Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
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John Quiggin 
Why does flue gas CCS fail?
John Quiggin and others have shown that it unarguably does. The question is why. At first sight it isn’t inherently a much harder problem than others that chemical engineers solve routinely. In a normal learning process, you would expect a mixture of failures and successes, the success rate rising over time but we aren’t seeing this. Hubris and political and marketing pressures overriding engineering judgement are no doubt part of it, leading to hype, corner-cutting and premature deployment at scale.
I came across another interesting candidate for an explanation. Here are two American bioengineering academics, MM Kubis and Lynd, in a recent article touting biofuel production from corn waste (references omitted):
“Commercial bioethanol production is a logical starting point technology because of high-purity CO2 streams (produced via fermentation or anaerobic digestion) compared to more-dilute onsite flue gas. It has been reported that the levelized cost of CO2 capture scales inversely with concentration. The cost of separating CO2 from dilute flue gas (<20% CO2) is projected to be between $30–$70 per ton before compression can be performed, whereas during ethanol fermentation, nearly pure CO2 is generated as a saturated gas at low to atmospheric pressure. Largely related to separation costs, capturing CO2 from combustion diluted flue gas requires around 10-fold more energy than from fermentation sources. [….] Collectively, the total levelized cost of sequestration for high-purity and dilute flue gas sources are generally around $30–$50 per t CO2 and $70–$120 per t CO2, respectively. “
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlepdf/2023/se/d3se00353a
Looks plausible. There are other possibilities. <speculation>Flue gas is vented in tall chimneys for a reason. It includes a cocktail of very nasty pollutants, NOX, fine and ultrafine particles of soot, and – if what’s being burnt is coal – radon, arsenic and heavy metals. The chimneys are needed to exercise the industry’s droit de seigneur to disperse this muck over a wide area, much cheaper than filtering it out. For this, you want the flue gas to be hot and fast-moving. But this works at cross-purposes to the CCS, for which you want the flue gas to be cool and slow-moving. Look at this diagram of a coal generating plant with CCS. It includes a “flue gas cooler”. Downstream from this, there is still a chimney to vent “cleaned exhaust gas”, presumably heated up again. You could reduce the need for re-heating and tall chimneys by filtering out the crud, which as we already noted is not done today because it’s too expensive. </speculation>
In their comparison, Kubis and Lynd stack the deck in one respect. The wonderful biofuels plant they recommend is a virtual simulation. These tend to run better than real ones, welded together by Uncle Sid who has his bad days. However, there are BECCS plants (bio-energy with carbon capture and storage) in operation. I couldn’t find an up-to-date list, but here is one of 18 plants of different types from 2019, see page 5 and Appendix 1.
Global-Status-of-CCS-Report-1.pdf (globalccsinstitute.com)
It would also be nice to have a professional and independent evaluation of costs and performance, before taxpayers bet the farm (literally) on yet another “promising” carbon removal technology. Still, the BECCS sector does not look like the train wreck of flue gas CCS.
There is something else you can do with pure CO2 than bury it: reduce it with green hydrogen, stripping out the oxygen into harmless water, then add more hydrogen to the carbon to get biomethane (CH4) or the various longer-chain liquid hydrocarbons that make up kerosene, say pentane (C5H12). See here:
https://energypost.eu/extract-co2-from-our-air-use-it-to-create-synthetic-fuels/
I do not endorse Carbon Engineering’s crackpot direct air capture arrays, nor do I know how much the synfuel transformation costs, but it is clearly technically doable.
The flue gas CCS people cannot go down this route. Their whole problem is the karmic burden of burning fossil fuels, which requires carbon removal to offset. A biofuels plant aims at carbon neutrality over the cycle, and pure CO2 streams can be usable for this.
More thoughts on biofuels later.
Biofuels to run a modern physical economy are not viable. See Pimental and Patzek.
Click to access Pimentel-Tadzek.pdf
“Natural Resources Research, Vol. 14, No. 1, March 2005 ( C 2005)
“Ethanol Production Using Corn, Switchgrass, and Wood; Biodiesel Production Using Soybean and Sunflower – David Pimentel and Tad W. Patzek.
