Great – Only 3 Billion Tons To Go

I feel sure that right now, readers here are probably heartily sick and tired of my comments nearly every day now about the way our leaders are trying to save the environment on our behalf, of how they plan to make the World a better place for us all. Nearly every day, somewhere, there is a release warning us of the cataclysmic damage we are doing, and how they plan to save us. Every little thing is beaten up out of all proportion. They give great sounding names to their plans, and loudly tell us how it is only they who can save us. The media, well they just lap it up. They don’t even go off and check the Science, the technology, the engineering. They just report the media release handed out by the talking head standing behind the podium.

So, that’s my job. I go away and I check these things. Then I tell you what it really means. If you read, well and good. If you don’t, that’s also well and good. It’s your choice. It doesn’t really bother me one way or the other, because if just one person learns something, then I’ve achieved what I’m setting out to do. The hardest thing to comprehend is the scale of what needs to be done if we do agree with the hype that has been spun on this matter. That is also my job. To tell you things like that. If anything I tell you is false, then I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that someone would come and confront me, pointing out where I am wrong. But no, that has not happened yet, in more than 8 months. No one has come and offered the tiniest shred of evidence that I have been wrong, well, except for the cow’s stomach thing that is. I was wrong there.

That brings us to the offering for today.

Here in the State of Queensland in Australia, a new project was opened the other day with great fanfare. Our State Premier (the equivalent in the US would be the State Governor) opened a new pilot plant that is testing a way to extract the Carbon Dioxide (CO2) Greenhouse gas from the exhaust of a coal fired power plant.

Here is the link to the article. Great fanfare was made of the event with TV coverage from all the Australian majors, and news releases in every major outlet, heralding the dawn of a new future for us all. This release has the bold headline.

“CLEAN COAL TIPS FIRE NEW AUSSIE TRIAL.” (whatever that means)

The article then goes on to (very basically) explain that the coal will be burned in pure oxygen instead of air, and this process then makes the CO2 easier to extract at the exhuast end of the process. The CO2 is then liquified and transported by truck to a destination 35 miles away for partial burial in the ground.

What a great idea.

The plant is a small coal fired plant that was decommissioned years ago, and for the purpose of this trial, refurbished and brought back on line. The end cost is in the vicinity of $200 Million. The plant produces just on 125 MW, around one twentieth of the power of a large power plant. However, it consumes a lot of its own generated electricity in the process during the coal burning phase, the extraction phase, and the liquefaction process turning the gaseous CO2 to a liquid. Because of that only a tiny amount of power will be sent to the power grid, and even that is conservative, because the power used by the process itself is around 25 to 40% of the total power generated. A total of 300 tons of CO2 will be recovered during the process, and this will be sent by (fuel burning) truck to where it will be buried, sorry, partially buried.

This is looked upon as a great advance towards the possibility of actually getting the process to work. What was not mentioned was that only one boiler of the decommissioned plant has been set aside for the project, so that amounts to only 30MW total power being produced, and even less than that being sent to the grid, now down to just over 1% of the total from a large plant, at a cost of $200 Million and collecting only 300 tons of CO2 for transport by road tanker.

They’re still not sure if the project can be viable for scaling up to large plants.

Again, the US currently produces 3.03 Billion tons of CO2, just from its coal fired plants alone, because you also have to add the CO2 produced in lesser amount from those natural gas fired turbine plants.

Even in your wildest dreams where they actually prove the theory of capturing the CO2 from those plants, the task is an immense one.

Forget that they have to bury forever (not just partially) more than 3.03 Billion tons of CO2 every year into places that have not been discovered yet, but they need to construct the pipes to get that liquified CO2 to where it is to be buried. Forget that they have to construct the new process and retrofit it to each and every one of the 650 coal fired power plants. Forget that the conservative cost has been calculated at around $1.5 Billion per plant, Forget that the plant to inject the liquified CO2 back into the ground at the place they finally settle upon. Forget that to construct that new process, the plant will need to be closed down during the construction period. Keep in mind one thing only.

To achieve the process, between 25 and 40% of the power produced by the plant will be required to run the process itself. The US at the moment is so delicately balanced between demand increasing at around 2.5% per annum, and on the supply side not constructing power plants of any sort to replace even that increase, then a project like this will be just that.

An expensive project that recovers 300 tons of CO2. Now for the other 3.03 Billion tons.