Tuesday
Apr032012
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill If at first you don't succeed
Apr 3, 2012 Climate: WG3 The government is to relaunch its carbon mitigation "X-factor" competition - an attempt to get private investors to research carbon capture technologies.
For the second time in five years, £1bn will be offered for schemes to trap and bury carbon dioxide.
An earlier competition collapsed after all nine entrants pulled out, most citing cost as the main problem.
If government is going to pay for big, new technology breakthroughs then structuring the attempt as a competition is probably the least harmful way of doing it. I hold out little hope of success though.
(H/T Munroad)
Reader Comments (49)
Can I get a billion quid by sending them a picture of a tree? A forest? And the beauty of it is, it all happens without you having to actually do anything.
What's a £1bn when you need to get rid of plant fertilizer?
Unlike green (as in naive) politicians and even greener NGOs, businessmen know that the writing is on the wall for this carbon scam.
The technical name is a "cash cow" ... an area of business which is still profitable, but which has no future and so it is worthless wasting any further investment on it except to keep the cash rolling in.
"I hold out little hope of success though.
Depends on how you measure your success Bish, I believe the politicians will see it as a success if they spend the money. I should say "our" money.
Rhoda
Ditto
But not as 'sexy' I suspect....!
But no doubt these are the right kind of earthquakes, as opposed to those caused by fracking, which must be the wrong kind, judging by the Green mobilisation against fracking.......
Grow trees, make paper, dump in unused mine. Job done. Can I have my £1bn now?
Carbon capture? There used to be (perhaps still is) a researcher at an american university (Arizona?) who was studying desert landfill. He found, after decades, still recognisable hotdogs, and still readable newspapers.
So my solution is: dig a big hole in a desert. Fill it with every newspaper article, every magazine article on carbon capture, every leaflet and sustainability newsletter produced by local government and green organizations. Cover it over with an impermeable layer.
Problem solved. A billion tons of carbon removed.
See also:
Meeting recycling targets
I don't think that Charles Hendry's little helpers at DECC have dared show him this:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/04/ceo-the-market-for-carbon-capture-and-storage-is-dead/
Note the contractor's £13.5bn expected cost of completing the abandoned Longannet CCS project which was originally budgeted at £1bn, and that the Norwegians are abandoning CCS because they think that the market is dead. Methinks that DECC is headed for yet another fiasco.
Is anybody taking advice from practising engineers on the viability of these scheme? At first blush, to me at least, the notion that we can store tera-tones of CO2 in the earths crust seems (a) highly impractical on many levels and (b) daft because of (a). CCS looks like one of those solutions that came from a Greenpeace/WWF brainstorming sessions on how best to bring western industrial civilization to it's knees.
Andrew Marr's R4 programme last night had a comment worth recording: when the USSR collapsed then many of the ideologically committed engaged with the Green movement as a substitute. No-one demurrred, not even Marr. I've always thought that, but for someone like Marr to accept it as fact is a sign of something.
JF
This has to be one of the most farcical uses of technology and money I have ever heard of. But its not even funny.
I mean.....well....its so manifestly obviously stupid and ludicrous that they very idea of using our money to do it..
I almost give up.... I really do. If the disconnection from rational reality is this much you wonder if common sense and reason will ever return.
I worked on two international CCS programmes. The IEA programme led to the IGCC and dump the CO2 into old oil wells using the existing infrastructure. This will probably win the 'competition'.
The NEDO programme was aimed at using the CO2 as a feedstock for chemical engineering, locking it in building materials - polycarbonates.
My idea, to use it to create ocean biomass thus using solar energy to increase the H/C ration of the material into thermal power stations was 20 years' too early. It's being investigated anew.
can I keep my co2 in a jerry-can and store it in the garage
Isn't the biggest problem the capture of the CO2 in the first place ? "Washing" the exhaust pipes of power stations to extract sulphur dioxide and nitrous oxides that cause acid rain is a stable and straightforward technology now widely applied to power stations.
But there is no cheap way of extracting the CO2 ?
The British government might like to encourage the realisation of the Academy of Lagado as envisioned by Swift.
A suitable motto awaits them: 'On Anyone's Word, Provided They Are Attracting Sufficient Attention and Grants' (my Latin is not nearly good enough to make a snappy version of that).