“Energy outputs from ethanol produced using corn, switchgrass, and wood biomass were each less than the respective fossil energy inputs. The same was true for producing biodiesel using soybeans and sunflower, however, the energy cost for producing soybean biodiesel was only slightly negative compared with ethanol production. Findings in terms of energy outputs compared with the energy inputs were:
• Ethanol production using corn grain required 29% more fossil energy than the ethanol fuel produced.
• Ethanol production using switchgrass required 50% more fossil energy than the ethanol fuel produced.
• Ethanol production using wood biomass required 57% more fossil energy than the ethanol fuel produced.
• Biodiesel production using soybean required 27% more fossil energy than the biodiesel fuel produced (Note, the energy yield from soy oil per hectare is far lower than the ethanol yield from corn).
• Biodiesel production using sunflower required 118% more fossil energy than the biodiesel fuel produces.”
End Quote.
Biofuel production of the above types is a net energy sink not a net energy source. So, carbon capture from biofuel production is a complete illogicality. The process is pointless to begin with, being an energy sink. There are also great problems with the areas of arable land, even marginal arable land, which would need to be devoted to biofuel crops. World food needs could not be met if this were done. But the killer is the net energy loss, the energy sink of the whole process.
Far better to stick with solar power, wind power, plus hydro, wave and tidal power where each of these can be economically and built and used for positive energy production over the life-cycle.
CO2 removal at useful physical scale from the atmosphere and ocean on any timescale useful to humans is fundamentally impossible. All technologies that could be used are prohibitively expensive in financial and energy terms. It won’t happen. It’s just another boondoggle.
On the positive side, solar, wind, hydro, tidal and wave power do work. We have to scale down our economies to work with these only with all widespread fossil fuel use rapidly reduced to zero and prohibited. That’s the only path.
Further to my post above. Drawdown (on a human timescale) will fail. Indeed it has already failed
https://drawdown.org/programs/drawdown-science
People speak about limiting temperature rise to below 1.5C. Well, guess what. We have already failed. We have already passed 1.5C warming against the correct pre-industrial benchmark. And carbon drawdown does not work and cannot work anyway. It is completely unfeasible energetically and in the timescale of the phase-up needed to save us.
Carbon drawdown is a distraction. It will do its intended job of distracting people while fossil fuel emissions are continually increased. That is what is happening every year with no sign of any substantial change.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2406318-carbon-dioxide-emissions-from-fossil-fuels-hit-another-all-time-high/
Egg on my face. After warning people on this blog about heatstroke from high wet bulb temperatures, I think I inflicted moderate heatstroke on myself a couple of days ago. Got frustrated and angry because of a needful job hanging over my head (one of several) and worked in the sun in the middle of the day – Something in the range of 60 to 90 minutes intense effort (for me as an old, slightly overweight man). Left 10% of the job undone because suddenly I felt “If I finish this I won’t be able to stagger up the hill to get shade and water.”
I have since suffered 48 hrs of (slowly abating) moderate symptoms – Back pain (kidney area) side pain, stomach pain, dull headache, nausea and increased arthritic pain in the fingers. I am no medical or other doctor, as I always make clear, but it seems to me I heat stroked myself. The ongoing symptoms I guess are the body clearing toxins from damaged tissue and the body’s inflammation reaction to those toxins. I am coming good now or otherwise I would have gone to the doc. Just resting my way through it.
Clearly, with old age encroaching, I have to get smarter and actually live up to my own advice. At 178 cm and 82 kg I still need to lose about another 3gk to 4 kg to get to the top of the heathy range. That would help.
Frankly, I wouldn’t care if I died on the spot. I couldn’t care could I? Because I would be non-existent as a sentient being. However, it is the damaging of oneself and then the living on more damaged that is to be rightly feared. I must be more careful in future, as should we all.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1753450232707248447.html
“24.4% (say 25% for a round number) of Americans ages 18 and over who have received a positive #COVID19 test or diagnosis have experienced symptoms of #LongCovid that persisted for 3 months or longer. Long COVID (is) generally worse/more frequent with more severe COVID survivors.”
