I have been thinking a little more about the problem of persuading the population to abandon the internal combustion engine. It would be great if the range, performance, battery life and initial cost of electric cars improved to the point where we all bought them, but that might be like waiting for fusion power.

I for one would not voluntarily abandon my car even if gasoline price rose to £5/litre, although I might get a more economical one. I doubt if there is space on the planet to grow enough crops for biofuel for everyone and anyway it would raise all sorts of issues about habitat destruction, displacing food crops for the poor etc.

But carbon capture from the atmosphere, as you suggest, will become economic at much lower carbon dioxide prices than those associated with £5/litre gasoline. For example ocean quicklime addition would work at 50p/litre, see my March 28th 2009 comment at

http://www.cquestrate.com/the-idea/detailed-description-of-the-idea

and there may well be similar land based approaches that are even cheaper. One advantage of the ocean approach was to capture the carbon mainly as bicarbonate rather than carbonate, which only grabs half as much carbon per quicklime molecule. But the 50p number is for capture of only 0.68 moles of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere per mole of quicklime not the 1.77 moles per mole expected if solid calcium carbonate does not precipitate during ocean addition.

The other advantage of ocean addition (and there are plenty of environmental disadvantages) is that no equipment is required to contact the quicklime with the atmosphere. This reduces capital cost but I have not attempted to calculate by how much.

If I were doing it on land I think I might plump for potassium hydroxide rather than quicklime because potassium carbonate and bicarbonate are very soluble in water. I guess the potassium carbonate could be electrolysed to release carbon dioxide and regenerate the hydroxide thus avoiding the high temperature solid calcination step needed with quicklime.

Come to think of it you could probably scrub the exhaust gas on the vehicle with potassium hydroxide solution and then just exchange spent potassium carbonate solution for fresh potassium hydroxide solution when filling up with gasoline. Alternatively there could be bulk storage for fresh alkali and spent bicarbonate liquor at home and tankers would periodically refill the former and collect the latter to go for processing.

The weight and volume of the solution might be an issue. I estimate minimum weight of absorbent as 11 kg per litre of fuel burnt but a range of 100 miles would probably be fine if changeover was quick and easy.

It is not crucial that the vehicle carries enough hydroxide solution for a long journey because most trips are only a few miles and these account for a large proportion of the emissions. But it is important that the vehicle can occasionally make these long trips without delays for battery recharging. On a long journey it would be possible either to make several brief stops to exchange spent liquor for fresh or to simply exhaust the absorption capacity and allow carbon dioxide to escape to atmosphere.

Whatever the process, my plan to make fuel producers pay for the capture of an increasing proportion of the carbon dioxide formed from their products would provide the financial incentive to make it happen.

That said, turning around the enormous existing coal infrastructure will definitely take some time. Current IGCC capacity is 520 MW globally, less than one half of one tenth of one percent of global generation capacity. And even to get that tiny amount effectively sequestered, we’d need to build a pipe to carry the gas to a sequestration site and the infrastructure to compress the gas and pump it down. To say that it’s available today is not quite right.

Furthermore, experience with existing IGCC plants show that it’s tricky and expensive technology that may not be able to compete against more economical low emissions alternatives like wind. The two plants in operation are demonstration models that couldn’t operate without huge subsidies themselves. A third plant had technical difficulties and isn’t operating at all.

If we slap a price on carbon high enough to make carbon sequestration viable, it will happen as quickly as it can. And in the meantime, things that are either even more economical or quicker to implement can reduce carbon emissions before. We need to ensure that we enable those things to happen too.

Best, Adriana

I remember when we wanted to get lead out of gasoline, everyone said they were not ready, it would be very difficult and expensive. Then along came a tax incentive of a few pence per litre and it all happened painlessly.

It is not the know-how that is lacking for carbon capture but the incentive to apply it. GE seem to agree with me and surely they must know. “With IGCC, carbon capture is available today. Gasification-based carbon capture is widely employed in industrial gasification operations worldwide; and is the same as would be employed in an IGCC plant.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/monte-atwell/the-puzzle-of-coal-americ_b_460140.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/monte-atwell

The argument about squandering our kids future is not much of an argument for carbon capture, because it’s not ready now. Carbon capture has been the greatest excuse for inaction so far. Because we can’t impose it now, the oil and coal industries keep demanding subsidies to develop it and suggest we sit tight until it’s ready in 2020.

Meanwhile, because it’s coming, that seems to be an excuse to keep building coal plants WITHOUT carbon sequestration. Not sure how that works, but it happens all the time. Oh, we’ll switch them all over when the technology arrives, we are told. It’s that kind of mentality that’s torching our children’s future.

If you want action now, we need to focus immediately on what’s more economically available. Right now that’s efficiency and renewables. Over time that may change.