The prizewinners in this new competition might be made Fellows (FAL guys) by way of encouragement, and the Academy itself could be funded by the taxpayer to be one of those new-fangled NGOs which are actually, de facto, GOs.
Howzabout that for being in tune with the Zeitgeist!
John Anderson: the NEDO programme was aimed at using CO2 selective ceramic membranes. I was a pioneer of this materials' science. Alternatives are to use amines or the cement kiln process in reverse. The latter plan is built and ready if you have the capital. It's called Powerfuel: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/industry/mining/8192474/Hatfield-Colliery-owner-Powerfuel-enters-administration.html
The problem here is that this project removed CO2 from reformed producer gas so was ineligible for the government funding, once more a damming indictment of DECC's lack of engineering knowledge.
A way to simplify the plant is to burn the coal in pure oxygen, which is what the Germans are planning for some of their new coal plants, and what was planned for the 2 new Kingsnorth power plants, now cancelled. This means you can burn at higher temperature without NOx.
Suppose a company successfully cons the politicians into paying them the £1Bn, what happens a year or so down the line when the evil demonic gas escapes back into the atmosphere (to fertilise crops again)? Does the company have to pay the money back or do the politicians simply write the billion quid off as a bad job?
In reality this is probably a billion of taxpayers' money being thrown at the Libdumbs as a sop so they won't ditch the Coalition and provoke an election. Or am I being just a little cynical?
Henry Brubaker:
Henry, I think you'll find that this is the old [Political] Management trick: confusing movement with action. I guess DECC figure they can throw the odd billion around - and allow private companies to waste their own money into the bargain - if they can say that they were 'trying' to save the world.
I didn't see this thread but posted this under Munroad's initial comment on Unthreaded. So to get extra mileage will post it here also: (apologies for the caps lock, but this madness has to stop, and CCS is the last straw).
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Sad to see there's no improvement in Shukman's knowledge of basic science now that he has been given the post of BBC Science Editor. Just the usual mix of green propaganda and mendacity:
He labels an image of steam rising from a cooling tower with "The aim of carbon capture is to is to prevent CO2 escaping into the atmosphere".
He then says of CCS:
So CO2 has now been elevated to the key greenhouse gas. No mention of water vapour anywhere. And no mention of the fact that even if there is a 'commercial' way to capture CO2 from power station flue gases, it will mean having to burn at least 30% more coal per MWh produced, just to provide the energy to power the CCS process. Not to mention the costs of transporting the gases hundreds of miles and then trying to pump it back underground (in the forlorn hope that it will stay there indefinitely).
So another £1 billion of taxpayers money, just to see if someone can actually build something that works? How many schools and hospitals could that build? This reminds me of wave and tidal power projects which are permanently stuck at the 'prototype stage', primarily because they are a crap and unreliable way to make electricity, and no sensible private money will ever fund a commercial machine.
JUST WHEN ARE OUR POLITICIANS GOING TO REALISE THAT THEY HAVE BEEN TOTALLY DUPED BY WWF, IDIOT ACADEMICS (AND BBC SCIENCE REPORTERS LIKE SHUKMAN), WHO DO NOT SEEM TO LIVE IN THE REAL WORLD?
Henry Brubaker:
"This has to be one of the most farcical uses of technology and money I have ever heard of. But its not even funny."
Henry, I think you'll find that this is the old [Political] Management trick: confusing movement with action. I guess DECC figure they can throw the odd billion around - and allow private companies to waste their own money into the bargain - if they can say that they were 'trying' to save the world.
Apr 3, 2012 at 10:03 AM | Registered CommenterSnotrocket
Snotrocket - yes, you are probably correct, this could be political expediency. But given the idiots in DECC I would not be so sure.
And how many African villages could be set up with rain water collection and storage systems for £1 billion? Or basic rocket stoves so they could use wood to cook more efficiently and not suffer from inhaling poorly combusted smoke? It is a disgrace that taxpayers' money is being spent to fund this CCS fantasy.
Apr 3, 2012 at 9:36 AM | Unregistered CommenterAnoneumouse:
"can I keep my co2 in a jerry-can and store it in the garage"
I think you're on to something here Anon. If everybody in the world (with a garage) stored a jerry canfull of CO2 - hey presto, problem solved!
