I feel like I'm reading the same article, but drawing very different conclusions from other commenters. I might be missing something - of eleven projects, three were reasonably successful implementations of an improvement to existing infrastructure that can slow climate change. Not terrible for new technology.
Although there is likely a better allocation of $1.1B in isolation, that is not the world in which this investment was made - $1.1B amounts to <5% of the annual DOE budget. It also does not include comparisons to other investments e.g. over $1B goes towards electric vehicle tax rebates every year [1]. Build Back Better proposed $555B of federal spending for renewable energy.
Are we going to discuss budgets in absolute dollar amounts, or discuss them as portfolios?
I will simultaneously applaud efforts to develop electric vehicles while applauding efforts to increase the MPG rating of an ICE vehicle. The same way, I'll applaud any serious effort to reduce our emissions at coal power plants that do indeed help load balance our somewhat fragile power grid - a fragility we need to address while also ensuring our existing infrastructure serves us well.
Just to be clear (because I didn't realize this until earlier this year), but Carbon Capture generally refers to capturing CO2 emissions at the source, like coal-fired power plants. It does not generally refer to extracting CO2 from air at large. As such, they are, in all reality, a bullshit boondoggle invented by the fossil fuel industry as a bandaid for business as usual.
I am not surprised that this $1.1B basically bought nothing. It's just more Pollyanna BS that keeps the current freight train barreling along at full speed.
I find it kind of funny that people are quick to hate on technologies that could enable reduced emissions while continuing to burn fossil fuels. It's as if the goal all along wasn't to actually reduce emissions, but to destroy Oil and Gas. Reactions similar to yours abound, and they are antithetical towards the goal of solving climate change.
Of course, not saying that this technology in particular can achieve net zero emissions by any means, but if it could in a more cost effective manner, it would be more societally beneficial than the alternative of overhauling the entire energy production infrastructure.
> it would be significantly more cost effective (thus societally beneficial) than to overhaul the entire energy production infrastructure.
Citation needed on that cost effectiveness estimate, but regardless, all infrastructure is incrementally rebuilt and replaced over the years. So instead of eventually building replacement coal [1] plants with fancy (and leaky) CC, we could as well build different plants that don't emit any CO2.
[1] or natural gas, which is what's been happening over the past 10-15 years in the US, primarily because natural gas became cheaper. Those natural gas plants produced less CO2 than coal, which has primarily driven any reduction in the US's CO2 output. But natural gas still produces huge amounts of CO2 and will never be carbon neutral.
There are far more problems with fossil fuel than just destabilising the climate.
It also acidifies the oceans, it kills by air poisoning and just is generally bad and also nonrenewable.
We do need a paradigm shift in the way we utilise the earth’s resources.
That is why CCS gets a bad rap, it’s like the alcoholic parent saying they can continue drinking because there’s this new hangover drug and also a great skin remedy for your bruises.
I actually really support all the climate mitigation strategies and CCS is definitely an important one, but together with a strict ban on new coal and oil projects.
Natural gas seems an OK tradeoff for now if each new plant is tied directly to the shuttering of a coal or oil one.
It is hypothetically possible that a some carbon capture technology could be more cost effective than renewables, but we'd need to be clear about what exactly we mean by cost. I mean hypothetically the cost could swing either way if we really accounted for everything-- nonrenewables have tons of costs that get externalized, renewables are a growing market and expertise in dealing with them might be very profitable.
Yes, destroying oil and gas is a good idea for several reasons.
1) these capture demos usually don’t capture ALL the CO2 emitted.
2) gas still has leaks and oil still has spills
3) there’s potentially a finite amount of easy to access carbon capture storage repositories. Using it for more fossil fuel burning is maybe a bad idea.
4) there are still geopolitical problems associated with oil and gas
5) there is still a FINITE AMOUNT of oil and gas.
6) If we keep oil and gas infrastructure in place, what’s to stop a Trumpian populist in the future from just stopping the carbon capture program to save money and reduce costs? Then we’d be back to square one. This has happened in the past when the Bush admin suspended environmental rules because of “oil shortage.” But if we get rid of oil and gas infrastructure, that’ll basically be impossible except with massive reinvestment.
7) There’s reason to believe these programs are just headfakes by oil and gas, cover to keep emitting as much as possible while alsways promising to start carbon capture “next year” or whatever.
I mean, that's like 3-400M a demonstration. It's not like other energy demonstration projects are historically a lot cheaper. TerraPower and X-Scale are getting $3.2B for two nuclear demonstrations. https://www.heraldnet.com/business/terrapower-plans-to-build...
