Weekend Reflections is on again. Please comment on any topic of interest (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please). Feel free to put in contributions more lengthy than for the Monday Message Board or standard comments.
-
Follow
Following
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
John Quiggin 
Which major party is more believable on climate? Note that an absolute renewable energy target (eg 30 Twh) still leaves the possibility of coal expansion compared to a relative 20%. The fact both camps have shrugged off Karl Kruszelnicki’s dismissal of clean coal suggests it was all posturing anyway. The bluster from both majors includes other unproven technologies such as geothermal, suggesting a lack of realism. Moreover the goalposts are moving with the unknown effects of price changes and the likely needs of desalination and electric transport.
I conclude that the next government will bury themselves in day-to-day issues while letting big problems slide. Don’t expect any progress on climate beyond tokenism whoever wins.
geothermal is proven, in use in many countries. many large energy companies are planning to invest heavily in this area. it will supply the base load component of national grid.
the major parties are reluctant to discuss this due to the pressure of their important patrons in mining. if you keep a clear distinction between political and physical obstructions, the world will be a less mysterious place.
It seems pretty easy to find probability estimates for the amount the world is likely to heat up under various scenarios. However, does such an estimate exist that looks at the likelihood of greenhouse gas reduction based on likely _political_ decisions of the countries in the world? What I’d like to see are two graphs (a third integrating them would be even nicer) — one would be the estimated warming given certain levels of greenhouse gases (I can find this), and the other would be the likely amount of greenhouse gases given an estimate of the effect of world-wide political decisions. The second of these should be a probabilistic distribution, so you would have a very small chance of everyone co-operating, for example.
suppose for a moment the citizens of the democratic republic of australia decide to do away with taxation. to support national expenses,they ask everyone to contribute to the national treasury in equal proportion as they receive material benefit from the nation.
it’s easily done: convert to all electronic money, and clip off x% of every transaction to the treasury.
oz flourishes as never before. all business benefits, but small business is simply unshackled. there is a downside, many lawyers and accountants have to retrain, but the lawyers at least could be used to support citizen initiative groups on a work-for-the-dole program.
now, for the professionals: how big is x?
“Which major party is more believable on climate?”
I was cynically resigned to the answer to that reading a small spot item in Today’s Advertiser(p53). It’s headed $780M Project- Biggest power plant and reads-
“Queensland’s Darling Downs is to be home to the biggest gas-fired power station.
Premier Anna Bligh yesterday turned the first sod for Origin Energy’s $780 million station, 40km west of of Dalby.”
That’s all of it, bar the last, mandatory, PC rider to all such noble enterprises to produce those 60% CO2 reductions by 2050, by our Prius driving elites. Here’s the last sentence as if you couldn’t guess-
“On completion in 2010, the 630 megawatt station would emit about half the greenhouse emissions of a conventional power station.”
Captain Bligh on the good ship Bounteous sails on regardless of the scowling mutineers, but as Oily said and Sly won’t deny, we’ll change all the policies when we get in. Now that’s one election statement we can all believe in with absolute certainty. A core promise.
The amazing thing about the outrageous “me-too” policies of Rudd is that nobody on the left seems to mind. In 3-4 weeks The Labor party has been dragged to the centre-right without a hint of protest from the faithful.
Step1: Say anything to get elected
Step2: Reveal true policies later
once you form an opinion the other guys are amoral connivers and participating in war crimes to boot, it’s easy to convince yourself ‘anything goes,just win’ is acceptable civic behavior.
Meanwhile in the Saudi Arabia of uranium, where Rann has previously unveled plans for more power stations and desal plants for the new mines that all run on Kyoto promises, he’s come up with a ‘secret plan’
http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,22692820-2682,00.html?from=public_rss
Don’t you just love this bit-
“AAL has favoured a concept it says is “currently operating in the city of Adelaide” very successfully and that could be delivered within budget.
The Premier, however, wants to ensure any project has a “visual” component to try to highlight the Government’s green credentials.”
and finally this bit
“AAL spokesman John McArdle said while the airport’s preferred concept had not been selected, the new option was “a more efficient and effective scheme”.”
Yeah, riiiiiiight!
Vijayawada Municipal Commisioner Gulzar Natarajan has some intersting ideas on elections:
http://gulzar05.blogspot.com/2007/11/politicians-and-time-frames.html
It stars with “I suggest that every serving politician be registered under the Election Commission (EC) and have an account. It should be made mandatory for all candidates to clearly outline their manifesto in terms of quantified outcomes, rather than mere normative statements. A general schedule of desirable economic or social parameters must clearly be specified by the EC or a Government agency like the Planning Commission, and made available to all the candidates. The outcomes should be constituency specific. By this, the candidate would perforce have to study the implications of all his promises in detail and give more specific outcome linked commitments. It will also significantly reduce the moral hazard inherent in “issueless elections”. ” And goes on to give some concrete suggestions for municipal elections.
