I'm sure I've posted somewhere before on my thoughts on CCS, for those who don't know CCS is where Carbon Dioxide is captured at power plants, compressed into a liquid form and pumped underground. Now there's a huge number of reasons I think this is a bad idea, the energy used to do it, the volume needed to store enough to make a difference and the potential for some very serious shit to happen should it leak (Lake Nios anyone?) and certainly the technology isn't available and unlikely to be ready anytime soon (even if it could work).
Now personally I'd be much happier living a couple of kilometres above nuclear waste than I would over highly compressed CO2.
The Sydney Morning Herald has a good story today:
Mining stalwart sees no future in carbon plan
Paddy Manning, Sustainable InvestingApril 25, 2009
Kevin Rudd should meet Graham Brown before he decides to spend billions of dollars on carbon capture and storage. A coalminer for more than 20 years, Brown retired in 2007 and is happy to call a spade a bloody shovel.
Brown, 57, has his own theory on why good money is being wasted on a technology very few have faith in.
Brown, from the Hunter Valley, originally worked in the construction industry, in open-cut and underground coalmines, including for Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton.
He is a staunch unionist but does not toe the corporate line on CCS parroted by officials from the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union.
Brown's main motivation is to see his former colleagues retrained to be able to exit a fading coal industry. He joined the NSW Greens after meeting state MP Lee Rhiannon, who said the party's policy was to make the transition to a clean energy economy with no job losses.
Brown is not a politician and does not want to be one. But he is active locally and takes any opportunity to speak on the transition away from coal.
Last year he took part in a Greenpeace blockade of the Eraring power station, and attracted media attention as one of a handful of miners sympathetic to the action.
"I'm not the only one in the mining industry," Brown says. "There's quite a few and they're coming on board all the time. The blokes in the industry, they're fully aware that there's a problem with burning the coal. They're interested in where they fit into the situation."
Brown is not funded by anyone. He gets a kick out of putting some of the retirement savings he earned from mining back into the cause.
I saw Brown speak at a climate change rally in Sydney in November and was struck by his denunciation of CCS. He says most people working at the coalface know CCS is "just not do-able".
"In the beginning there wasn't a lot of view either way on it but now, because it's been going so long, a lot of the blokes are up to speed on it and they are fully aware that it's nonsense. It's never going to get off the ground. The technology's so expensive that it's not going to be economical."
The main problem is the sheer volume of carbon dioxide that needs to be captured and stored. It is hard to visualise. Brown explains it this way: for every tonne of coal burnt there is 2.5 to 2.7 tonnes of CO2 to store. How big is a tonne of CO2? About 500 cubic metres, as a gas at sea level at room temperature.
Now say coal-fired power stations in Australia emit 100 million tonnes of CO2 each year. The Government hopes CCS will trap 20 per cent of those emissions. If the gas is compressed 500 times, that is about 20 million tonnes a year.
Transporting 20 million tonnes of highly compressed gas is no mean feat. "Look at the infrastructure that needs to be in place to get 80 million tonnes of coal to port," says Brown. "Moving gas is a different kettle of fish to moving coal, I can tell you, because it's got to be stored in an intrinsically safe way - either pipe or trucks or trains".
Where to put it all? Brown says there is really only one place where significant volumes of CO2 can be stored - the Cooper Basin in South Australia, where Santos recently shelved a $700 million CCS project. If that project were revived, Brown says it has been calculated that we would need a B-double lorry carrying six tonnes of CO2 leaving NSW for the Cooper Basin every 20 seconds to store 20 per cent of emissions from the state's power industry.
Then there is the problem of getting the stored CO2 into the ground or, even harder, beneath the sea floor. "You really need a mining industry to get it into the ground," says Brown. "And that's going to create more CO2."
There is also the risk of leakage, made worse by the increase in underground temperatures. "You're talking about a lot of pressure, and there's heaps of cracks. It's only got to come out through a slow leak and it's all for nothing.
"The second you put it into the ground, the more it will expand. If you're going to put it a kilometre underground where the temperature might be 65 degrees Centigrade, it's going to expand a monstrous amount. And that in itself will be the big mechanism where the rocks will crack.
