NIMBY, meet NUMBY: Not under my backyard.
The Guardian reports today:
It was meant to be the world’s first demonstration of a technology that could help save the planet from global warming – a project intended to capture emissions from a coal-fired power station and bury them safely underground.
But the German carbon capture plan has ended with CO2 being pumped directly into the atmosphere, following local opposition at it being stored underground.
Ouch. Perhaps CCS is just another (open) pipe dream.
CCS was never going to be a slam dunk. As I explained a year ago, “CCS has four fundamental problems that have reduced enthusiasm for it recently and limited its likely role“:
- Cost: This is the biggest problem, and it hasn’t gotten better (see Harvard stunner: “Realistic” first-generation CCS costs a whopping $150 per ton of CO2 — 20 cents per kWh!).
- Scale: We need to put in place a dozen or so clean energy “stabilization wedges” by mid-century to avoid catastrophic climate outcomes — see “How the world can (and will) stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm: The full global warming solution (updated)” For CCS to be even one of those would require a flow of CO2 into the ground equal to the current flow of oil out of the ground. That would require, by itself, re-creating the equivalent of the planet’s entire oil delivery infrastructure, no mean feat.
- Permanence and transparency: If Putin’s Russia said it was sequestering 100 million tons of CO2 in the ground permanently, and wanted other countries to pay it billions of dollars to do so, would anyone trust them? No. The potential for fraud and bribery are simply too enormous. But would anyone trust China? Would anyone trust a U.S. utility, for that matter? We need to set up some sort of international regime for certifying, monitoring, verifying, and inspecting geologic repositories of carbon — like the U.N. weapons inspections systems. The problem is, this country hasn’t been able to certify a single storage facility for a high-level radioactive waste after two decades of trying and nobody knows how to monitor and verify underground CO2 storage. It could take a decade just to set up this system.
- Timing: As Howard Herzog of MIT’s Laboratory for Energy and the Environment said last year, “How can we expect to build hundreds of these plants when we’re having so much trouble building the first one?“
On timing, I wrote last September that “the first moderate-sized (30 MW) pilot plant with CCS just started up this month in Germany.” So it was quite a shock to learn:
Vattenfall’s Schwarze Pumpe project in Spremberg, northern Germany, launched in a blaze of publicity last September, was a beacon of hope, the first scheme to link the three key stages of trapping, transporting and burying the greenhouse gases.
The Swedish company, however, surprised a recent conference when it admitted that the €70m (£60.3m) project was venting the CO2 straight into the atmosphere. “It was supposed to begin injecting by March or April of this year but we don’t have a permit. This is a result of the local public having questions about the safety of the project,” said Staffan Gortz, head of carbon capture and storage communication at Vattenfall. He said he did not expect to get a permit before next spring: “People are very, very sceptical.”
The spread of localised resistance is a force that some fear could sink Europe’s attempts to build 10 to 12 demonstration projects for carbon capture and storage (CCS) by 2015. The plan had been to transport up to 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the power plant each year and inject it into depleted gas reservoirs at a giant gasfield near the Polish border….
Stuart Haszeldine, a CCS expert at the University of Edinburgh, warned of the danger of opposition towards CCS snowballing into a “bandwagon of negativity” if too many early projects were rejected. “Once you’ve screwed up one or two of them, people are going to think ‘if they rejected this in Barendrecht, there must be a reason’,” he said.
People should think of CCS as a post-2025 solution (at best), worthy of R&D and demonstration funding, especially for projects that include biomass cofiring.
But we need massive deployment of low-carbon technology now, however, and that means efficiency, conservation, recycled energy, natural gas, wind, solar PV, concentrated solar thermal with storage, geothermal, biomass….
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“It was supposed to begin injecting by March or April of this year but we don’t have a permit. This is a result of the local public having questions about the safety of the project,”
Is there any legitimate safety concern, or is this just NIMBY hysteria? CO2 is not exactly toxic waste: you breathe it every time you exhale.
