: $10 — 20 per tonne
Torrification & transportation: $90 per tonne
————————-
Torrified wood at site $100 — 110 per tonne
Burial: $10 — 12 per tonne
————————
$110 — 132 per tonne

Spot price for comparable grade coal: 1.10x$135x(11/12.5) = $130.68 per tonne

($0.10×100 + $20)x(44/12) = $110 per tonne of carbon.

Burying biochar is certainly less expensive than that.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/ releases/ 2008/ 09/ 080929123941.htm