Carbon Capture and Sequestration

This is really weird stuff. It's quackery.

I cannot believe what's in the Cap and Trade bill. I can't believe it.

John Boehner is right: "Hey, people deserve to know what's in this pile of s--t."

American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009

TITLE I--CLEAN ENERGY
Subtitle B--Carbon Capture and Sequestration
SEC. 111. NATIONAL STRATEGY.

(a) In General- Not later than 1 year after the date of enactment of this Act, the Administrator, in consultation with the Secretary of Energy, the Secretary of the Interior, and the heads of such other relevant Federal agencies as the President may designate, shall submit to Congress a report setting forth a unified and comprehensive strategy to address the key legal, regulatory and other barriers to the commercial-scale deployment of carbon capture and sequestration.

What is "carbon capture and sequestration"?

From the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC):

CCS involves the use of technology, first to collect and concentrate the CO2 produced in industrial and energy related sources, transport it to a suitable storage location, and then store it away from the atmosphere for a long period of time.

So the CO2 has to be captured and sequestered.

Where?

Potential technical storage methods are: geological storage (in geological formations, such as oil and gas fields, unminable coal beds and deep saline formations ), ocean storage (direct release into the ocean water column or onto the deep seafloor) and industrial fixation of CO2 into inorganic carbonates.

We're going to scoop up all that bad CO2 and store it?

We're going to shove it deep into the earth for the long term. Yeah, that's a good idea.

What a load!

Even Greenpeace objects to the plans to store CO2.

From The Economist, "Trouble in store - Politicians are pinning their hopes for delivery from global warming on a technology that is not quite airtight":

Greenpeace, a pressure group, argues that it is impossible to be certain that carbon dioxide will not eventually leak out of the ground. Carbon dioxide forms an acid when it dissolves in water. This acid can react with minerals to form carbonates, locking away the carbon in a relatively inert state. But it can also eat through the man-made seals or geological strata intended to keep it in place. A leakage rate of just 1% a year, Greenpeace points out, would lead to 63% of the carbon dioxide stored in any given reservoir being released within 100 years, almost entirely undoing the supposed environmental benefit.

The more I learn about this bill the more I'm convinced it is total crap.

The problem with CCS is the cost. The chemical steps in the capture consume energy, as do the compression and transport of the carbon dioxide. That will use up a quarter or more of the output of a power station fitted with CCS, according to most estimates. So plants with CCS will need to be at least a third bigger than normal ones to generate the same net amount of power, and will also consume at least a third more fuel. In addition, there is the extra expense of building the capture plant and the injection pipelines. If the storage site is far from the power plant, yet more energy will be needed to move the carbon dioxide.

Do you believe this?

We're going to increase the infrastructure required to produce electricity and it will take at least a third more fuel to produce.

This is insane.

Al Gore, America’s green conscience, does not see CCS working commercially “in the near term or even the medium term”. Sam Laidlaw, the boss of Centrica, a British utility, thinks it will take at least 15 years, and probably 20, to roll out CCS plants in large numbers.

Some sceptics feel so strongly they have started airing advertisements of their own to lambast CCS. In one of them, an engineer with a hard hat and a clipboard promises a tour of a “state-of-the-art clean-coal facility”. He pushes open a factory door to reveal a patch of barren scrubland; the factory, it turns out, is just a façade. “Amazing!” he shouts, gesturing at the empty space. It is a fairly accurate portrait. For the moment, at least, CCS is mostly hot air.

Within one year from its passage, the Cap and Trade bill requires that there be a strategy to address the "deployment of carbon capture and sequestration."

The technology is unproven. There's no agreement that such capture plants will be effective and safe.

It's complete idiocy.

Unbelievable.

We're going to destroy our economy for THIS?

"For the moment, at least, CCS is mostly hot air."