Carbon Pipelines Negative T
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- No solvency—buildup of pressure in the pipelines fractures the rock, allowing CO2 to escape
- No Solvency – No capture
- Capturing technology is far from ready—massively increases costs and decreases coal plant efficiency —turns the case
- Any stage of CCS is key to the others—that means if one fails the others do as well
No Solvency – LeaksLeaks prevent solvencyJohnson et al. 10 – PhD in Atmospheric Science Andrew Simms, policy director of New Economics Foundation, UK think tank, and head of NEF's Climate Change Programme, Dr. Victoria Johnson, researcher for the climate change and energy programme at NEF, MSc with distinction in Climate Change from the University of East Anglia and PhD in Atmospheric Physics at Imperial College, London and Peter Chowla, Policy and Advocacy Officer at the Bretton Woods Project. “Growth isn’t possible”. New Economics Foundation, January 25,2010. http://www.neweconomics.org/sites/neweconomics.org/files/Growth_Isnt_Possible.pdf As journalist Jeff Goodell writes in his book Big Coal, tens of thousands of people may be destined to live above a giant bubble of CO2 and since ‘CO2 is buoyant underground it can migrate through cracks and faults in the earth, pooling in unexpected places.’300 A sudden release of large amounts of CO2 due to, for example, an earthquake resulting in the fracturing or pipeline failure could result in the immediate death of both people and animals, since asphyxiation can result from inhalation of CO2 at just a 20 per cent concentration. Because CO2 is a colourless, odourless and tasteless gas; a large leak would be undetected. An example of just how catastrophic a leak could be is the natural limnic eruption of CO2 in 1986 from Lake Nyos in Cameroon. The sudden release of 1.6 Mt CO2 resulted in the asphyxiation of around 1,700 people and 3,500 livestock. If this rules out the storage of CO2 in land-based geological sites, let us consider sequestration in ocean saline aquifers, such as Sleipner in Norway. Slow, gradual leakage of CO2 could result in the dissolution of CO2 in shallow aquifers, causing the acidification of groundwater and undesirable change in geochemistry (i.e., mobilisation of toxic metals), water quality (leaching of nutrients) and ecosystem health (e.g., pH impacts on organisms).301 Transportation of captured carbon could also be problematic. CCS involves a process of converting CO2 to something else, or moving it somewhere else. Taking the transport of natural gas as an example, we can estimate how secure CO2 transportation might be. The world’s largest gas transport system, 2,400km long running through Russia (the Russian gas transport system), is estimated to lose around 1.4 per cent (a range of 1.0–2.5 per cent).302 This is comparable to the amount of methane lost from US pipelines (1.5 ± 0.5 per cent). Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that CO2 leakage from transport through pipelines could be in the order of 1.5 per cent. Furthermore, it is noteworthy that around 9 per cent of all natural gas extracted is lost in the process of extraction, distribution and storage. No solvency—buildup of pressure in the pipelines fractures the rock, allowing CO2 to escapeRomm 10 – Senior Fellow at American Progress and Ph.D. in physics from MIT (Joe, “New study finds geologic sequestration ‘is not a practical means to provide any substantive reduction in CO2 emissions’” Center for American Progress April 27 2010 http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2010/04/27/205870/ccs-stunner-new-study-finds-geologic-sequestration-is-not-a-practical-means-to-provide-any-substantive-reduction-in-co2-emissions/) MLR But any significant amount of leakage would render CCS pointless. The UK Guardian‘s article on the study quotes the coauthor: Previous modelling has hugely underestimated the space needed to store CO2 because it was based on the “totally erroneous” premise that the pressure feeding the carbon into the rock structures would be constant, argues Michael Economides, professor of chemical engineering at Houston, and his co-author Christene Ehlig-Economides, professor of energy engineering at Texas A&M University “It is like putting a bicycle pump up against a wall. It would be hard to inject CO2 into a closed system without eventually producing so much pressure that it fractured the rock and allowed the carbon to migrate to other zones and possibly escape to the surface,” Economides said. The paper concludes that CCS “is not a practical means to provide any substantive reduction in CO2 emissions, although it has been repeatedly presented as such by others.” No Solvency – No captureCapture isn’t close to readyEPA 10 “Report of the Interagency Task Force on Carbon Capture and Storage,” http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/downloads/CCS-Task-Force-Report-2010.pdf