There will be NIMBY opposition to lots of climate solutions. Eg, when we try to build a smart grid, people won’t want it near their backyards.
Whenever they don’t have legitimate concerns, the NIMBYs should be ridiculed and dismissed, not taken seriously.
> Is there any legitimate safety concern, or is this just NIMBY hysteria? CO2 is not exactly toxic waste: you breathe it every time you exhale.
It would be toxic if there was a sudden mass release where there are people. About 1700 people died when a large amount of CO2 was released at Lake Nyos in 1986:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Nyos
However, I don’t know what risks there are, if any, of this happening with CCS.
Wow. I am constantly astounded at the enormous and complicated schemes and planning and work and pointless frenetic activity people will engage in to create, for themselves and others, the illusion that they’re doing something useful, when they could be sitting in a hammock, ACTUALLY doing something.
The more we do, the worse everything gets. (Severeid’s 2nd law: The chief cause of problems is solutions.) Coming up with machines and bureaucracies and moneyed incentives and punishments and Byzantine rules and theories and authorities… sheesh! Plant some damn perennial bunch grass and then sit and watch it grow, already! And while you’re at it, reforest Madagascar and the Amazon. Increasing the organic matter in soil will sequester all the carbon we produce, if we do it well enough on enough land.
We don’t have to DO anything. All we have to do is undo what we’ve already done trying to outdo Nature. Call it biomimicry, call it seed bombing ourselves back to the stone age… call it whatever you want, if we do it most of our problems will be solved. If we don’t, most of our problems will be unsolvable.
Or is that insoluble? Pardon me while I get a dictionary and a glass of water and sit in my (permaculturing forest garden) yard…
CO2 actually is toxic; it is a metabolic waste product which you must get rid off by respiring. When you exhale, there is still plenty of O2 left. You exhale because your body needs to get rid of the CO2.
“Carbon Dioxide (CO2) is the body’s regulator of the breathing function. It is normally present in the air at a concentration of 0.03% by volume. Any increase above this level will cause accelerated breathing and heart rate. A concentration of 10% can cause respiratory paralysis and death within a few minutes. In industry the maximum safe working level recommended for an 8 hour working day is 0.5% .” http://wasg.iinet.net.au/Co2paper.html
“High concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) in soil gas are killing trees on the flanks of Mammoth Mountain at the southwestern edge of Long Valley Caldera. First noted in 1990, the areas of tree kill now total about 170 acres in six general areas, including the most visually impressive tree-kill area adjacent to Horseshoe Lake on the south side of Mammoth Mountain. The soil gas in the tree-kill areas is composed of 20 to 90 percent CO2; there is less than 1 percent CO2 in soils outside the tree-kill areas. ” http://lvo.wr.usgs.gov/CO2.html
> First noted in 1990, the areas of tree kill now total about 170 acres in six general areas, including the most visually impressive tree-kill area adjacent to Horseshoe Lake on the south side of Mammoth Mountain.
Not only that, but the release of CO2 from the soils is enough of a risk that one end of Horseshoe Lake is closed to cross-country skiers. I know, because we used to be able to ski all the way around the lake, but one end is now cordoned off with many warning signs of the risks of entering the area.
Thanks to all for the information about CO2.
I think there is a practical policy available related to J4zonian’s comment: shorter work hours. A study by CEPR found that, if Americans worked the same hours as Europeans, it would cut our ghg emissions by 20%, and I think Dutch-style work-time choice could be politically feasible in the US. See http://www.preservenet.com/ studies/ WorkTimeGlobalWarming.html
It is not enough in itself, but it really would help to spend more time lying on the hammock rather than working. Work less to save the earth!!
