Carbon capture and storage

At the blessing of the briquette plant at Mataura, Don Elder assured me that he and Solid Energy were entirely confident that the CO2 created by their mining and refining of lignite, would be captured and stored, or mitigated by the planting of trees. I was very dubious about the capture and store claim prior to speaking with Don Elder and this quote by Vaclav Smil, lifted from the very good Sustainable Energy Forum (SEF) discussion group, makes me even less confident that it will ever be done.

When you do the hard numbers on CCS it just does not stack up at all.

The hard physical reality is that despite its technical feasibility, it cannot be

brought to significant scale in a useful time period (hat-tip JF)

But the scale of the effort needed for any substantial reduction of emissions, its safety considerations, public acceptance of permanent underground storage that might leak a gas toxic in high concentrations, and capital and operation costs of the continuous removal and burial of billions of tonnes of compressed gas combine to guarantee very slow progress. In order to explain the extent of the requisite effort I have been using a revealing comparison. Let us assume that we commit initially to sequestering just 20 percent of all CO2 emitted from fossil fuel combustion in 2010, or about a third of all releases from large stationary sources. After compressing the gas to a density similar to that of crude oil (800 kilograms per cubic meter) it would occupy about 8 billion cubic meters”meanwhile, global crude oil extraction in 2010 amounted to about 4 billion tonnes or (with average density of 850 kilograms per cubic meter) roughly 4.7 billion cubic meters. This means thatin order to sequester just a fifth of current CO2 emissions we would have to create an entirely new worldwide absorption-gathering compression- transportation- storage industry whose annual throughput would have to be about 70 percent larger than the annual volume now handled by the global crude oil industry whose immense infrastructure of wells, pipelines, compressor stations and storages took generations to build.

Technically possible”but not within a timeframe that would prevent CO2 from rising above 450 ppm. And remember not only that this would contain just 20 percent of today's CO2 emissions but also this crucial difference: The oil industry has invested in its enormous infrastructure in order to make a profit, to sell its product on an energy-hungry market (at around $100 per barrel and 7.2 barrels per tonne that comes to about $700 per tonne)” but (one way or another) the taxpayers of rich countries would have to pay for huge capital costs and significant operating burdens of any massive CCS.