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To be quite clear, I think carbon capture is a scam. That being said, talking about energy investment demonstration projects, this doesn't seem totally out of whack for what projects generally cost; we should attack projects based on the merits, but the particular thing in the headline is not actually crazy. The point of demonstrations is to figure out if things work, and so they should be expected to have failures; what would be stupid is if we kept going.
It's not even that. It was 1.1bn for 11 projects of which only 3 were continued until completion. The rest being shut down because earlier parts of the projects showed there was little chance of success.
One issue with carbon capture in the wild is that carbon is actually a not a major portion of the atmosphere (ie, think 0.0004)
So doing capture near CO2 sources makes some sense.
Secondarily, the private market is throwing money at this as well, current costs per ton captured are on the range of $1,000! That is mind boggling pricy, we don't know if these demos were this bad - they might even have been better.
So, if you have a potential society ending issue, spending $1B to try out some things might not be terrible.
That said, if you look at things like SLS, you can understand how these things are prone to being total boondoggles as well.
Specific to this situation you may be right, but generically the idea of making coal-fired power plants emit less CO2 is not a bad idea, mostly because there's not a feasible way to turn off all such power plants tomorrow, so given that they need to continue to operate for some time, therefore it is helpful to figure out how to minimize their negative impact.
My favorite fossil fuel shenanigan is convincing folks who purport to care about climate that the solution to climate change isn’t reforming corporate pollution policies (e.g., taxing polluters), but convincing Americans to change their lifestyles—if we can just convince Americans to go vegan and trade in their SUV for a Prius then the world wouldn’t be in a climate catastrophe.
There are some industrial processes that emit carbon, for which we don't have good alternatives (e.g. making cement, refining certain chemicals).
Being able to capture their CO2 output will likely be necessary, even in the presence of a 100% renewable electric grid - which makes this a technology worth pursuing.
So instead of investing in this technology where it could make the most difference we're going to throw everything out for mountains of broken solar cells, dead and dying battery fires and strip mining in the far east?
Carbon capture has real potential, but has as long as coal or gas is used for baseline we should probably look into using that there into it's understood if we can push these technologies further or use the CO2 in some productive way imo
I used to work at one of these as it was being thought up - boots on the ground so to speak, straight out high school. Both my father and grandfather were union pipefitters, welders.
They mixed the coal with asphalt in a big ole mixer. Bulldozers push coal into a hopper, conveyors take the coal up a few stories and it falls down a Shute and gets mixed with asphalt prior to being burned in the coal fired steam plant. We had four large towers of asphalt holding tanks, they had to be climbed regularly to check to make sure we didn’t overflow them while pumping off tankers.
I don’t know how this is supposed to reduce CO2 emissions or how to capture it on the back end, but that’s the beginning stage of making coal more environmentally friendly.
You mix the coal with something else and have to create an entirely new mountain pile of mixed coal and you burn that. The logistics of mixing coal with asphalt - not so easy.
I read the GAO 33 page report to make sure my local power company is listed, yep. Southern Company shut down the operation. They’ve had DOE signs at the entrance for 20 years at least.
Claw it back and refund the taxpayers. Bipolar red and blue government wastes everyone's time and money with policy oscillation. Instead of pulling the cart back and forth let's find a peaceful, democratic legal separation of the ideological incompatible.
Cant say we didnt try to make coal clean. Turns out its more expensive than its worth and commercial operations dont see any benefit. Time for Manchin and his constituents to read the writing on the wall and get over coal.
The thing is "clean coal" is not totally crazy, there's no scientific reason you couldn't separate hydrocarbons from coal and create a fuel that emits only CO2 -- it's just as an engineering, technical and economic task it turns out it really doesn't make sense, for the particular coal deposits that exist on the earth and/ot are economical to mine.
At some level you could argue it wasn't unreasonable to give it 'the old college try'.
Readit News
Although there is likely a better allocation of $1.1B in isolation, that is not the world in which this investment was made - $1.1B amounts to <5% of the annual DOE budget. It also does not include comparisons to other investments e.g. over $1B goes towards electric vehicle tax rebates every year [1]. Build Back Better proposed $555B of federal spending for renewable energy.
Are we going to discuss budgets in absolute dollar amounts, or discuss them as portfolios?
I will simultaneously applaud efforts to develop electric vehicles while applauding efforts to increase the MPG rating of an ICE vehicle. The same way, I'll applaud any serious effort to reduce our emissions at coal power plants that do indeed help load balance our somewhat fragile power grid - a fragility we need to address while also ensuring our existing infrastructure serves us well.
