There Are Ways to Fix It - Eventually

The struggle of the 21st century will be to reduce atmospheric carbon concentration to safe levels.   There's a fair chance it can be done, given time, commitment and vast resources.

One way to reduce carbon is to extract it from the air and mineralize it, that is turn it into a stable compound that can be safely buried.  We don't need a stunning technological breakthrough to get carbon out of the air.   Trees already do it very nicely.   A lot of trees.   But the trick is to then stabilize it by transforming the wood carbon into mineral carbon.   There's a word for it, biochar.

Trees are felled and the wood is essentially baked in kilns to transform it into dense charcoal.   The neat part is that heating the wood releases methane and other combustible gases that are cleanly burned to fuel the process.   The resulting biochar is then trucked away to be ploughed into farmland.   Why farmland?  Because biochar enriches the soil, makes it far more fertile and productive.   Marginal soil, in many cases, can be transformed into good quality, arable soil.

So, what's the hold up?   There is a time lag factor of two to four decades that the tree takes to grow to its maximum carbon intake point at which it can be felled and a new tree planted.

Then there's the economic factor.   Trees are typically given a resource value for wood or wood products.   Biochar, on a planet-saving scale, would have to be on a highly discounted value.   Somebody would have to make good the difference.   Which is where meaningful carbon pricing might come into play.   Tie carbon emissions to the effective cost of the equivalent in biochar, inclusive of all production, processing and administrative costs from planting to ploughing, and you could deter carbon emissions, stimulate the market for alternative energy and begin realistic and safe carbon sequestration.

Would this sort of thing sound the death knell for fossil fuels?  Some maybe, not all.   There will always be a need for some fossil fuels.   What it would bring to a grinding halt would be the production of and market for the most carbon-intensive fuels and, yes, I mean Tar Sands bitumen.   Yet surely that's a small price to pay for an opportunity, within just a few generations, to bring our climate back into balance.

A reforestation effort of this magnitude is truly mind-boggling.  It would be on the same scale as climate change itself - global.  It could even be more expensive than any endeavour mankind has ever undertaken.   Yet isn't that to be expected in a world running out of options - and time?

This Blows Holes Through the Tar Sands and "Clean Coal"

Remember CCS, "carbon capture & sequestration", the solution that allows safe, limitless exploitation of fossil fuels? It's more than a myth, it's a lie.

Whenever Big Coal and the Alberta oil patch face tough questions about carbon emissions they immediately wave the carbon capture & sequestration flag and assure critics that, very soon, any day now, they'll be capturing those carbon emissions and sequestering them safely underground where they'll never harm the planet or mankind. A new report shatters the myth of CCS and leaves its proponents looking utterly deceitful.

A Guardian article published on Sunday says the CCS myth is unrealistic, unviable and based on deeply flawed assumptions.

A new research paper from American academics is threatening to blow a hole in growing political support for carbon capture and storage as a weapon in the fight against global warming.

The document from Houston University claims that governments wanting to use CCS have overestimated its value and says it would take a reservoir the size of a small US state to hold the CO2 produced by one power station.

Previous modelling has hugely underestimated the space needed to store CO2 because it was based on the "totally erroneous" premise that the pressure feeding the carbon into the rock structures would be constant, argues Michael Economides, professor of chemical engineering at Houston, and his co-author Christene Ehlig-Economides, professor of energy engineering at Texas A&M University.

"It is like putting a bicycle pump up against a wall. It would be hard to inject CO2 into a closed system without eventually producing so much pressure that it fractured the rock and allowed the carbon to migrate to other zones and possibly escape to the surface," Economides said.

The paper concludes that CCS "is not a practical means to provide any substantive reduction in CO2 emissions, although it has been repeatedly presented as such by others."

The Carbon Capture and Storage Association, which lobbies for CCS, notes, "..that Statoil, a Norwegian oil company, had been injecting CO2 into an old reservoir on the North Sea Sleipner field for some time as a successful experiment in carbon storage. But Economides says the Sleipner scheme involved a million tonnes over three years, while one 500mW commercial station would need to absorb and store 3m tonnes annually for 25 years.Economides, who admits he veers towards being something of a climate change sceptic, says the oil and coal industries see these schemes as potential solutions so they can keep on doing what they have been doing in the past, but "CCS is the last refuge of the scoundrel," he said. "

Economides says, "...vested interests are protecting a new concept foisted on the world by geologists without proper thought.

"I was a [practising] petroleum engineer for many years and soon realised that geologists did not understand flow and the laws of physics, against which you can't argue."

I suspect the University of Houston team are correct in dismissing CCS as a con. The fact that the CCS "miracle" has been repeatedly promised for so many years yet still remains the uncertain subject of pilot, small-scale demonstration projects speaks for itself. Worse still, when you look behind the Alberta government's CCS smokescreen you discover, in the fine print, that their ultimate "target" is to capture and sequester an underwhelming 20% of Tar Sands CO2 in any case - if such a plant ever materializes.