A few years ago, the miracle that was going to save us was ethanol. A decade and several billion dollars later we have a huge subsidy-dependent lobby with a product that makes a negligible to negative impact on climate and threatens to starve the world to run our cars. I sure don’t want to develop another parasitic industry. If carbon capture can work, its proponents can demonstrate. And the best way to do that without public subsidy is with a high enough carbon price, either directly imposed or resulting from caps or other limitations.

We can hope the industry proponents are right and carbon capture is ready in 2020. I sure do. But until it is, we can’t depend on it.

While I don’t completely dismiss the IEA report, I take it with a grain of salt. The IEA has consistently overestimated projections of global energy demand, consistently overestimated reserves of fossil fuels and consistently underestimated the growth of renewables to a ridiculous degree.

That’s why they think that wind power will grow at what they think is an astronomical rate of 3% per year but will still have a shrinking share. Meanwhile, in the real world, wind is doubling capacity about every 3 years and with that it’s share of global generation. The crystal ball the IEA is using appears to be defective. Myself, I don’t pretend to know how to use crystal balls.

Still, it’s likely that they’re right that when carbon capture matures, we’d be stupid not to put it to use.

Of course I also agree with you that it’s much better to get at emissions at the source rather than pull them out of the air. Let me explain.

James Hansen and others are suggesting we need to eliminate emissions from coal in developed countries within ten years. That means that by the time carbon capture will hopefully be ready, we won’t be able to emit any more of the carbon from coal, not even the residual emissions that escape from carbon capture. Furthermore, Hansen says we need a linear reduction in coal use through that period. Another way of phrasing it is that the entire budget we have for coal emissions is about half of what we used in the last decade.

So anyone who builds a coal plant today anticipating carbon capture is not being honest with the public about the effect. Coal plants aren’t profitable if built for a 10-year life expectancy.

In other words, by the time carbon capture arrives to save the day, most of the remaining coal should be off-limits, though there will still be a small coal emissions budget in developing countries.

Fortunately, we can draw down emissions at that time from the atmosphere. I’m not suggesting here that we literally attempt to suck it up from the air. I’m talking about sequestering carbon from forest and agricultural waste, burned in much the same way as coal is burned now to help balance out the loads in power generation.

I wanted to touch on something you wrote in your previous post as well. While in the past scientists believed that the ocean’s capacity to absorb carbon will leave us with a small sustainable carbon emissions budget, that’s no longer believed to be true. Studies by Susan Solomon and others indicate that as we stop emitting carbon into the atmosphere, the oceans will stop being a net sink and will interact with the atmosphere, emitting carbon right back. So it’s now understood that complete elimination will be necessary.

Of course, that realization might just mean that carbon capture will perform an even more vital, though less robust role. And understanding, as you do, how difficult it is to capture carbon that’s already been emitted reinforces the stupidity of having put it all up there. Figuring out how to leave it in the ground in the first place would have been far, far easier than trying to stuff it all back now.

I’m enjoying this conversation. Thank you.

The International Energy Agency (an intergovernmental body) http://www.iea.org/subjectqueries/ccs/what_is_ccs.asp have said that achieving climate stabilisation in 2050 will cost at least 70% more without carbon capture and that the power sector will need to be largely decarbonised by then. Carbon capture is therefore an essential part of the most economic solution. Every year we delay reducing emissions we squander about fifteen years of our children’s meagre ration, based on an ongoing ocean uptake of only 6% of today’s emissions see http://jemsavestheplanet.blogspot.com/2010/01/more-on-global-warming.html

Recent reports from the World Future Energy Summit
http://cleantech.com/news/5532/carbon-capture-and-storage-rebooting
say that “speakers pointed to the maturation of CCS and many successful pilot facilities around the world. And they set the expectation that the industry is now ready to see production facilities built in large numbers.”

It is not the government that would be pushing carbon capture with my proposal but the fuel producers. Whatever else we may do to save energy or generate clean electricity if we are burning fossil fuel we need to capture most of the carbon dioxide and it is much easier to catch it at source than after it is diluted in the atmosphere.

I agree that capturing vehicle emissions is impractical and that drivers will not be put off by the modest increase in gasoline price associated with my proposal. But that is no reason not to make capture happen as soon as possible for power stations, steel works, cement factories etc.

So far, all the international agreements have had allocations by country. That’s not the smartest way I see of doing things, but that’s what I meant by predicting that way forward. It’s now a habit in climate negotiations, and habits are difficult to break. I would welcome other options.

The people who voted for companies to sequester an increasing share of their emissions likely don’t understand the challenges. Many people think that we can take the emissions from a coal plant and sequester it with a fairly simple alteration. Few people know that carbon sequestration is not economically viable anywhere on the globe in the current economy, that there are no large scale models anywhere, or that it requires immense infrastructure rivaling the pipeline infrastructure of the fossil fuel industry.

Your suggestion to impose a growing percentage of sequestration is interesting, but it wouldn’t be my preferred route, and it won’t solve the tar sands problem any time soon. Other approaches will have to be taken in the near term and the tar sands will be the victim.