One point mentioned in the post, the hypothetical about Russia claiming mythical sequestration amounts, deserves a few more words I think…
What happens if in a few years we discover a growing gap between what the various countries say they’re emitting and what scientists find in the atmosphere? We could quickly wind up with a yearly “emissions gap” that we don’t know how to explain–is it countries lying, or is it CO2 from defrosting permafrost, or some mix? Even if we’re reasonably sure that the emissions are coming from a very small number of countries, how can anyone confront them? Who’s going to say to the US or the BRIC countries, “Satellite data strongly suggests you’re lying.” And if they insist their numbers are accurate, do we believe them and go hunting for the emissions in the permafrost?
The problem is that a lot of countries will perceive that they have a big incentive to lie (or simply be sloppy in their data collection and reporting), and we need to cut emissions very aggressively.
Problem #5 with CCS: It provides an escape for those who want to do nothing about climate change. They dismiss real action with the claim that CCS will allow us to solve the the CC problem without any change in business as usual. It is a point frequently made by deniers, essentially the same kind of argument as, “Hydrogen will save us.”
Joe,
Maybe you need to write a book on this and name it, “The Hype about Carbon Sequestration.”
Larry Coleman:
I was with you right up ’till the end (I think that your point should be added to the list of reasons to have serious doubts about CCS) when you lumped deniers in with hydrogen enthusiasts. You (and our host Joe) may reasonably believe that the hydrogen economy will never happen, just as people like me can just as reasonably believe that its time will eventually come. Debating the future of a technology is very different from denying the science of climate change. And I have to strongly object to the notion that hydrogen enthusiasts tend to have anything in common with deniers, blatant counter-examples like Bush notwithstanding!
I had the opportunity to visit Schwarze Pumpe earlier this year. The engineers there made it clear they were ready for sequestration, and that it was policy preventing realization of the full concept of CCS.
http://www.globalwarmingisreal.com/ blog/ 2009/ 07/ 17/ schwarze-pumpe-part-2-ccs-carbon-captured-but-not-stored/
Hi Joe-
Cost- Pay for the cost of CCS with increased efficiency:
http://www.ms.ornl.gov/ FEM19/ Proceedings/ papers/ Session%20III/ Hurley.pdf
By the way, there was further progress on the heat exchanger development, including development of a ceramic lined alloy heat exchanger that worked quite well and was highly corrosion resistant.
Scale- The Juan de Fuca plate has enough in situ mineral carbonation capacity and CCS storage capacity to store a couple of centuries of U.S. CO2 output, and multiple trapping mechanisms of the Juan de Fuca plate including negative buoyancy when deeper than 2.7 kilometers, multiple layers of cap sediment, chemical reactivity, and the tendency of any escaping CO2 to form CO2 hydrates make it unlikely that any CO2 would leak from this location for a long, long time.
Deep saline aquifers, which lie directly under many (perhaps even most) coal fired power plants in the U.S., have even more capacity. Worldwide, deep saline formations have in the range of one trillion to ten trillion tons of CO2 storage capacity, according to the IPCC report.
Still, we shouldn’t abuse the storage capacity of the earth. We should use the available storage capacity for “carbon negative” biomass or biochar plus CCS, sufficient to undo the damage caused by the industrial revolution, and then stop.
Permanence and transparency: The IPCC report says “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 in situ mineral carbonation, any CO2 that reacts to form carbonate is permanently sequestered effectively forever.
Timing – don’t build new plants, just convert the old ones, as the Jupiter Oxygen Corporation has done successfully in the U.S. and Vattenfall plans to do with it’s 250MW demonstration power plant. Don’t wait on industry to do this, just nationalize the whole bunch, and force their conversion to biochar/oxyfuel/increased efficiency/CCS.
Don’t fool around, and take a chance with the future of the human race and the biosphere itself. Seize the coal plants, and force their conversion. Pay for the conversion with increased efficiency.
Oh, I forgot to address transparency-
It has to be easier to monitor a few thousand power plants (something like 6000, I think, for the major ones) than it is to monitor hundreds of millions of cars, for example. Hire 24,000 human regulators, to have one on site at each power plant 24 hours a day. It might also be possible to label the output of each power plant with a different mixture of trace gases, to be able to track down cheaters using an electron capture detector or gas chromatograph mass spectrometer.