“The amazing thing about the outrageous “me-tooâ€? policies of Rudd is that nobody on the left seems to mind. In 3-4 weeks The Labor party has been dragged to the centre-right without a hint of protest from the faithful.”
Well it might be a case of some sort of derivative or corollary of Watson’s Law, namely-
Anything that is almost universally regarded as being unmentionable has a high probability of being true
I had forgotten that Kevin Rudd is on the left. Reminds me of Noel Pearson’s talking wanting those in the centre to talk about Indigenous policy.
al
The proven geothermal is recently active volcanic rock in oceanic rim countries, not granite as proposed in Australia. I’ll say again, it hasn’t delivered yet.
observa
I think Rann may also be counting his geothermal chickens before they’re hatched. Granite geothermal is really nukular-lite and the slightly radioactive steam has to be closed loop. Rann is a hypocrite since he happily takes Olympic Dam royalties and promotes radioactive geothermal while talking down nukes to his constituency. The personally moral thing would be for him and the next Fed govt to ban the lot.
Dr Karl’s comments on clean coal surprised me. I thought there were already plants in the USA storing CO2 underground, and of course there’s the CO2 going into the oil fields in the North Sea and elsewhere. So I don’t understand why he thinks it not feasible. Uneconomic maybe, but I thought feasibility OK
“Rann is a hypocrite since he happily takes Olympic Dam royalties and promotes radioactive geothermal while talking down nukes to his constituency. The personally moral thing would be for him and the next Fed govt to ban the lot.”
Never come between a State Premier and a bucket of royalties, is my sound advice to Kev on that one Hermit.
What on earth are all these State Premiers going to do, when their spoiler bogeyman on GW is gone and they’re suddenly expected to walk the talk with Kev in one giant gaia love-in eh? I reckon Beattie could envision that day of reckoning, the cunning old fox.
And he chucked a sheila up front as they usually do when the manure’s about to hit the propellor.
“Step1: Say anything to get elected
Step2: Reveal true policies later”
Here’s hoping.
Johng
I have only heard about Dr K,s comments at second hand. However as someone with a science background I would postulate that his thinking is something like mine. That is, coal as an energy source is going to produce exactly the same quantity of CO2 whatever. That is a stoichiometrical and ineluctable reality. Currently there is no scientific studies that have demonstrated that sequestering CO2 is a feasible strategy. While there has been a deal of rhetoric about the possibility and some reasonably plausible scenarios about the possible engineering of such a solution, this in no way constitutes a solution at this time. Imagine if a solution was proposed that for a number of years buried large quantities of CO2 that subsequently failed – releasing a large pulse of CO2. The point is, the state of the art is a long way from definitively pointing to sequestration as a viable engineering solution. Given that, Dr Karl, like myself, would suggest that reducing CO2 production, in toto, is a far more rational approach.
Persse,
Your comments are correct. Add to them the catastrophic loss of efficiency in the capture and sequestration process, and you are looking a failure. It just cannot be justified. The whole thing is a delaying tactic to avoid facing reality, hence its appeal to politicians.
Observa 10,
Rudd is out manouvering Howard at his own game. The public are aquiescent simply because that is better than revolution. The decision to change was made long ago. Howard’s only chance is to stuff voting boxes.
Currently there is no scientific studies that have demonstrated that sequestering CO2 is a feasible strategy. While there has been a deal of rhetoric about the possibility and some reasonably plausible scenarios about the possible engineering of such a solution, this in no way constitutes a solution at this time.
Geosequestration of CO2 is currently carried out on an industrial scale at the Sleipner West field in the North Sea.
johng/persse. At a recent coal industry (Coal21) forum in the Hunter Valley, one of their own said that the nearest possibility for geological sequestration -for Hunter power stations – was the Darling Downs in Queensland. By my reckoning that is a 6 -700 km pipeline at a cost? which ought to be factored into the cost of constructing a third coal burning power station currently under consideration. There is possibility that it will be gas powered but whatever, for a region that generates 40% of NSW power needs this aspect of ‘clean coal’ would seem to be a pipedream.
Ken M
That is done in a couple of places but there they are dealing with “live” sink sites. It is a very different proposition pumping liquid into rock where there is no cavity and expecting it to not find a way out over time. Even if the whole process was energy efficient it would be doubtful.
BilB, every geosequestration project aims to put the CO2 into a “cavity” of some sort (mostly porous material or saline aquifers). Nobody thinks that you can just pump it into solid rock.
