Tuesday
May082012
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill A sting in the tail
May 8, 2012 Energy: CCS Energy: gas Greens According to a report from the BBC, the Environment Agency looks set to give its blessing to shale fracking in the UK.
However there is also what looks like a sting in the tail.
[Environment Agency boss] Lord Smith is expected to insist, however, that power firms should be required to capture the carbon emissions from burning gas and store them in underground rocks to prevent them contributing to climate change - something power firms are not currently obliged to do.
Given that millions (billions?) have been spent trying to make CCS work without any success, it does rather look to me as if this could be an attempt to kill off shale gas completely.
Reader Comments (63)
Oct. 6 2011(Bloomberg) -- Norway revised the cost estimate for the Mongstad carbon capture and storage test center up by 257 million kroner to 5.77 billion kroner ($985 million), the Ministry of Petroleum and Energy said today in a statement on its website in connection with the 2012 budget bill. The test center is 80 percent complete and will start operating next year, it said.
The government is allocating 1.7 billion kroner to the test center in 2012, the ministry said.
At least we won't have to cough up for a test centre!
Presumably there will be no CSS requirement if the gas is just exported
Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?
Shakespeare: Henry IV, Part 1, III, i
Omnologos said:
<< How about using high-pressure CO2 to do the fracking? 8-) >>
Ironically that is one solution being proposed to get round the water issues. Another is to use liquid propane.
Or they could go the whole hog and "capture" CO2 by injecting it to release natural gas from methane hydrates, per the technology successfully trialled in the Arctic last month!
Maybe the regulation doesn't say how much CO2 must be captured. Would it do to place a little slaked lime in a good location to absorb a small amount of CO2 from the discharge, and change it once a week!
(Hopefully the politicians and regulators won't realise that lime is made by driving CO2 from calcium carbonate!)
'Hopefully the politicians and regulators won't realise that lime is made by driving CO2 from calcium carbonate!'
Shush, thats how medieval lime mortar and plaster was made!
Relax- it absorbed it back again to cure the mortar.
Strange thing is that that medieval lime mortar, so soft and friable, lasted for centuries in old walls, while modern portland cement normally cracks up.
I wonder why we ever had an industrial revolution? Surely it must have been obvious to our ancestors that coal mining is not safe? In fact some people (mainly those ignorant types that live in the former mining areas) would argue that coal mining is even more dangerous than fracking!
Our ancestors should have stuck to burning charcoal. Because there are limits to how many trees, and hence how much charcoal, Britain could produce, the Industrial Revolution would never have taken off and today we would live in perfect harmony with nature, just as the Greens wish us to do, and we would never have to worry about excessive CO2 levels!
Wouldn't life be wonderful if the Greens had been powerful during the period 1750-1900?
The best way to separate CO2 from the exhaust of a CCGT is to burn the methane in pure oxygen and condense the water.
The coal fired power station originally planned for RWE was to use this procedure but with coal.
There's a transcript of this morning's interview with Lord Smith now available here:
https://sites.google.com/site/mytranscriptbox/home/20120508_r4
Come on, Roy:
Us miners have always been considered an expendable item. As the General said when the 50th Division (from the North of England) appeared in the First World War just after the German use of gas for the first time on the Western Front at Ypres - "send in the miners, they know how to deal with gas!"
Problem was that the gas was chlorine at the time, not the CO, CO2, and methane that miners normally meet. But that has been the way it has always been, so why should now be different?
Dave
Thanks Bishop.................Lord Smith...............another name to add to my list of CLIMATE CLOWNS.
Wrong page! moved this comment!
Bit late to this - but Chris Smith is a smarmy apparatchik clinging to a comfy sinecure who should have been turfed out in that Bonfire of the Quangos we were all promised.
That the BBC see fit to broadcast his inane witterings from inside the delusional bubble of Whitehall Quangoland is about par for the course - he has a tick in every PC qualification box.
The Environment Agency really make the Met Office look good....
I know that commenters here are entirely correct to suspect both the motivation and honesty of this man and his organisation.