By the end of 2022 just over 3 in 4 U.S. adults and older teens had caught COVID-19. I would say younger children caught it at a similar rate. By now, a fair guess is that 4/5ths of all Americans have had COVID at least once. One quarter of 4/5 is 1/5. One fifth of Americans is about 68 million… who have or have had Long COVID. A third of those surveyed report “reductions in quality of living”.
Sarc on. Nothing to see here. Sarc off.
Iko:
The paper by Pimentel and Tadzek was published in 2005. It was based on data now over twenty years old. A lot of water has flowed under many bridges since then. They concentratd, reasonably so for the time, on the waseful conversion of food crops and cropland into bioethanol for combustion in cars. Can you name any accredited biofuels expert supporting this scheme today? What I and Mike Barnard (read him) are interested in is biodiesel for ships and biokerosene for aircraft, where batteries don’t yet work, made from the plentiful biomass that does not compete with food – food waste, animal manure, offcuts from sustainable forestry, a few plants that grow on marginal land like salt marshes.
Of course biofuels don’t look good from an energy balance perspective. But this framing is wrong. In the net zero economy of the future, the ultimate source of enegy is sunlight (which also creates winds), captured initially as solar and wind electricity. Its supply is cheap, even allowing for transmission and storage, and unlimited for all practical purposes. Converting this energy into biofuels or green steel or green fertiliser is going to waste a lot of it. Per kwh used, these will always cost more than electricity. But so what? We don’t always have alternatives. The inefficiency also goes for green hydrogen as an energy carrier, where the unpalatable facts are beginning to deflate the bubble.
What we have to focus on is not energy balance but GHG emissions. Biofuels are definitely second best here to renewable electricity, as the best they can achieve is only net zero, not true zero or carbon removal. I have already given reasons why you are wrong on that too.
Sorry to hear about your health troubles. Take care. Slow down.
I’m glad you’re feeling better, Ike!! That sounds quite awful. I’ve had dehydration a time or two - and I was quite surprised that it laid me out for the rest of the day - you can’t just drink water and snap out of it, as it turns out - but I don’t think I’ve ever had a serious sun problem (yet).
Also, I’m sorry there’s no one around to help you with these tasks - I know what that’s like too. (Well in my case I could probably find someone if I were more sociable. Goals, as the kids say.)
James, thanks again for the great news!! Here are some high in the bleachers questions: would human pooh work? Or is our pooh not as useful? And do you think geothermal energy will ever compete with solar in cost terms? My guess is it won’t, but, otoh, it stays on at night … so what do I know? ; ) I suppose, given that geothermal would have to be utility scale, maybe it is too hard to compare them.
I am just thankful that there appear to be options. Hope is alive!
Ikonoclast: – “We have already passed 1.5C warming against the correct pre-industrial benchmark.“
What “correct” pre-industrial benchmark? The “Paris Agreement” pre-industrial benchmark is for 1850-1900. I’d suggest earlier period benchmarks would have inadequate data for global coverage. This benchmark issue is dependent on having adequate global coverage data. That’s where the arguments continue to be.
Meanwhile, Professor Eliot Jacobson tweeted on Feb 21:
The included graph shows Months Per Year Above Global Mean Surface Temperature Milestones for +0.25 °C, +0.50 °C, +0.75 °C, +1.00 °C, +1.25 °C, +1.50 °C, & +1.75 °C relative to the 1850-1900 baseline, for Berkeley Earth land & ocean dataset, dated 19 Feb 2024.
+1.00 °C has been at 12 months since late-2010s
+1.25 °C is currently at 9 months
+1.50 °C is currently at 5 months
+1.75 °C is currently at 1 month
Geoff,
This data. I don’t make up data. 🙂
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-023-01919-7
I am perhaps willing to make more radical interpretations and draw more negative conclusions from the data than most people. But then I think on any objective measure most people are excessive optimists, at least for the present times. Evolutionarily, including in evo-psych terms, a moderate optimism bias makes sense. A moderate optimism bias turns out to be optimal under most natural and more nearly natural and/or relatively stable ecological conditions. Optimal essentially for species survival that is. But in special conditions, like the ones we find ourselves in now, this optimism bias is perilous and leads us into ever deeper trouble.