Sleipner and Barrow Island are for CO2 separated via membrane from nearby working gas fields and have nothing like the problems of a landlocked coal station with staggering volumes of hot dusty flue gas. I’ll give Turnbull a week before he next invokes clean coal in a call to the faithful hoping we’ve all forgotten Dr Karl.
Some idea of the investment needed for low carbon energy can be made from the proposal to spend $7m generating 10MW of apparently continuous solar thermal electricity for Cloncurry, assuming no glitches http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22700542-1248,00.html
Except we really want 10 gigawatts by 2010 which would seemingly cost $7bn. I propose a 10% export tax on coal to raise the funds.
The point is Ken, when you pump liquid CO2 into a cavity which is known to have survived for millions of years (because it is yielding gas and the CO2 that you are about to pump back down) there is reasonable certainty that the material will stay there. However when infusing the material into rock that is assumed to be secure there is no certainty that it will work. The material that I have seen suggest that the sites to be tried are not cavities currently being drained, they are sites thought to have an imperveous layer (coal seams, etc) above. Much of the research on geosequestration has been on leak testing of such structures but noone knows what will happen in an actual practical test of such sites. The long term stability is entirely speculative.
Of course there is no certainty, which is why various tests on the ability are being performed, rather than blithely dismissing one option like Dr Karl. Our ability to monitor underground geological formations is pretty advanced, particular when we monitor change over time (which is important for measuring the effect of supercritical carbon dioxide in a geological formation).
Hermit, if geosequestration is so poor economically relative to solar, then the solution is too simply whack on a carbon tax and let the market do the rest.
Dr Karl’s comments OTOH add nothing to improving the public’s understanding.
Dr Karls comments on a “crappy world” would also offend those who dont think that this world is crappy.
There are wedges and there are wedges, in this instance Dr Karl has offended just about everybody.
That doesn’t offend me rog, mind you I can’t find any reference to Dr Karl using the words “crappy world”. Did you just make that up?
However I do think Dr Karl has exaggerated the numbers a tad. I did the calculations a few months ago and came up with 16 cubic kilometres per day globally:
That doesn’t get Sydney anywhere near 1 cubic kilometre of CO2 per day. Australia maybe, but not Sydney.
Carbonsink, additionally the CO2 is injected as a supercritical fluid which greatly increases the density which vastly decreases the volumes needed to be injected.
Of course it does. It also greatly increases the energy requirements and decreases the overall efficiency of the power station.
I agree with you however, lets remove all these subsidies, rebates, loans etc and whack on a carbon tax and see what happens. IMO, in the short term we’ll see a lot of conservation, a lot more gas, a lot more wind, and zero “clean coal”. But lets let the market decide.
Clean coal:
If you fart under a doona, its going to get out.
Long-term storage of ANY sorts of hazardous wastes – nuclear or C02 – is just unnecessary. Clean coal is a tranistional solution at best. There is just not enough room under our earth to put all the CO2 we produce. Some, maybe, but certainly not all.
Just invest in the right technologies from the start – technologies that don’t create waste that would have to be buried. We’ve got the technology.
Clean coal:
If you fart under a doona, its going to get out.
Nice line, but completely irrelevant to geosequestration, given that there are stores of gases underground which have been safety stored for millions (maybe even billions) of years.
Long-term storage of ANY sorts of hazardous wastes – nuclear or C02 – is just unnecessary. Clean coal is a tranistional solution at best. There is just not enough room under our earth to put all the CO2 we produce. Some, maybe, but certainly not all.
Just invest in the right technologies from the start – technologies that don’t create waste that would have to be buried. We’ve got the technology.
You’re correct to say that it is transitional, however, a clean transitional technology may well be what we need given that renewable energy isn’t currently capable of a large scale replacement of our power plants.
Geosequestration: it’s the scale that makes it unrealistic. Schlumberger’s boss said a year or two ago that to hold atmospheric CO2 to 450ppm by 2050 would require 50,000 Sleipner equivalents.
Geothermal: the radioactivity in the steam is (so I have read) lower than that released with the CO2 from coal-fired power stations.
Origin Energy is putting over AUD100M of its shareholders’ money into geothermal. This is more encouraging than Mr Howard putting AUD500M of taxpayers’ money into geosequestration.
O6, if it is even possible to get emissions to 450 ppm by 2050, the effort will be absolutely mind blowing. Any technological option, be it geosequestration, wind, nuclear whatever will have to be rolled out on a massive scale.
And I agree that private investment is a good thing – but public research frequently does a good job in filling out the fundamentals.
The problem has been, Ken, that Howard was playing favourites, his favourites and no-one elses. And his favourites have not been very popular at all. So the expenditure on public research has been very lopsided. There are things that work already, and they work very well. Enhancing those technologies consecutively with public research on “clean coal” would have been a smarter policy. But that is not the Howard way.
