An old scam is getting a fresh outing as fossil fuel interests sense the opportunity to extract some taxpayer funding from a government worried it might have to pretend it believes in climate change.
For two days running, The Australian Financial Review‘s Phil Coorey has reported on interest within the Coalition in funding carbon capture and storage (CCS) — and interest within fossil fuel companies in getting taxpayer money for it.
That included the hilarious claim from Santos’ Kevin Gallagher today that Santos could “safely inject and permanently store the CO² stored in Amazon rainforests today”.
Since 2010, Santos has given nearly $900,000 in donations to the Coalition, with the aim of stymieing action on climate change. According to Coorey, representatives of global mining company Glencore have also been in Canberra sniffing for handouts for CCS. Glencore, one of the world’s biggest tax dodgers, features at number 43 on the world’s top 100 carbon emitters.
Handouts are in play because the Coalition is worrying that its persistent climate denialism is going to hurt it. The loss of Liberal heartland seats like Wentworth last year and Warringah this year may become a pattern as high-income, well-educated voters switch to near-Liberals who actually believe in climate change, like Kerryn Phelps and Zali Steggall.
As with the “direct action” policy crafted under Tony Abbott in 2010, the Coalition’s goal will be to appear to be doing something about emissions abatement while funnelling money to Coalition supporters. But even better, the Coalition can point to the fact that the Rudd government spent considerable money on CCS (before Julia Gillard cut off funding).
CCS is perfect for that task, because it’s a scam. Who says? The coal industry itself.
“It is neither practical nor economic,” US coal giant Murray Energy CEO Robert Murray said about CCS two years ago. “It is just cover for the politicians, both Republicans and Democrats that say, ‘Look what I did for coal,’ knowing all the time that it doesn’t help coal at all.”
Why is it a scam? Because the very logic of CCS means making coal even more expensive, at the same time that renewables, already significantly cheaper than coal, are becoming ever cheaper.
Of course, coal companies themselves wouldn’t pay the additional cost of removing carbon dioxide and storing it — that’s why Santos and Glencore are in Canberra looking for handouts. They want taxpayers to meet that cost.
And the cost is enormous, for very little result.
Despite predictions for well over a decade that scalable CCS was just around the corner, nowhere has it been proven to be an effective and efficient carbon abatement tool. Even based on historical renewable costs, rather than current, much lower costs, investment in CCS would have curbed significantly more carbon if it had been directed into renewable energy. And you have to take into account the energy needed both to extract and then transport the carbon as well.
That’s before the problem of storage. Once you’ve sequestered carbon, you have to store it forever. It can never be allowed to escape, or be used in some other process. There’s no point storing the carbon from ten Amazons if you can’t succeed in keeping it locked down. That means someone has to monitor, safeguard and maintain the storage for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
Anyone trust a company, or a government, to safely do that?
In fact the key reason why CCS doesn’t make any economic sense is that no one wants the end result — namely, a huge amount of CO2. Carbon capture is a well-established technology, but the resulting product has traditionally been used to help pump more fossil fuels out of the ground — mitigating any benefits even if the gas you pumped underground to force more oil to the surface stays down there forever.
The one advantage of CCS is that it makes the maths of nuclear power look good. CCS is still an unproven and very costly climate abatement technology. Nuclear power, however, is a proven and very costly abatement technology, which will work if you’re prepared to spend enough money, wait long enough and have governments return to power generation.
There is one form of CCS that does work well: planting trees. Indeed, planting a lot of trees has “mind-blowing” sequestration potential, according to some scientists.
It’s probably a fair bet, however, that Glencore and Santos aren’t in Canberra to push for tree planting.
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Peter Fray
Editor-in-chief of Crikey
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We should treat any mention of “carbon storage” as an indication of quackery and possibly fraud. There is just nowhere at all on or in the earth where we could permanently store a significant fraction of our current emissions of 40 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide every year. Any proposal to do so will turn out to be utterly inadequate in its effect, and wickedly deceptive in its promise.
Any proposal to increase our emissions should be treated as criminal, with no such excuses countenanced. It is time we declared CO2 as a pollutant, to enable prosecution of emitters.
Bio-sequestration offers up at least some hope of reducing the carbon output of gas-fired turbines. High Density Algae have been shown to soak up around 70%-90% of CO2 & NO2 emissions from gas fired power stations. Algal biomass has a lot of downstream uses, too, so no need for burial either.
Besides planting trees, another option is industrial hemp, which is a ‘miracle’ crop:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemp
Thanks for the article Bernard, but a few quick points to consider:
– We need CCS technology – but not for coal. All bar one of the IPCC scenarios to stay below 2 degrees include BECCS (bioenergy CCS) as we need to be going net negative after 2050. Trees alone won’t do this (see the latest Special Report from the IPCC on land). Other technologies may come along to help here (Free air removals for example), but at the moment BECCS makes up the vast majority of the estimated removals required. Frightening, but that is the current outputs from the IPCC. How this is done is going to be challenge…
– The ‘mind blowing’ potential of tree planting article you refer to attracted numerous negative responses from experts in the field, to the point where the authors have actually retracted this statement (but not the article, though many reviewers requested this). The key point is that the reality will be far far less than mind blowing. It is a great example of science self-correcting, in this case quite quickly. It would be best to refer to the updated estimates… or perhaps write an article on the never ending over promising by the land sector (see the Garnaut reports for example) to deliver large scale abatement. This easily rivals the overreaching of the CCS community…
There is a feasible destination for CO2 captured directly from the air – recycling as hydrocarbon fuel, re-energised from fossil-free energy. As such, it could potentially supply all modern users of fossil hydrocarbons such as aircraft, ships, trucks etc. The current Fischer-Tropsch process is a hundred years old, and was then efficient enough for the German war machine in World War II. Currently it needs updating as an electrolytic process to become commercially competitive with fossil hydrocarbons.
In another life I was an operator at Eraring Power Station. At full lad (then 660MW) a unit had 5 mills grinding 60KG\sec each so total of 30Kg/sec.
The feed was up to 30% ash so 21 Kg/sec of clean coal. There was a healthy proportion of volatiles (also containing carbon) lets say 18Kg/sec of carbon. CO2 has 1 carbon atom with atomic weight of 12 and 2 oxygen atoms with atomic weight of 16 thus a molecular weight of of 44 so each Kg of carbon leads to 44/12 = 3.7 Kg of CO2 for each mill.
The result is that at full load 1 unit produces 5 X 3.7 Kg CO2/sec = 18.5Kg/sec This is more than 1 tonne every minute. This for 1 unit – Eraring has 4.
The cost of extracting this CO2, processing it and storing it would lead to a very significant increase in the price the electricity produced even if it could be stored locally. Then there is the impossible political problem of monitoring the storage for ever more, note that the Americans have given up on their storage of atomic waste in the Marshal islands already.
As far as I know and can find out, the only storage of radioactive waste in the Marshall’s is on Runik Island.
This was the topsoil of the atoll island contaminated during multiple land atomic testing that was scraped up into a heap, buried under a couple if yards of concrete in a dome with a “Radioactive for the next 50,000 years plaque in it.
The Fins put their spent radioactive fuel rod into glass cubes and bury them somewhere safe and monitored.
As a former Radiation Safety Officer, I can say, that Australia has no need for a nuclear power plant, however, whenever something goes wrong at Lucas Heights, it causes all sorts of delays in diagnosis and treatment for patients.
Co2 sequestration technology? If you are interested I have a really great bridge in Sydney available for sale too?
Thank you for that info and data… puts it into perspective…