US Greenergy.com

We know CCS to be the last rescue of the black criminals. To put 15 cubic kilometres compressed CO2 somewhere every year? Only perfect idiots can be without any maths to think 10% of that would ever be possible. Perhaps 1% for a show. Attack the criminal CCS humbug where ever you see it advocated.

Think about it.

15 cubic kilometers of compressed CO2?

The total land surface area of the planet is 148,940,000 square kilometers.

The total accessible potential storage volume is therefore something like half a billion cubic kilometers, if you go down a maximum of 3 or 4 kilometers.

Supercritical CO2 would spread out, no doubt about it, but 15 cubic kilometers is less than a millionth of one percent of the available storage volume – under land.

Of course, the best place for compressed CO2 might be under the continental shelves, which increases the potential storage volume still further.

The IPCC 2007 report (put together by idiots, I guess) was a lot more upbeat:

Will physical leakage of stored CO2 compromise
CCS as a climate change mitigation option?

25. Observations from engineered and natural analogues
as well as models suggest that the fraction retained
in appropriately selected and managed geological
reservoirs is very likely to exceed 99% over 100 years
and is likely to exceed 99% over 1,000 years.

For well-selected, designed and managed geological
storage sites, the vast majority of the CO2 will gradually be
immobilized by various trapping mechanisms and, in that
case, could be retained for up to millions of years. Because of
these mechanisms, storage could become more secure over
longer timeframes (Sections 1.6.3, 5.2.2, 5.7.3.4, Table 5.5).

27. In the case of mineral carbonation, the CO2 stored would
not be released to the atmosphere (Sections 1.6.3, 7.2.7).

The arguments against CCS are mostly emotional, economic, and skeptical ones, not arguments based on mathematics. The math is quite favorable.

Long term, CO2 storage as a carbonate would be better.

But we are out of time, IMO.

Carbon negative energy ideas are not perfect, but they do allow us to turn the corner on runaway warming, even in worst case scenarios.

Solving the runaway warming problem makes all other solutions in the future possible, because it avoids our extinction.

If the choice were CCS or extinction, which would you choose?

CCS may result in environmental side effects. None of those side effects can seriously be compared to the direct effects of runaway global warming, which I believe could exterminate all life on earth in a century or so. It’s hard to predict what will happen if a methane catastrophe is ignited, but the direct effects of runaway global heating will likely make the environmental side effects of CCS look like heaven.

http://www.killerinourmidst.com

Having said that, I don’t like CCS either. I just don’t see any practical alternative, right now. Our biosphere has been poisoned by half a trillion tons or so of carbon. I believe personally that we cannot solve this problem without putting carbon back in the ground, using carbon negative energy ideas.

Needless to say, digging fossil fuels out of the ground at this point is just plain crazy, IMO.

Risks short of extinction are perfectly acceptable when dealing with this sort of situation, IMO.

CCS has been used routinely and successfully on small and medium scales for decades, and is has been routinely used for secondary oil recovery from oil fields for decades, without apparent catastrophic side effects. Several oil fields in Canada are doing this, as well as many oil fields in Texas. Ultimate storage capacity in deep saline aquifers is something like 10 trillion tons of carbon, more than enough to put our half trillion tons of carbon back underground. Depleted natural gas fields offer ready sequestration sites, known to be naturally occurring gas traps.

Carbon negative energy ideas are the only way to keep the whole system from tipping over, at this point, IMO. I think we are already past the global tipping point. Only by applying truly massive negative feedback and transferring literally billions of tons of carbon back underground can we keep the Earth’s climate system from tipping over.

James Lovelock pointed out something like 30 years ago that the Earth’s climate system is far from thermodynamic equilibrium. If it were at thermodynamic equilibrium, it would resemble the surface of Venus, with surface temperatures of hundreds of degrees C, no oxygen in the atmosphere, and huge amounts of carbon in the atmosphere. Our Earth’s atmosphere is a huge thermodynamic anomaly, and the sort of changes life has wrought on our atmosphere are potentially detectable from astronomical distances, so that potentially we could detect similar differences in planets around nearby stars, by spectroscopy. Lovelock believes that this huge thermodynamic anomaly is actively maintained by life, mostly bacterial life. That does seem like the only reasonable explanation. By introducing carbon into the Earth’s climate thousands of times faster than has ever happened before, we are apparently tipping over this self-regulating climate system.

Repeating, if the choice were CCS or extinction, which would you choose?

I believe these are the choices, and I choose CCS, at least for right now, while suggesting research into carbon sequestration by mineral carbonation to solve the long term problem of how we get half a trillion tons of carbon back out of the atmosphere and oceans.

We need to seize the coal fired power plants, and convert them by fiat into carbon negative power plants, combining for example biocarbon fuel, oxyfuel combustion, a HiPPS topping cycle, and CCS. This would result in carbon negative biocarbon power plants that are as thermally efficient as existing coal plants. If this were done worldwide, immediately, we could be roughly carbon neutral in perhaps five years, and go carbon negative thereafter. We could return to preindustrial levels of CO2 by the end of the century in this way, even if significant positive feedback effects occur.

Looking at the problem quantitatively, the biggest hype is in hoping that lifestyle changes will significantly affect the core problem of these coal fired power plants pumping out 6 billion tons of carbon per year worldwide into our atmosphere, and other uses of fossil fuels pumping out a similar amount of carbon.

The second biggest quantitative hype at this point is thinking that carbon neutral or slightly carbon positive energy sources like wind or solar can do more than delay a catastrophe, at this point.

Our traditional carbon sinks are saturated, and are starting to evolve carbon.

Without carbon negative energy, we’re toast.

To do this on a meaningful scale, we’ll need lots of desert to grow the biomass. Just add water and fertilizer.

Oh wait, we’ll need to desalinate and pump all that water. Use the methane (maybe also wind) for powering that.

>>>
Huang is one of millions of Chinese eco-refugees who have been resettled because their home environments degraded to the point where they were no longer fit for human habitation. The government says more than 150 million people will have to be moved. Water shortages exacerbated by over-irrigation and climate change are the main cause.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/ world/ 2009/ may/ 18/ china-ecorefugees-farming

Maybe Joe needs to write another book called, “The Hype about Carbon (capture and sequestration)”