While more research money would be nice, I’m not convinced that it is that lopsided. For example, ANU can afford to maintain a great research program into solar thermal power. Throw in the other universities and CSIRO and it becomes clear that solar isn’t doing too badly.
My God BilB, we agree! Howard’s been throwing money at clean coal because (as he keeps reminding us) “renewables can’t supply baseload power”. Either he’s flat out lying, or no-one has explained geothermal to him.
Clean coal is an invention to placate the coal industry. Nothing more. If we get that desperate that we need to roll out clean coal on a mammoth scale we’ll go nuclear. Sure, nuclear waste might be nasty, but at least the volumes are a manageable, its not a gas, and its radioactivity does diminish over time.
CO2 stuffed down a hole has to be watched forever.
A good portion of captured CO2 could probable be used to synthesize the various synthetic organic compounds (like plastics and pesticides) which we currently produce from fossil fuels.
I saw a research report somewhere a couple of months back about making polycarbonate plastic from carbon dioxide.
CSIRO’s hybrid solar-gas system could also be used here – pipe the carbon dioxide out west, react it with solar-generated steam to make producer gas and pipe the producer gas back for re-use.
Carbonsink,
Howard is fully aware of concentrating solar thermal. I personally handed all of the information to the chief government whip some years ago. A delegation of business people from my area visited the DLR in Germany to investigate CSP and were told that the German governemnt had also presented the Australian government with the information but got absolutlely no reply. Howard invented the lie “renewables can’t supply baseload power� and has used it to fend of all need to invest in that direction.
Ian G,
That is the most sensible proposal yet. But the volumes (of CO2) are far too great to make a difference. Ultimately that is how we will be getting value from our coal. The Chinese are already doing this with our coal. This is partly how they manage to maintain the strangle hold on the plastics industry. The advantage of converting coal to plastic is that most of the plastic ultimately ends up in land fills and is thus sequestered.
BilB, interesting you raise Germany:
Germany Leads Way on Renewables, Sets 45% Target by 2030
Which raises the following questions:
Why is it we can’t have a higher renewables target like Germany?
Why is it Howard constantly repeats the mantra the renewables can’t supply baseload?
Why is it the Germans have so much solar and we have so little? Do we have less sun?
Why has Germany’s share of renewables risen from 6% in 2000 to 12% in 2006 while Australia’s share of renewables has fallen?
Why does Germany have a feed in tariff and we don’t?
Why does Germany have 240,000 people employed in the renewables industry, while the Australian coal industry employs just 20,000?
Why is it Germany can do all this with a leader from a centre-right party?
“Why is it we can’t have a higher renewables target like Germany?”
The obvious answer is that German coal is much more expensive than Australian coal meaning the opportunity cost5 for Australia is much higher.
Here’s where I invite the howls of both sides of the debate by suggesting that Australia would be one of the prime beneficiaries from international trading in carbon credits – our coal is so cheap we’d be better off continuing to burn it and paying for mitigation elsewhere.
Howl!
Just like we’d be better off chopping down our own forests and paying the Indonesians to stop chopping down theirs.
Energy policy comparisons between Australia and Germany are odious for a number of reasons, not the least being the latter’s centrality to a European electricity grid serviced by coal-fired, nuclear and renewable energy power plants in neighbouring countries.
While Germany’s renewable targets are loudly proclaimed, the silence is almost deafening from the same quarters about the the Merkel Government’s commitment to the construction of 26 new coal-fired power stations (using carbon capture and storage technology).
It is good that there are 240,000 German jobs in renewable energy from a population of 84 million.
It is also good that there are 130,000 jobs dependent on coal mining in Australia from a population of 22 million.
Dr Karl has changed his mind on clean coal:
“We’re stuck with the fact that we have still got to make electricity in the short term from carbon of some sort,” he told the paper.
“Something is better than nothing, so sequestering carbon dioxide is better than just letting it go out.
“I see it as a stop-gap, short-term thing rather than a long-term solution because the more you store it away the more the chance that it will escape,” he said.
From The Age.
CO2 stuffed down a hole has to be watched forever.
Not really. CO2 in a saline aquifer will gradually be converted into various mineral carbonates. In other porous sinks, it will be gradually become immobilized.
The major problem with converting carbon dioxide into useful chemicals is the thermodynamics. Carbon in CO2 is pretty useless for conversion into other products without a large energy input – hence it is much more effective to get your carbon from other sources such as methane.
CSIRO’s hybrid solar-gas system could also be used here – pipe the carbon dioxide out west, react it with solar-generated steam to make producer gas and pipe the producer gas back for re-use.
AFAIK< his reaction is thermodynamically unfavourably (which is short for: won’t happen in this universe).