|
|
|
| |
Carbon Capture and Storage: It's Already Here
We’ve been pumping CO2 underground for 36 years. We’ve been capturing it from coal at full scale since 2000. We pipe it through 3,600 miles of pipe into 100 different storage areas. No one has been injured by the CO2 that we’ve been storing. And all of this happens at a profit – and without subsidies.
There are two problems with carbon capture and storage (CCS). Misinformation and cost.
You will be told that no full-scale CCS power plant has ever been built. But we could have done so any time we wanted in the last 23 years simply by installing a gas-fired power plant next to the Great Plains Synfuels Plant and using its gas to generate electricity instead of using it to cook and heat. That coal plant produces enough synthetic natural gas to generate the electricity of two full-size 500 MW coal-fired power plants. North Dakota’s quite proud of their plant and will send you a full color 170 page book for free. You can see Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan helping them out, and see a picture of the ground-breaking in 1963—ten years before OPEC’s embargo. This is old technology.
The Great Plains plant sells 9,000 tons of CO2 per day, shipping it 204 miles by pipeline up to the Weyburn oil field in Saskatchewan where it’s injected to enhance oil recovery in an old oil field.
Now misinformation from environmentalists may well kill CCS, and that might be a good thing. Who knows? But that’s the point. We don’t know and they don’t know, and it’s time we all stopped pretending to know things we have no idea about. We are likely up against one very tough problem and it’s just plain wrong to shut off options before we know how to fix the climate.
Now some people “know” the answer is “wind” and will tell you wind power is growing 6.4 times faster than coal power, and they’re right about the 6.4. But it’s also true that coal power is growing 6.7 times faster than wind power. One is the wind-industry’s feel-good percentage-based number, that other is the actual megawatt-hour number—the one that matters to Mother Nature.
The Department of energy predicts that, in spite of phenomenal wind-power growth, coal power will still be growing five times faster than wind in 2030. The question of CCS is not at all the question of keeping coal-fired electricity alive. I wish it were. The question is, Can we tame the coal problem a bit? CCS is one possibility.
It’s not a great possibility, but if we get desperate—and we may well—we will wish we had checked it out, and that takes about 15 years. I just reviewed a soon-to-be-released report from Australia’s Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute and one point stood out. We need a little bit of government money to search for good storage geology right away. Geologists think there are a lot of good places, but a few of them need to be proven or no one is going to get serious about building CCS power plants.
And even though CCS can be done with old technology, we need cheaper technology or not much will be done. We especially need cheap technology to make this happen in China, which is where most new coal is coming on line, and will be for decades. Just a few years ago everyone was betting on gasification technology, as is used in North Dakota. But now Oxy-combustion is taking the lead. That’s burning the coal in oxygen and CO2 instead of oxygen and nitrogen (air). That solves the problem of separating CO2 out of the smokestack and it can be applied to existing plants because the O2-CO2 combination burns just like air. Even better, a new process for separating oxygen from air looks very promising. (The old way is to freeze out the oxygen.) A small oxygen plant using the new ITM (ion transport membrane) technology has been operating since 2006.
The GCCSI report has preliminary estimates that China could capture carbon for about $40 a ton with this new technology. That’s expensive, but with DOE predicting carbon allowance prices of $65 a tonne in 2030 under the Waxman bill, I would not want to be the one to take CCS off the table.
Once again there’s a simple answer to this conundrum. Have the government do what we need it to do, and let the market do what the market is good at. The government should check on safety and regulate pipelines, as always. And the government should help fund advanced urgent research. The market should decide whether wind, solar, natural gas, CCS or conservation is the cheapest way to go. Likely, it will choose a smart but complex mix of all five. What we don’t need is for politicians to decide the dangers of CO2 a mile underground. And yes, a gas can stay underground. The gas you cook with was down there for 100 million years.
Scientific American on EOR
|
|
http://stoft.com/p/140.html | 03/11/10 10:28 GMT
Modified: Tue, 08 Sep 2009 15:46:50 GMT
|
|
| |
Amazon
China and India have nixed caps. Without these caps, Kyoto fails. What can be done?
Carbonomics explains "wrecking" the economy, "peak oil," caps, carbon taxes, and Kyoto.
About Carbonomics.
Get discount.
|
|
|