The “not in my backyard” syndrome is what will ultimately torpedo the plans to build a bunch of new nuclear power plants. While people in polls may agree that, “Yeah, we need to generate more baseload electricity quickly so bring on the nukes” they are never asked the follow-up question: Would you still be in favor of building another nuclear power plant if it had to be located within 100 miles of where you live?
Not to mention the waste problem. Oh, yeah, I forgot: In the wonderful world of the future, nuclear waste will be reprocessed and no longer a threat. Kind of like making compost out of your kitchen waste, I guess. I’ll believe it when I see it (along with genuine, permanent, safe carbon sequestration from coal-burning power plants).
As a reminder, last week Climate Progress reported on the costs of CCS: http://climateprogress.org/ 2009/ 07/ 22/ harvard-stunner-realistic-first-generation-ccs-carbon-capture-storage-costs/
If NIMBY doesn’t kill it, the costs will.
The difficulty of certifying the extent of CO2 storage achieved by CCS is one of the key reasons why the Kyoto protocol set up such complex, time-consuming and expensive systems for regulating the creation of CDM credits.
Regulating CCS is just another system to add to this process – if you consider that it’s worth trying to pay for CCS via carbon trading. A carbon price of $150/tonne is of the same order that people think will start to greatly alter driving habits, for example.
The alternative is to pull down old dirty coal plants and build new stuff – is that going to be any cheaper?
Hi all-
The key to all of this is to find a synergistic solution, IMO. Only synergy can save us, I think, at this point, and derail the geologically instantaneous totally unsustainable increase in CO2 levels we are currently seeing.
Carbon negative energy ideas are one way to achieve that synergy.
Biomass or biochar fuels are inherently carbon neutral, they just recycle carbon currently in the biosphere.
Add CCS to biomass or biochar, and it is possible to achieve “carbon negative” energy production, and actually put carbon back into the ground while useful electricity is generated.
It is reasonable to count CO2 sequestration by carbon negative ideas three or four times – that is the sort of synergy that is achieved by these schemes.
Take a typical coal fired power plant that burns 11 million tons of coal per year, for example. It would produce about 37 million tons of CO2 per year, but for the sake of simplicity, lets just track the carbon. Since coal is mostly carbon, lets say that the coal plant puts 10 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere.
Convert that coal fired power plant to run on biomass or biochar. Run the transport system also on biomass or biochar, or gravity assisted transport via river, so that it is carbon neutral. Since coal fired power plants are located mostly on rivers or lakes for cooling water, all of the territory upstream becomes potential biomass or biochar collection area. This would transform the coal plant into a carbon neutral electricity plant, with a net carbon output of zero. So, net savings in carbon output to the biosphere is 10 million tons per year.
Now add CCS. Pay for the CCS with increased efficiency. Now net carbon savings to the biosphere are 20 million tons per year.
Now, get the biomass from urban trash, manure, and thinning the forests and harvesting them of combustible undergrowth plus cutting firebreaks through them. Also, engage in massive replanting, perhaps by aerial bombardment of seedlings from cargo planes. This would prevent CO2 contribution from wildfires, increase carbon storage in standing biomass, and prevent production of methane from manure and landfills. Lets call the contribution from land use changes, wildfire prevention, and methane avoidance 5 million tons of carbon per year. So we are up to 25 million tons of carbon avoided per year, and we are still going.
Next, use the electricity from the power plant to run electric or plug in hybrid cars. This could equal something like 5 million tons of carbon emissions, right there. So, we’re up to 30 million tons of carbon avoided, from a 10 million ton per year carbon source, converted to a carbon negative power source.
These synergies are real, this is not a mathematical trick. These are the sort of synergies we need to turn this problem around, IMO.