The problem is the capture. The storage is the easy bit! However, they could try a little harder than some who have simply taken the hackneyed nuclear waste storage papers where they suggest burying the stuff in huge underground man made centres (at horrendous cost), & simply crossed out the words "nuclear waste" & inserted the word "carbon"! Well worth abillion I should think.
It just doesn't make sense from a practical point of view. The idea that you can dig coal out of the ground, burn it to get useful energy, then get the whole lot back in the ground again without using up all the energy.
Of course, this crazy idea got the full Today treatment at the BBC this morning. Has it not occurred to anyone up there in Westminster that if economically viable CCS was possible, it would already have been sorted by the USA. Or, like nuclear fusion, would have become a multinational programme, at least at the EU level.
This is reminiscent of the Longitude prize – which (by chance?) showed evidence of corruption (or at the least a conflict of interest) in the Royal Society by “Astronomer Royal”, Nevil Maskelyne. Nothing changes.
Offering prizes (the best known in Britain probably being the Longitude Prize) does seem to be 33 to 100 times more effective per £ spent when it works. Of course in cases where it doesn't work because no prize is awarded whereas conventional grants are, prizes are infinitely better..
This looks like an example of that superiority in that all 9 contenders decided they couldn't make CCS work whereas if they had been offered grants they would presumably only have discovered this after they had spent the money.
The disadvantage for our rulers is that prizes, being open to anybody, do not give them the power of patronage that grants do, which is probably why governments much prefer the far less effective route. For them to have chosen prizes in this case suggests that even our rulers thought that the odds pf them getting anything for their billion were negligible.
On my own blog I have written of space X-Prizes. There seems little doubt that if the budget of NASA ($17 bn annually) had been used that way we would now be building starships and even Vritain's £270 m a year pointlessly given to ESA would have produced a commercial space industry.
I hope this is the same billion pounds that was offered at the first attempt and not new money; but even so why do they think they will get a different result this time?
Why not feed the CO2 into tomato polytunnels, to increase yields..? Oh, right - they do that already, because it makes sense...
My question is this - what guarantee would ANY developer of 'carbon capture' provide, that the stuff wouldn't all leak out into the atmosphere again..? Gas under pressure, underground - what could possibly go wrong..?
You're right, Henry Brubaker - it IS a farce - surely there's ONE sane soul in this government who can spot this....
An old economists' moral:
Public seed money will reap subsidy farmers.
Impossible, why do they want to capture a life giving gas= what's green about that?
One of the means of CO2 storage is, of course, to inject it at high pressure into old gas fields.
Doesn't this "injection at high pressure into deep strata" sound remarkably like 'fracking- which
we are told is "undesirable/environmentally dangerous/will cause earthquakes"?
Presumably the Green Lobby will be lining up to condemn this "controversial" new technology?
Actually the cheapest, most cost-effective way of doing it is ...... doing nothing at all, and cashing the government subsidies to do nothing - not quite unlike the windfarmers ....
For lack of a chemist an insight was lost.
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John Anderson
Plant a tree -- sow some grass. That was Rhoda's suggestion. I agree.
David
I suspect we will find out. The kiddies around where I live are no longer permitted to buy dry ice -- it appears that too many of them were putting it into an empty two liter coke bottle, capping it, putting it into a mail box and running like hell. It would normally destroy the mailbox and throw pieces for up to 50 meters. Absolutely amazing blast. Well, one kiddie finally got caught by the shrapnel. Fortunately no permanent damage, but the authorities finally acted.
Now imagine doing this with several million tons of the compressed gas. I am a complete NIMBY on this.
Go for the low technology, highly reliable and proven route: planting trees, felling them and sealing them in disused mines. It's an entirely solar powered method of carbon capture (can we collect a grant for that as well?), uses no nasty chemicals, and produces oxygen as a by-product, and possibly other desirable substances or fruits as well. No high pressures, no leaks, no risk.