One of the reasons it’s not my preferred route is that I don’t believe that governments should be imposing one solution over another. Regulating carbon capture essentially amounts to an enormous subsidy to that technology. I attended a forum on carbon capture, which had some opponents, an industry expert and a representative of Statoil Hydro, which runs the Sleipner facility in Norway. What they all agreed was that carbon capture and storage was uneconomical until carbon prices reached about $70/tonne for advanced oil recovery, $100/tonne for coal generation and upwards of $200/tonne for some tar sands operations. If we can get emissions reductions for $50/tonne through efficiency, why wouldn’t we go for that?

Another reason it’s not my preferred route is that it’s just not ready and we need emissions reductions now. While the wind industry is doubling every three years, carbon capture and storage has yet to demonstrate one economically viable large-scale facility. Even carbon capture promoters are suggesting it will need enormous public subsidy to hopefully achieve something workable by 2020. Meanwhile, if the wind industry just continues growing the way it is, by 2020 almost 10% of global power generation will be from wind.

If we were to impose a carbon tax of, say $50/tonne, efficiency, conservation and wind would just get even more attractive. Carbon capture still wouldn’t be able to get a toehold. I’m not in favour of legislating more expensive solutions.

And when we finally get to a carbon price that will make it worthwhile to capture the carbon from tar sands oil refining, it probably still won’t be high enough to discourage burning the product in a car.

Finally, carbon capture, like other technologies that are touted as the solution to everything, would tend, if truly treated as a miracle cure, to create more problems than it solves.

For one thing carbon capture doesn’t solve the problem of all the other emissions from coal and tar sands oil. In fact it exacerbates the problem because carbon capture increases the energy required, so more sulphur goes up for every unit of energy.

Also, there are always fugitive emissions, so carbon capture will never be emissions free. This is fine if you’re trying to get negative emissions by burning forest waste – every bit you get out of the atmosphere is a bonus. But it’s a real problem if you’re looking for a way to eliminate the emissions from fossil fuels.

The infrastructure required to move gas around would actually be larger than the fossil fuel infrastructure it has taken a century to build. This would be a massive, energy intensive project, and once again most of the emissions involved would not lend themselves to sequestration. And it would take time, more time than we have.

It really can’t solve the space heating problem. Right now we’re burning natural gas at 90% efficiency with low NOx and SOx. Switching to electric heat powered by coal generation with carbon sequestration means we move to a more polluting fuel and reduce efficiency below 25%. The carbon emissions are comparable. We’re no further ahead for fighting climate change and we’ve got worse air quality to deal with.

But finally, as a method of extending the lifespan of fossil fuels, it just extends our agony. If we insist on the high energy lifestyle we have now and continue to power it with fossil fuels, even if carbon capture succeeds brilliantly with 100% efficiency and no fugitive emissions (both physical impossibilities) it just means we’ll have the exactly same crisis a couple decades later. Far smarter, if we can, to learn to live within the energy budget that’s actually renewed every year.

I don’t necessarily oppose carbon capture, in fact I think it might prove to be critical for drawing carbon from the atmosphere, since we’ll probably need to find a way of getting negative emissions the way we’re going. I expect it will have a place. Just not right away.

We certainly need an international arrangement to tackle global warming. But for cap and trade, cap and dividend or carbon tax to work globally there needs to be agreement either about how to share the limited allowable carbon emissions between sovereign nations or about how to share the trillions of revenue from an international tax or auction of allowances. Neither seems likely to happen any time soon if ever.

I have a simple, effective and popular alternative.

In a recent Times Online live debate, 85% voted that “Fossil fuel companies should be obliged to sequester an increasing fraction of the carbon content of the products they sell to avoid dangerous climate change”.

You mention that it is impractical to capture carbon from home heating and automobiles. But it is not impractical to use electricity generated with carbon capture for these applications. There will remain a few applications such as transport and heating in remote areas and aviation for which mains electricity cannot be used and I do not advocate increasing the cultivated area to provide biofuel. But the downwelling polar currents will continue to move about 6% of today’s emissions to the deep ocean for over a thousand years and this could allow limited emissions for these difficult applications.

For details on why my proposal would be easier for all countries to agree to than cap and trade or carbon tax, how it would drive energy saving, renewables and nuclear, how it would be implemented and how it would stop global warming see my website.

When fuel producers are obliged to place contracts for carbon capture and sequestration for a proportion of the carbon in their fuel, as I propose, I think there will be power companies from around the world competing to take their money. I hope we will be left wondering what all the fuss around cutting emissions was about.

http://www.ontario.ca/en/information_bundle/mineral/stel02_038204

If you click on the MOE summary, natural gas generation is still a category B process, which requires only an environmental screening rather than a full EA.

All this was done to accommodate public private partnerships, which combine the worst of both worlds – the profit motive and shield from public scrutiny of the private sector with guaranteed public sector funding for risk insurance.