Seize the coal fired power plants. Don’t believe the industry hype about costs. Force their conversion to biochar/oxyfuel/enhanced efficiency/CCS.
Don’t take no for an answer. Build a political constituency that demands carbon negative energy options.
These synergies are the only way that I can see to turn this problem around, and avoid a probable runaway greenhouse world, as Lovelock predicts, within the coming century.
One final point, and then I’ll shut up, at least on this thread.
Because of the synergies involved in carbon negative power production, the dollars per ton of CO2 avoided calculations are way off, in all published studies of CCS costs that I am aware of. Most of the economic studies of CCS that I am aware of assume coal or natural gas as the fuel, not biomass or biochar.
The synergies from using carbon neutral fuels combined with CCS would cut the cost in dollars per ton of CO2 avoided by something like 60 to 70 percent.
@Jeff Wishart,
Moving targets is a common tactic of the deniers/delayers. Just as they said that warming would be a good thing how many delayers now talk about hydrogen, CCS, nukes, geoengineering and adaptation as the only plausible solutions? This is what Larry Coleman tried to point out.
Leland Palmer — You seemed to have covered it, but your estimates of the carbon fraction of coal is much too high. Typical bitumenous grades currently used run around 65% carbon by weight, with quite a bit of variation depending upon source.
Hi David-
It’s a good point, but doesn’t affect the above “thought experiment” results very much, I think. Just start with more coal, with a carbon content of 10 million tons, and run the math as usual from there. I was thinking anthracite, and like you say bituminous is mostly burned in the U.S.
One thing that seems apparent is that biochar would actually be a big fuel upgrade, in terms of carbon content and perhaps heating value for many ot the coal plants in the U.S. Certainly, it is much, much cleaner.
Read and his collaborators talk about planting big biomass plantations, and they may be right that this would help the economics of the idea. What I envision is big biomass plantations located upstream of the coal plants, with biomass transport down the rivers for direct co-firing. As the transport distance gets longer and storage becomes more necessary, carbonization of the biomass into biochar and pelletizing to increase its density becomes more necessary. For very long distances of 300-1000 miles, gasify the biomass, burn the hydrogen locally to minimize hydrogen embrittlement of pipelines (separating the CO from the hydrogen by the COSORB process), and transport the resulting carbon monoxide by pipeline. At the destination, use the water gas shift reaction with water to add hydrogen back into the gas stream, and burn the resulting mixture of CO, CO2, and hydrogen by oxyfuel/CCS, as usual.
So, direct firing of biomass for short distances, or distances directly upstream of the power plant, and for biomass that does not need storage. For longer distance transport and longer term storage, biochar or pelletized biochar. For very long distance transport, carbon monoxide transport, or direct transport of the pyrolysis gas from biomass by pipeline.
Whew! Thank goodness CO2 doesn’t cause warming or else this story would be a big deal.
Leland,
A small but significant correction: Some energy is lost at every stage of every process. I believe due to the laws of thermodynamics, biochar and biofuels are not carbon neutral. Better than coal and oil, maybe, and thus less carbon-productive than they are, (so ‘carbon neutral’ in that limited sense, maybe) but not as good as doing nothing. (Otherwise known as conservation, contemplation, wisdom.)
Although I regret my saying (#3) “we don’t have to do anything” in most ways the less we do–the less work, the less production, the less waste, etc.–the better off we are. What we DO need to do is replace coal, oil and nuclear with 1. conservation, 2. solar, 3. conservation, and 4. wind. And oh yes, conservation. Of course that wil take a lot of work. but I hope we balance the work with careful planning, forethought and wise balance (like ACES isn’t, in my opinion).
We need to carefully consider the actual happiness, fulfillment and connection to other beings we get per unit of carbon and other pollution and nature degradation, and spend more time becoming wise and happy and less time becoming “rich”. (That’s in quotes because every dollar richer–beyond the basic necessities–means poorer in time, nature, true and deep connections and everything that really matters.