As discussed above, CO2 removal technologies are not ready for widespread implementation on coal-based power plants, primarily because they have not been demonstrated at the scale necessary to establish confidence for power plant application (Kuuskraa, 2007). Since the CO2 capture capacities used in current industrial processes are generally much smaller than the capacity required for the purposes of GHG emissions mitigation at a typical power plant, there is considerable uncertainty associated with process scale-up. For example, maintaining adequate gas and/or liquid flow distribution in the larger absorption and regeneration reactors required for power plant applications could prove difficult. Other technical challenges associated with the application of these CO2 capture technologies to coal-based power plants include high capture and compression auxiliary power loads, capture process energy integration with existing power system, impacts of flue gas contaminants (NOx , SOx , PM) on CO2 capture system, increased water consumption and cost effective O2 supply for oxy-combustion systems (see Appendix A, Table A-3) (Kuuskraa, 2007). The following is a brief summary of two of the more significant technical challenges of applying these technologies.
Before CO2 can be disposed of, it needs to be captured and transported to the disposal site. Transport does not pose any new challenges, but capture will require new technologies. The obvious place to capture CO2 is at those places where it is produced in large, concentrated amounts. The largest of these sources are power plants that operate on fossil fuels. Conceptually, the easiest way of capturing the CO2 produced by fossil fuel combustion is to scrub it from the flue (exhaust) gas. This option has been well explored and typically entails roughly a 30 percent energy penalty;68 that is, the scrubbing operation itself consumes roughly one third of the plant’s energy output. The addition to the price of electricity would be similar. The biggest downside of this technology is that, when installed as a retrofit, it leaves the plant running at far from optimal efficiency. Since the cost of CO2 scrubbing far exceeds the cost of the coal input, a power plant that collects its own CO2 would need to be substantially reoptimized for greatly improved efficiency. As a result, retrofitting capture technology is far more costly per unit of energy produced than installing such technology in a new plant. Any stage of CCS is key to the others—that means if one fails the others do as wellStigson et al., 11 (IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute Ltd, former researcher at Mälardalen University (School of Sustainable Development of Society and Technology), Ph.D. in Energy and Environmental Engineering, Anders Hansson, Marten Lind, "Obstacles for CCS deployment: an analysisof discrepancies of perceptions", Mitig Adapt Strateg Glob Change, December 2011, Springer Science & Business) As mentioned above, the different CCS stages within the full infrastructure are interdependent. This invokes a risk for the operators of each stage from two perspectives. Firstly, any stage within the CCS infrastructure will be unfeasible if the other stages are not available. A logic question for an industry looking to deploy one stage is if someone will supply the other stages. This boils down to the question of who moves first. This concern has also been highlighted by the UK Minister for Energy, Malcolm Wicks (2008), who identifies interdependency as one of the important aspects of deploying demonstration projects, i.e. proving the commercial, contractual, and financial feasibility of full CCS operations. Secondly, as a failure at one stage could bring operations at the other stages to a halt, there is also an operational risk. Both these risks are emphasized in the beginning of developing a robust infrastructure as the system flexibility can be expected to be low. While these risks are relatively easy to mitigate in demonstration project consortia including all systems, it may form an obstacle when it comes to first-movers who will pursue operations at one single stage. The issues should therefore be included on the CCS agenda as not to cause unnecessary uncertainties regarding operational feasibility and respondents views that governmental investments in supplying a transport infrastructure should be remembered. Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. Objective files -> Pop Warner History files -> North Carolina Inclusion Initiative Mapping Where Children with ieps are Being Served Purpose files -> Fall 2013 Spring 2014 Program Data: Standard 1 Exhibit 4d files -> Hanban – asia society confucius classrooms network 2010 request for proposal files -> Northern England’s set-jetting locations Download 0.92 Mb. Share with your friends:
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