On a lighter note, why am i only now finding out about the mankini? C’mon, y’all …
How could you have missed Borat in a mankini? I mean how does anyone get so lucky as to miss that?
Mind you, my wife said of the complaints about the equestrian in the mankini, “How did everybody get so prudish? I think he looks alright!”
From the Santos full year financial report on Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS):
“Phase one of the Moomba Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) project remains on track for first injection mid-2024. Moomba CCS phase one will be one of the lowest-cost CCS projects in the world and will have capacity to store up to 1.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. This is equivalent to around 28 per cent of the total annual emissions reduction from Australia’s electricity sector2 making Moomba CCS very significant in Australia’s journey to net-zero emissions.”
Time for the CCS scoffers to rethink?
Harry Clarke
CCS is a complete boondoggle.
As at June 2021;
“Currently there are only 26 CCS plants operating globally, capturing about 0.1 per cent of the annual global emissions from fossil fuels.
Ironically, 81 per cent of the carbon captured to date has been used to extract more oil from existing wells by pumping the captured carbon into the ground to force more oil out. This means that captured carbon is being used to extract oil that would otherwise have had to be left in the ground.” – Friends of the Earth, Scotland.
So basically, they withdraw some CO2 from gas/oil burnt during operations and use it to inject wells to get more gas (or oil) to burn elsewhere and send more CO2 straight into the atmosphere. Total boondoggle. Who can’t see through this?
CCS is a complete boondoggle.
As at June 2021;
“Currently there are only 26 CCS plants operating globally, capturing about 0.1 per cent of the annual global emissions from fossil fuels.
Ironically, 81 per cent of the carbon captured to date has been used to extract more oil from existing wells by pumping the captured carbon into the ground to force more oil out. This means that captured carbon is being used to extract oil that would otherwise have had to be left in the ground.” – Friends of the Earth, Scotland.
So basically, they withdraw some CO2 from gas/oil burnt during operations and use it to inject wells to get more gas (or oil) to burn elsewhere and send CO2 straight into the atmosphere. Total boondoggle. Who can’t see through this?
I think the Santos report is out by an order of magnitude. 1.7 million tonnes is about 2.8 per cent of current electricity emissions (around 60 million tonnes a year). And “up to” covers the entire range from 0 to 1.7
I think the Santos claim is wrong. It’s an official report. I’ll ask them. Harry Clarke.
Geoff,
Reposted link, in case you missed my post of the relevant data. According to this paper, we have already passed plus 2 degrees C warming compared to a more accurately calibrated pre-industrial baseline. I presume it is peer reviewed and its methods, calculations and conclusions are sound. The emerging picture from new research and data is that the IPCC’s conservative consensus methods and conclusions have consistently under-estimated the severity of the real situation re climate change.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-023-01919-7
Iko: Of course CCS through oil recovery should not be counted as a form of carbon removal, and the attempts to present it as such are dishonest. That’s irrelevant to the merits of flue gas CCS, even when also defended in bad faith by a different set of lobbyists. The Nazis opposed Communism, smoking and cruelty to animals. That does not discredit these positions, or buy them a pass on the other stuff.
Harry: you pass on some mildly good news on CCS. I note that no operational gas injection has yet taken place. Also, this is not a flue gas CCS plant. Like the Sleipnir offshore project in Norway, running since 1996, it simply prevents the venting of the natural CO2 that comes out of the ground with fossil methane. There is no reduction of the much larger volume of CO2 released when the methane is burnt, a much harder problem, which would have to be solved for gas to have any part in in a net zero future. This part is probably zero, so the mined gas band-aid will disappear too.
