Carbon Sequestration: What's the Point?

December 01, 2008

Today we have a special treat: Two opposing opinions about geological carbon sequestration. That's where you capture carbon being freed by fossil fuel-burning power plants and inject it deep underground. Peter Montague, executive director of Environmental Research Foundation in New Brunswick, New Jersey (www.rachel.org), doesn't think much of this idea and he has some compelling reasons why.

To get the other point of view visit Discovery Tech where Kurt Zenz House and Julie Shoemaker argue that we need to bury carbon dioxide underground.  But first, here's Peter Montague:

Whenever we burn fossil fuels (gasoline, natural gas, oil, or coal) we emit carbon dioxide (CO2) as a waste product.

This waste CO2 contributes to two big problems:

(1) The earth is getting warmer, producing more and bigger storms, more floods, and worse droughts, thus disrupting food production and water supplies. This is serious.

(2) The oceans are growing more acid (CO2 plus water = carbonic acid). Many creatures at the base of the oceanic food chain live inside a thin, hard shell -- and carbonic acid attacks their shell, threatening the base of ocean life. This too is serious.

The ideal solution would be to stop making waste CO2 by phasing out fossil fuels and getting our energy from solar power in all its forms (direct sunlight, wind, and hydro dams). We know how to do this today but solar power remains somewhat more expensive then fossil fuels. Solar has three big advantages -- (1) the sun shines everywhere so it provides "energy independence" for everyone; (2) using solar creates little or no CO2 wastes; and (3) the supply is endlessly renewable, so we won't run out. The sun doesn't shine at night but the wind blows at night and a "smart grid" with diverse power storage can keep the energy flowing everywhere 24/7. Today, the sun can provide the "base-load" power we need.

What prevents us from adopting renewable solar power is not the cost; it's the political muscle of the fossil fuel companies (oil and coal). Obviously they want us to keep burning fossil fuels because they're
heavily invested.

The people who run these companies aren't dumb -- they know CO2 is a big problem, so recently they devised an end-of-pipe solution: they propose to capture the CO2 and pressurize it until it turns into a
liquid, then send it by pipeline to a suitable location and pump it a mile or so underground, hoping it will stay there forever. They call this "carbon capture and storage," or CCS for short.

What's wrong with this plan? In a nutshell:

1) The plan entails as many as 10,000 separate disposal sites in the U.S. alone. This would require creation of a hazardous-waste-CO2 disposal industry as big as the oil industry.

2) CCS itself would require lots of energy. For every four power plants, we would have to build a fifth power plant just to capture and store CO2. This would waste even more coal and oil.

3) Every engineer knows that avoiding waste is far better than managing waste. So CCS is fundamentally bad design.

4) Creating and running an enormous CO2 hazardous-waste disposal industry would roughly double the cost of fossil-fueled electricity. But this would make solar energy cost-competitive, so why not invest in renewable solar power now instead of investing in a dead-end CO2-waste disposal industry?

5) It would take decades to build this huge new CCS industry -- but we need solutions to the CO2 problem soon. Solar power plants can be built much faster than this experimental CCS plan could develop.

6) Instead of solving the CO2 problem that we've created, CCS would pass the problem along to our children and their children and their children's children. Basically buried CO2 could never be allowed to
leak back out. We should take responsibility for our own problems, not pass them to our children to manage.

7) Scientists paid by the fossil fuel companies say the CO2 will never leak back out of the ground. What what if they're mistaken? Then our children will inherit a hot, acid-ocean, ruined world.

8) Sooner or later we're going to run out of fossil fuels -- all of them -- so eventually we have to adopt solar power. CCS just delays the inevitable -- a huge waste of time and money. We should skip CCS
and go solar today.

Comments

[Andrew]

Carbon Dioxide (CO2) is Not Pollution

http://www.populartechnology.net/2008/11/carbon-dioxide-co2-is-not-pollution.html

"CO2 for different people has different attractions. After all, what is it? - it’s not a pollutant, it’s a product of every living creature’s breathing, it’s the product of all plant respiration, it is essential for plant life and photosynthesis, it’s a product of all industrial burning, it’s a product of driving – I mean, if you ever wanted a leverage point to control everything from exhalation to driving, this would be a dream. So it has a kind of fundamental attractiveness to bureaucratic mentality." - Richard S. Lindzen, Ph.D. Professor of Atmospheric Science, MIT

[Larry O'Hanlon]

Thanks Andrew, but that train left the station a long time ago.

[Marc]

CO2 is not exactly hazardous waste, its abundance and distribution has effects, but it is also a natural constituent of our atmosphere, just like for example salt is a natural constituent of our oceans, which can sometimes become excessively concentrated. Does that mean that salt is also hazardous waste? All this goes to say that we should not treat CO2 sequestration like disposal of nuclear waste or something like that and impose regulations and red tape on it as if it is extremely dangerous, and thereby make it infinitely expensive to do with the cost of lawyers. Like the other post pointed out, geologic formations have trapped natural gas for hundreds of millions of years. There is every reason to know the same or similar formations would similarly trap CO2. Of course, just like natural gas occasionally seeps, CO2 might occasionally, but the vast majority would never seep, and would remain for tens to hundreds of millions of years, as has natural gas. The argument that a significant portion of CO2 would 'leak' back into the atmosphere is no more creditible than to say that the CO2 currently in the atmosphere will leak back into the earth. Natural processes exist to react and bury CO2 in the earth, but they can be expected to be very geologically slow, and likely in the long term balanced with natural return of CO2 to the atmosphere. As for CCS requiring a second infrastructure, we currently have dual infrastructures for our water system: water companies, and sewer companies. This increases the cost, uses more power, etc but it is cleaner and provides more jobs than doing away with the sewage infrastructure. A CO2 disposal infrastructure could also provide cheaper more accessible CO2 to use for pressurizing reservoirs to recover more natural gas and oil. Even if we rely less on fossil fuels for energy, we will still need them for plastics, industrial chemicals, consumer products containining chemicals, etc. CCS and wind/solar are not an either/or proposition. In addition, wind/solar cannot remove existing carbon from the atmosphere, but a CCS infrastructure might someday be adapted to do so, for example by using plants to capture CO2 from the atmosphere, and then capturing CO2 when the plants matter is burned, and pumping it into the CCS system.

[Jason]

As we burn fossil fuels, we just put back into the air what was once there already. If the biotic thoery of oil is true, all that C and O was at some point in the atmosphere. Then it got combined with hydrogen and made fossil fuels, when we then pumped out of the ground. We are just putting it back where we got it, minus some hydrogen. What we need then, is a way to put the hydrogen back in and let bacteria or some other natural process regenerate our fossil fuels.

[Phil]

This is ridiculous. Nuclear power is what we need to develop. Solar cannot account for all of our base load power and we still need to have a backup cause the sun dont shine the same everyday.