Reuters: Scientists refute carbon capture doubts (well... carbon storage actually)

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63P4FQ20100426

> Speaking to BusinessGreen.com, Professor Stuart Hazeldine, a geologist at
> the University of Edinburgh and leading expert in CCS technologies, said
> that the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) should close the
> competition and award the funding to Scottish Power to develop CCS at its
> Longannet plant in Fife in order to prevent any more time being wasted.

(http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/09/carbon-capture-and-storage)

> Large scale commercial carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects this week
> took a step closer to becoming a reality with the announcement that the Energy
> Act had received Royal Assent. The Act will mean that funding for four CCS
> demonstration projects will now be generated via a special levy applied on
> electricity bills.
> ...
> Gas CCS plants can also now be funded through the levy, a change borne
> out of lobbying.
(http://www.allbusiness.com/energy-utilities/utilities-industry-electric-power/14274021-1.html)


> The Department for Energy and Climate Change last month awarded an
> undisclosed sum to Eon and ScottishPower for initial design and develop
> commercial demonstration plants at Kingsnorth in Kent and Longannet in
> Scotland over the next year. This will be followed by one winner for the
> full post-combustion project.

Prof. Stuart Hazeldine is on the Thermal Generation/CCS group of the ETP
(Energy Technology Partnership), a very well-connected lobbying group that
are "well represented" on the Scottish Advisory Board.

No conflict of interest there then.

Amusingly, in the aforementioned article, even he admitted that no-one really
knows the available capacity:

> "The geological storage remains unproven, there are many theoretical
> predictions of the storage volumes and efficiencies," he (Stuart Hazeldine) said.
(http://www.allbusiness.com/energy-utilities/utilities-industry-electric-power/14274021-1.html)

It would appear that it's OK for him to hedge his bets (to avoid getting
caught out by lawsuits after the projects fail) but he doesn't like it if
someone else says it (in case it damages income prospects?).

Put a tick against "unconvinced" for me ...

:shrug:

"Capture and Release" seems a little pointless :D

:)

There have been pilot projects to demonstrate Carbon Capture (it works) but which have released the captured CO₂, since they had no way to store it long term.

The conclusion of Economides' paper:

5. Conclusions
The implications of this work are profound. A simple analytical model shows immediate results very similar to those that take hours to produce with numerical simulation. Much more important, the work shows that models that assume a constant pressure outer boundary for reservoirs intended for CO2 sequestration are missing the critical point that the reservoir pressure will build up under injection at constant rate. Instead of the 1–4% of bulk volume storability factor indicated prominently in the literature, which is based on erroneous steady state modeling, our finding is that CO2 can occupy no more than 1% of the pore volume and likely as much as 100 times less.

This work has related the volume of the reservoir that would be adequate to store CO2 with the need to sustain injectivity. The two are intimately connected. In applying this to a commercial power plant the findings suggest that for a small number of wells the areal extent of the reservoir would be enormous, the size of a small US state. Conversely, for more moderate size reservoirs, still the size of Alaska's Prudhoe Bay reservoir, and with moderate permeability there would be a need for hundreds of wells. Neither of these bodes well for geological CO2 sequestration and the findings of this work clearly suggest that it is not a practical means to provide any substantive reduction in CO2 emissions, although it has been repeatedly presented as such by others.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63P4FQ20100426

Do you really think that truncated, highly edited account of Economide's response to the response in a newspaper is a legitimate source?

I would expect that all those who stand to be proved wrong by Economide's study should it prove valid will be lining up to give a fair and impartial response to the contents of the paper, don't you?

I've looked the paper over, and it is not for me to evaluate, but I suspect the results are going to have a big influence on the discussion.

(That seems to be a fair assessment.)