Are you defending Moomba and CCS in general as operational investments or as R&D projects? As investments in emissions reduction, they have to be compared with firmed renewables. Currently these have an LCOE roughly half that of gas electric generators with CCS: A$94-134 per Mwh vs A$177-266. The gap is still wide without the CCS. The implication is that gas and coal generation will disappear from Australia. The numbers don’t allow a simple calculation of the comparative cost of prevention of a tonne of CO2 emissions by CCS vs. marginal new renewables, but common sense suggests that the latter are better emissions value for money in the short run.
Go the other way and defend CCS as a research programme. The comparison now is with other methods of carbon removal, including geochemical ones like enhanced weathering (eg basalt on farmland) and seaweed dumping. This is a very young field and current costs per tonne of CO2 are unimportant; what matters is the potential for future economies of scale. I agree that CCS deserves a place on this R&D list, and enough money to test its potential. But to put it mildly CCS projects are not being run as research ones ought to be, with lots of small projects being carried out on specific parts of the scheme, rigorously planned and independently evaluated. Instead CCS promoters panicked politicians into thinking their pet scheme was the only game in town, then rushing into premature deployment at scale of untested technology.
The Santos statement is wrong and John’s arithmetic on the fraction of emissions addressed is correct. The Santos writer in the report released yesterday here got confused between Phase 1 of the project and the “potential” output of emissions reduction across the whole Moomba Basin if it was used as a whole for CCS which is claimed to be 28 million tons of CO2 stored. My mistake. I should have checked.
https://www.santos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Fact-sheet_Moomba_CCS.pdf
Harry Clarke
Struggling here: 20 million tons not 28 and across the entire Cooper and Eromanga Basins in South Australia and Queensland. Harry Clarke.
Ikonoclast: – “Reposted link, in case you missed my post of the relevant data.“
I did see it the first time, thanks. I’m well aware of this paper.
This is one proxy data point (for the Caribbean), not a global mean.
I’d suggest it’s similar to the Medieval Warming Period argument that global warming deniers try to use to say global warming has happened before the industrial era – but it’s a regional indicator, not a global one.
The “Paris Agreement” pre-industrial benchmark is for the period 1850-1900. I’d suggest earlier period benchmarks (like this McCulloch et al. paper is suggesting) don’t attract sufficient scientific agreement because there is insufficient data representative for global coverage.
I’d suggest what the scientific community do know is that the ‘sweet spot’ for human civilisation is the Holocene period (zero to +0.5 °C relative to 1850-1900 baseline).
I’d suggest what the McCulloch et al. (2024) paper doesn’t change is:
Geoff Miell,
I accept the currently validated science as covered in your 8 points. All of these factors are already concerning enough. Indeed, they are existentially terrifying for those who are fully aware of them and understand the profound implications and near certain consequences.
I’d suggest that we can walk and chew gum at the same time. That is we can get ourselves across the peer-reviewed, cross-checked, re-tested and validated science and we can at the same time take an interest in new research at the cutting edge. Scientists and philosophers must always hold that human paradigms, even scientific ones, exist to be refined, challenged and revolutionized further. Further research on sclerosponge thermometry should continue in my view, hopefully at other suitable locales too. This should happen along with exploration of other rationales for base-line setting and further possible historical thermometry methods.
What we need to remain on our guard against is the excessive academization of a certain stage of scientific knowledge along with the status quo gatekeeping of ensconced careerists in the academy, the bureaucracy and worse still the interests of those in the political-economic interstices where science is politicised and capitalized. There is, often enough, another scientific revolution bubbling up under these people and they can’t see it or won’t see it.
We saw this and still see this in the failed response and continued failed response to COVID-19 at all levels, with massive scientific, moral, public health and governance failures. Even successes (like the m-RNA vaccines) were egregiously misused (applied with no other measures leading to a failed race against viral mutation) and hijacked for billionaire wealth creation despite most of the research being publicly funded. Seeing this has made me suspicious about how much the IPCC industry (it is an industry now) has in turn been hijacked, manipulated and even captured for the purposes of institutionalizing delay in action. The IPCC certainly seems to have persistently low-balled the scenario dangers by very concerning margins and every piece of new data seems to confirm this.