The Houston University report guts every excuse and false promise held out by the supporters of the Athabasca Tar Sands whether from Big Oil or its political backers, Tory and Liberal. The Liberal leader, Michael Ignatieff, has already foolishly placed himself on record as a wholehearted supporter of the Tar Sands. Maybe it's time he did a little reading, learned of the magnitude of all the environmental threats posed by this mad venture, and carefully but deliberately climbed down from that perch.

The Myth of Carbon Sequestration

Carbon capture and carbon sequestration are often heralded as the key to "clean energy." If you can just take the carbon emitted from producing energy - from coal fired plants or from, he he, the Tar Sands, problem solved, right?

Wrong.

It's not as though you point to a hole in the ground and the carbon jumps at the chance to bury itself safely in some deep cavern. No, there's an elaborate process involved. First you have to capture the carbon emissions. Then you have to find a means to compress and transport them. Finally you have to either find or create a place big enough and safe enough to store the stuff, under pressure, and make sure it doesn't leak back to the surface (it's poisonous, really deadly) in perpetuity.

Now we hear a lot of talk about carbon sequestration but we've heard a lot of talk about a manned mission to Mars too. Both are theoretically feasible but neither has been proven to be possible, much less viable.

Viable. Now there's a word that deserves some attention. Viable as in effective. Viable as in affordable. Viable as in politically and socially acceptable.

A while back the Toronto Star used the Freedom of Information Act to get its hands on an Environment Canada report that found sequestration used an awful lot of energy and produced about the same amount of carbon emissions as the carbon emissions it sequestered.

So, we're supposed to pay big bucks and expose folks living nearby to lethal risks on a process that creates as much carbon as it purports to capture? Wait, I know. All we need to do is to set up a second carbon capture operation to capture the carbon emissions of our first carbon capture operation. Then again, maybe that's not such a great idea after all.

http://www.thestar.com/article/574514

So it seems that sequestration is essentially carbon neutral but it produces all manner of other contaminants, uses an awful lot of fossil fuel, wastes a lot of resources and exposes anyone in the vicinity to lethal risks.

Hey Ed, Put Up or Shut Up!

If Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach wants to protect his supposed, Tar Sands bonanza, he knows just how to do it. In fact, he keeps telling us he wants to do it. The problem is, we've been waiting for years for any sign that Special Ed or his predecessors will or even can do it.

The "It" is carbon sequestration. Alberta produces the dirtiest oil on the planet but whenever anyone points that out, Ed tells us what his employers, Big Oil, have been prattling on about for years - the answer is to take all that carbon output and sink it deep underground where it can do no harm to man or any other lifeform.

Ed's even put up two billion petrobucks to fund a sequestration initiative, or so he says. He wants you to take his word for all of this. Just don't ask Ed or Big Oil to lift the veil so that we can see the awesome results of their efforts. That would be rude, wouldn't it?

The Alberta Tories are possibly even more indentured to Big Oil than the gang of squatters that currently occupy the White House. If it wasn't for this windfall of unearned, subterranean treasure, the province might actually have to live off the labours of its own people. In today's Alberta that must seem a thoroughly scary prospect indeed.

But TWO BILLION DOLLARS for carbon sequestration, that's pretty impressive, rien? Hardly. The Americans recently scrapped their own sequestration trial after many years and countless bags of treasury doubloons because they couldn't make it work. In fact, the technology has been or is being attempted elsewhere but... that's where these alchemist's tails always end, "but."

The science and technology is much too complex for the likes of you and me to really comprehend which explains why the Eds of this world use such childlike language when they speak to us of these things. But you don't really need to understand coal seam geology to sort your way through this anymore than you need to know what makes the canary fall of its perch and die in the mine.

Here's the dead parrot for carbon sequestration claims. In fact you've got a flock of dead parrots, all of them lying at your feet.

The ever popular Norwegian Blue. If Special Ed really believed that the miracle of carbon sequestration was in his hands, why would he bridle at the first suggestion of capping carbon emissions?

The Reunion Ring-Neck. Taking Ed at his word, why are his projections for Alberta's carbon emissions so high as to render futile Our Furious Leader Harpo's "50 by 2050" commitment completely unobtainable?

The African Grey. If this vaunted carbon sequestration technology that Big Oil has been hailing for so many years existed, where the hell is it? They've been promising this FOR YEARS but never allowing us so much as a peek at anything resembling a practical, carbon sequestration system.

My favourite, the Bismark's Hanging Parrot. Ignoring the Blue and the Grey (and that pesky Ring-Neck) altogether, why are the Petro-Morlocks so stubborn about timelines for their eco-salvation technology? Could it be they don't want us to know that, even if they could turn lead into gold, it would take two decades, possibly more to refine and deploy the technology?

The Scaly-headed Pionus. If Big Oil and its legislative henchmen can perfect carbon sequestration, why are they doing so precious little about the other environmental ills associated with the Tar Sands? Why are those oily tailing ponds now visible from space? How about Fort Chipewyan downriver and its strange cancer rates? How about the other aspects of land, air and water pollution? What about the inordinate strain on the region's fresh water and natural gas resources?

You see, everywhere you look it's the same thing - dead parrots. That's got to tell you something.