[1] https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/IF11017.pdf
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I am not surprised that this $1.1B basically bought nothing. It's just more Pollyanna BS that keeps the current freight train barreling along at full speed.
Of course, not saying that this technology in particular can achieve net zero emissions by any means, but if it could in a more cost effective manner, it would be more societally beneficial than the alternative of overhauling the entire energy production infrastructure.
Citation needed on that cost effectiveness estimate, but regardless, all infrastructure is incrementally rebuilt and replaced over the years. So instead of eventually building replacement coal [1] plants with fancy (and leaky) CC, we could as well build different plants that don't emit any CO2.
[1] or natural gas, which is what's been happening over the past 10-15 years in the US, primarily because natural gas became cheaper. Those natural gas plants produced less CO2 than coal, which has primarily driven any reduction in the US's CO2 output. But natural gas still produces huge amounts of CO2 and will never be carbon neutral.
It also acidifies the oceans, it kills by air poisoning and just is generally bad and also nonrenewable.
We do need a paradigm shift in the way we utilise the earth’s resources.
That is why CCS gets a bad rap, it’s like the alcoholic parent saying they can continue drinking because there’s this new hangover drug and also a great skin remedy for your bruises.
I actually really support all the climate mitigation strategies and CCS is definitely an important one, but together with a strict ban on new coal and oil projects. Natural gas seems an OK tradeoff for now if each new plant is tied directly to the shuttering of a coal or oil one.
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1) these capture demos usually don’t capture ALL the CO2 emitted.
2) gas still has leaks and oil still has spills
3) there’s potentially a finite amount of easy to access carbon capture storage repositories. Using it for more fossil fuel burning is maybe a bad idea.
4) there are still geopolitical problems associated with oil and gas
5) there is still a FINITE AMOUNT of oil and gas.
6) If we keep oil and gas infrastructure in place, what’s to stop a Trumpian populist in the future from just stopping the carbon capture program to save money and reduce costs? Then we’d be back to square one. This has happened in the past when the Bush admin suspended environmental rules because of “oil shortage.” But if we get rid of oil and gas infrastructure, that’ll basically be impossible except with massive reinvestment.
7) There’s reason to believe these programs are just headfakes by oil and gas, cover to keep emitting as much as possible while alsways promising to start carbon capture “next year” or whatever.
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To be quite clear, I think carbon capture is a scam. That being said, talking about energy investment demonstration projects, this doesn't seem totally out of whack for what projects generally cost; we should attack projects based on the merits, but the particular thing in the headline is not actually crazy. The point of demonstrations is to figure out if things work, and so they should be expected to have failures; what would be stupid is if we kept going.
The headline is wildly misleading.
One issue with carbon capture in the wild is that carbon is actually a not a major portion of the atmosphere (ie, think 0.0004)
So doing capture near CO2 sources makes some sense.
Secondarily, the private market is throwing money at this as well, current costs per ton captured are on the range of $1,000! That is mind boggling pricy, we don't know if these demos were this bad - they might even have been better.
So, if you have a potential society ending issue, spending $1B to try out some things might not be terrible.
That said, if you look at things like SLS, you can understand how these things are prone to being total boondoggles as well.
Being able to capture their CO2 output will likely be necessary, even in the presence of a 100% renewable electric grid - which makes this a technology worth pursuing.
Carbon capture has real potential, but has as long as coal or gas is used for baseline we should probably look into using that there into it's understood if we can push these technologies further or use the CO2 in some productive way imo
They mixed the coal with asphalt in a big ole mixer. Bulldozers push coal into a hopper, conveyors take the coal up a few stories and it falls down a Shute and gets mixed with asphalt prior to being burned in the coal fired steam plant. We had four large towers of asphalt holding tanks, they had to be climbed regularly to check to make sure we didn’t overflow them while pumping off tankers.
I don’t know how this is supposed to reduce CO2 emissions or how to capture it on the back end, but that’s the beginning stage of making coal more environmentally friendly.
You mix the coal with something else and have to create an entirely new mountain pile of mixed coal and you burn that. The logistics of mixing coal with asphalt - not so easy.
I read the GAO 33 page report to make sure my local power company is listed, yep. Southern Company shut down the operation. They’ve had DOE signs at the entrance for 20 years at least.
Deleted Comment
At some level you could argue it wasn't unreasonable to give it 'the old college try'.
Dead Comment