I KNOW A GREAT WAY TO CAPTURE CARBON AND RECYCLE CO2 ITS CALLED A TREE
and it solar powered
Do I get my million quid prize money now
(And unlike Windmills Trees dont spoil the landscape and provide a Natural Habitat for wildlife and you can them use them to produce Apples Building Material Paper and Cardboard but also Heat and light all you need is a Chainsaw and a box of matches)
Unfortunately Trees are NOT as sexy as the Fussion Powered Futuristic Atmosphere Proceesor in James Camerons 80s Sci Fi Classic movie Aliens
You wont find Sigurnety Weaver in an Orchard in a sweaty T Shirt with a Flame Thrower and a big Machine Gun shooting the place up
TerryS Apr 3, 2012 at 9:08 AM
Why the paper stage, why not turn the trees to chippings and put that down the mine? Then we could pay people to mine them back out and burn as an environmentally friendly eco-fuel; cutting unemployment and creating green jobs?
Solves loads of issues including the lack of green jobs created so far.
Sandy Sinclair
Ooh, Sandy, the perpetual economic engine machine. Too bad the vandals keep breaking the windows on the showpiece.
========
Kim,
I doubt that any of our politicians including Mr Osbourne have heard of Frédéric Bastiat
Sandy
Frédéric Bastiat
Who does he play football for
I have a simple solution. Just offset the emissions.
Carbon capture then becomes easy. Concerned individuals can be given boxes of balloons and CCS masks. Each balloon filled would contain around 4% deadly CO2. Collect ballons, or encourage individuals to walk (or jog) to their nearest sequestraton centre. By walking or jogging, individuals would exhale more deadly CO2 increasing offset potential. At the sequestation centre, the deadly CO2 could be extracted from the balloons, compressed, then sent for safe, long term disposal.
Costs would be minimised as the population is already becoming trained to pay for garbage collection, yet expected to transport increasing amounts to their nearest recycling centre. These would be obvious places to collocate the sequestration centres. Some may need to be modifed to make them more pedestrian friendly though.Costs could be further minimised by encouraging sponsor's logos on the balloons.
Additional costs may be saved by allowing commercial exploitation by the offset scheme administrators. So 100 balloons may be worth 1 clubcard point, but the dedication of a concerned individual to a worthy cause may be worth far more to any enterprise seeking to sell green products or services.
The idea also extends to larger scale green job creation enterprises. During the Cold War, people would flock to places like Greenham Common to camp. People could be encouraged to set up similar schemes next to power stations. Scrubber camps if you will. Permanent or long term residents could be paid the equivalent of state benefits to work as full-time scrubbers, reducing unemployment. Costs of maintaining these camps would be low, although minimum balloon quotas may need to be established.
So a simple, low-cost, practical solution that would be quick to implement. We have "bags for life", why not "balloons for life".
Friends of the Earth tried to ban Sulphur
God created Hevan and Earth you cannot undo Gods creation
You cannot ban an element in the Periodic table
Matter and or Energy can neither be created or destroyed
You cannot dis invent Sulphur or Carbon
Every thing that is living or has ever lived and can burn is made of Carbon
Banning Carbon is like trying to ban Christmas
And most of the CO2 is being obsorbed by the oceans
Must be because the Enviromentalists are NOW moaning about Carbonic acid in the sea
A billion may well help to engineer the catalyst to split CO2 into CO (fuel) and O. CCS is a sweep-it-under-the-carpet solution and attractive only to those who consider the stuff 'nasty'.
"I hold out little hope of success though."
They'll pay out your £1Bn regardless of the viability of the "winning" scheme. The US DOE paid $10m of our money for a high-efficiency light bulb that costs 50 times that which it replaces. Success!
Lou
Related?
http://www.cemnet.com/News/story/149372/ieta-urges-reform-of-eu-ets-caps-to-restore-confidence.html
Apr 3, 2012 at 9:08 AM | malcolm
As malcolm says a start could be at least made in burying Carbon by banning paper recycling and making sure it goes into landfill. I see loads of advertising where they claim the paper isn't wasting trees and is from 'sustainable forests'. Surely these sustainable forest people would like to go Green and join in carbon sequestration in making sure any paper they produce doesn't get back into the atmosphere and maybe build landfills that their paper and go back into. (Especially if they can get part of a billion pound grant to be that Green...)
I'm with Rhoda!
"If government is going to pay for ..."
It's not government paying. Government pays for nothing. Government collects money off ordinary folk, you and/or your children, and hand it to a favoured people, while 'clipping the ticket' on the way.