Carbon Capture and Storage For Canada

The Environment Ministry in Canada has just come out with new regulations the compel carbon capture and storage for coal-fired electricity and bituminous sands extraction (variously called tar sands or oil sands depending if you call it what it is or what you hope it will become). I've discussed the feasibiltity of this in previous articles

• Hot Air: How to Beat Climate Change By Burning More Coal
• Is Carbon Sequestration Completely Useless?
• No One Can Do CO2 Capture: Feds

Environment Minister John Baird says: "It's not a pie-in-the-sky dream. It's being done here." Unfortunately, Mr Baird is being misled by his officials, through lack of scientific knowledge. What is being done here is quite different from what he is proposing, which has never been done anywhere yet. He is probably referring to the pilot project in Weyburn, Saskatchewan. This is one of several large-scale demonstration projects in the world pumping CO₂ into underground formations, including Sleipner, off the coast of Norway, and one at the In-Salah gas wells in Algeria. All of the biggest such projects in the world put together do not add up to the capacity required for one typical coal-fired power plant. And none of them uses CO₂ that comes from burning fossil fuels, in fact they burn extra fossil fuels in order to capture and store CO₂. Actually capturing greenhouse gases from a smokestack such that the total emissions per unit of energy are significantly lower than before has not been done.

Applying CCS to power plants is more difficult because typically only 5-12% of what comes out a chimney is CO₂, it is at low pressure, and it is mixed in with impurities. Before it can be pumped underground, it has to be purified and compressed, and that takes a great deal of energy and of money. It costs over $100 a ton, according to the experts, about half of which is extra energy costs. If you want to clean the emissions from that extra energy, you have to use CCS on it, which requires even more energy, and on and on.

Some high-profile CCS energy generation projects have been cancelled recently because of the cost, including the SaskPower 300-megawatt, clean-coal plant near Estevan whose cost went from $1.5 billion to $3.8 billion in a few years, and FutureGen, a 275-megawatt integrated sequestration and hydrogen production plant in Mattoon, Illinois, which would have cost $1.5 billion more to build than its total revenues. And in one alarming development, the West Pearl Queen sequestration experiment in New Mexico leaked its injected gas. Carbon dioxide sometimes naturally seeps out of the ground, and when it does it kills all plant and animal life in its path. Because it's heavier than air it stays close to the ground and suffocates them.

A panel of experts on U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Carbon Sequestration Program, formed by the National Research Council, recently concluded that carbon sequestration could not be implemented unless there were a significant carbon tax, and examined carbon taxes of $100 or $300 a ton. Even then the benefits are not very large. The panel members could find no environmental benefit and no security benefit to DOE sequestration research. To make sequestration a viable alternative you need a high tax on emissions. But the taxes that make CCS feasible make other low-emission energy cheaper than fossil fuels. Whatever the price of energy, other sources of energy always give a better return on investment.

According to experts at Hydro Quebec, CCS never has a good return on investment.

Tags: Greenhouse Gas Kyoto Protocol Climate Change Energy Carbon Capture CCS Environment

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