A haszelnut in every bite

As I think I've mentioned before, I now  assume that most gongs are handed out to people, not for public service, but for "going the extra mile" in the furtherance of a cause dear to ministers' hearts. I was reminded of this when I read James Verdon's devastating take down of an article by our old friend Stuart Haszeldine OBE, professor of carbon capture and storage at the University of Edinburgh.

I first came across the good professor when I appeared at a Spectator debate on windfarms, and he spent a section of his talk bad-mouthing The Hockey Stick Illusion, before admitting that he hadn't actually read it. I'm therefore always on the lookout for his latest utterances. Earlier this week, he and colleagues from his group at Edinburgh wrote an article for the Energy and Carbon blog about waste water disposal in the oil and gas industry, with a particular focus shale gas fields. Unconventional oil and gas is not obviously where their expertise lies, and so one might have expected a few errors to have crept in to their text, but as James Verdon points out in his response, the level of incorrectness is...a bit of a worry.

Click to read more ...

The fading dream of CCS

The pretence that carbon capture and storage can ever be a viable technology is looking increasingly hard to maintain, with the news that Drax will pull out of the White Rose CCS project in Yorkshire once the current phase is complete.

It's amusing to recall Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the Telegraph just three weeks ago, telling us that the UK had "hit the jackpot" on the CCS front:

Britain is poised to take the lead in Europe, approving two CCS projects later this year with a £1bn grant. One will be a retro-fit on SSE's gas-fired plant at Peterhead in Scotland. The CO2 will be sent through the Golden Eye pipeline to storage sites in deep rock formations below the North Sea.

The other will be Drax's White Rose plant in Yorkshire, a purpose-built 448 MW "oxyfuel" plant for coal. With biomass, it promises negative carbon emissions.

Oh dear.

Corruption, calamity and silliness

Richard North has been doing some interesting analysis of the new carbon capture and storage project in Saskatchewan, which was widely reported in a few days ago. Here's what the Guardian had to say at the time:

Canada has switched on the first large-scale coal-fired power plant fitted with a technology that proponents say enables the burning of fossil fuels without tipping the world into a climate catastrophe.

The project, the first commercial-scale plant equipped with carbon capture and storage technology, was held up by the coal industry as a real life example that it is possible to go on burning the dirtiest of fossil fuels while avoiding dangerous global warming.

Click to read more ...

The Yeomen's report

Tim Yeo and the merry men of the Commons' Energy and Climate Change Committee have released their report into carbon capture and storage. The conclusions are pretty much as you might expect, with the committee calling for the government to bung money at CCS companies and to do it quickly, quickly, quickly. The interesting bit, however, was always going to be the bit on the technical challenges. And also much as you might expect this is buried and consists largely of brushing the problems under the carpet:

It was repeatedly asserted that scientific and engineering challenges were not major factors preventing the development of CCS. Mr Warren CEO of the CCSA argued that the number of CCS projects operating or under construction around the world,“gives us a high degree of confidence that this is not a technical or scientific challenge”. Despite this there is limited experience in integrating the components which make up CCS into full-chain projects. Ongoing research and development will be critical to drive improvements...

This is followed by an extended discussion about storage capacity for carbon dioxide in the UK and ultimate acceptance that "scientific and engineering challenges are not a major barrier to deploying CCS".

Are they serious?

Update on May 21, 2014 by Bishop Hill

James Verdon is telling me on Twitter that I should be focusing on cost, not engineering as the biggest issue for CCS.

Swedes abandon CCS

The Swedish energy giant Vattenfall has decided that carbon capture and storage is a dead duck and will wind up its research efforts in the area.

The state-owned giant had been investing in this technology for more than 10 years, with plans for a power plant equipped with CCS in 2016.

Capturing and liquifying CO2 coming from carbon combustion to later store it underground was meant to curb greenhouse effect gas emissions, but its costs and the energy it requires make the technology unviable.

This really does put a question mark over the direction taken by Ed Davey, who is hosing down oil majors with money in an attempt to keep them working on the technology. It's the 1970s all over again - ministers pick winners while the public watches them sink without trace, all the time wondering if it would have been better simply to have burnt the cash in a power station, which at least would have generated something useful.

Down the carbon drain

"If England's going down the drain with its energy policies, why not take Scotland with us? That must be what Davey is thinking- nothing else could explain this madness.

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Pielke Jr in Foreign Policy mag

Roger Pielke Jr explains the Kaya Identity to readers at Foreign Policy magazine, arguing that it is through technology that progress will be made on the global warming problem:

To secure cheap energy alternatives requires innovation -- technological, but also institutional and social. Nuclear power offers the promise of large scale carbon-free energy, but is currently expensive and controversial. Carbon capture from coal and gas, large-scale wind, and solar each offer tantalizing possibilities, but remain technologically immature and expensive, especially when compared to gas. The innovation challenge is enormous, but so is the scale of the problem. A focus on innovation -- not on debates over climate science or a mythical high carbon price -- is where we'll make [progress].

Another nail in the CCS coffin

This is an excerpt from a speech given by Judith Hackett, the head of the Health & Safety Executive. Coming so soon after the news that CCS can cause earthquakes, one can't help but wonder if this is an idea that will now pass into obscurity

CO2 has for many years had a variety of applications in industrial processes. But CCS brings these processes together on a completely different scale to capture the CO2 from fossil fuel burning power stations and then store it permanently under the sea in deep geological formations.

Click to read more ...

CCS "unlikely to succeed"

From the Daily Telegraph (Australia)

A PROPOSED method of cutting harmful carbon emissions in the atmosphere by storing them underground risks causing earthquakes and is unlikely to succeed, a US study said.

The warning came in a Perspective article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, just days after another independent US study warned that carbon capture and storage (CCS) risked causing earthquakes.

CCS is currently considered a "viable strategy" by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for pollution control from coal-based electrical power generation and other industrial sources of carbon dioxide, said the PNAS study.

If I recall correctly, DECC's plans for our future energy needs only consider fossil fuels if they have carbon capture in place.

I wonder what they are going to do now?

A sting in the tail

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.

Longannet scrapped

The flagship carbon capture and storage project at Longannet - just up the road from me - has been scrapped.

A decision has been made not to proceed with Longannet but to pursue other projects with the one billion pounds funding made available by the government," the Department of Energy and Climate Change said today.

Energy Secretary Chris Huhne insisted the idea can still work elsewhere, and promised that the £1bn would be available for other projects.

I can't help but recall the speech by the oil industry bigwig at the Oil Club dinner last year, when CCS essentially formed the core of the industry's vision for the future. For the whole idea to be jettisoned so soon seems, well, odd.

How much of industry's green credentials are just a matter of keeping public and politicians out of their hair? Quite a lot, I would guess.