"They can put it in there but whether it will stay there is another thing. I've pointed that out - others have too - and it's not long before people start nodding their head and laughing because they understand that it's not possible."
Brown says CCS is a no-brainer. "It just doesn't cut the ice any more. Most people know that it's a furphy." Brown says the coal companies know it too and until late last year, put little of their money into CCS. "They're not wasting money on it. They're just taking what they can from the Federal Government, and saying 'thank you very much'."
Their main interest is in ramping up extraction of coal-seam gas, Brown says. "Any kind of drilling technology that will be used to try and get this gas down, is also going to be reversed, to be able to be used to mine the carbon qualities of the coal in situ.
"They're having the taxpayer supply a lot of money for that research. They should be doing it themselves. They're going to piggyback on all this carbon capture and storage stuff and they will use that technology for their own benefit.
"It's not a matter of being solely for that but the coal companies already know that research needs to be done to get the gas out, and they will certainly use it if it's available. They might be greedy and they might have deep pockets, but they're not stupid."
For Brown, it means more job losses down the track. "If they can get the methane out of the coal seams, or convert the gas to hydrogen, without having to mine the coal, they'll use that gas and will hardly have to employ anyone."
What really annoys Brown is the attitude of officials at the CFMEU, in particular general president of the mining and energy division, Tony Maher.
He has lined up with coal companies and is backing CCS rather than focusing on retraining workers to get jobs in the green-collar economy.
"Tony Maher made some statements in Newcastle two years ago. I've got them on tape. In a submission to Newcastle council, he called the transition away from the coal industry to anything else the 'geriatric solution'. He made a statement we are by and large too old, and our skill base from the start is too low, to be trained in anything else, insinuating that we should stay in the coal industry because that's all we're good for.
"I played that tape to some of the blokes at work and I can tell you they weren't real happy with Tony, basically calling them untrainable boneheads.
"They didn't like it at all .. We can be trained in anything. Who do you think maintains the equipment in the mining industry? Doesn't he know that a lot of the truck drivers and plant operators are actually some sort of a tradesman? We definitely have the skills base.
"And who does he think is going to do the work in the renewable energy industry, and other industries as well, because statistics in Europe - and a study by Greenpeace on the Central Coast of NSW - show that there's six times more jobs in the transition away from coal than there is in it.
"I think we should be gunning for it. We definitely have the skills and he didn't do a very good service to his members. I don't see why miners should be thrown on the scrap heap by a bloody coal company. There should be a mechanism to let them flow on to other jobs."
paddy.manning@fairfaxmedia.com.au
So why do we keep throwing good money after bad? When are our planetary dynamic duo Wong & Garrett going to actually do something? Well anything really?
Showing posts with label Greenhouse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Greenhouse. Show all posts
Friday, April 24, 2009
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Maggie Thatcher: Environmental Hero. Yes "that" one and yes I am serious.
Ok I admit it, I usually lean to the left on most political issues and tend to regard the right of politics with slightly more distrust than what is laughingly referred to as the "left" (personally I'm of the opinion that the last proper socialist Prime Minister we had in this country was Malcolm Fraser - and I know a few thinking lefties that agree with me). But having said that I do have a policy of giving credit where credit is due and despite having some major difference with her economic and social policies I do have to admit that following her conversion former British Pime Minister Maggie Thatcher was a very good environmental advocate. In fact if you really want to upset a climate skeptic, tell them it was Maggie and not Al Gore who was pushing all this.
Margaret Thatcher was probably one of the first prominant politicians in recent times to start talking about environmental issues. Despite being slow to initially come around to seeing the problems of chlorflourocarbons on the ozone layer....
".........when British scientists were able in 1988 to bring the ozone issue personally before Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who had an academic degree in chemistry, the U.K. position changed almost overnight and the British thereafter became a leading proponent of phaseout for all ozone-depleting substances."
The change was so rapid that in a September 1988 speech to the Royal Society she was warning of the dangers of global warming, ozone depletion and acid deposition, the latter two are no longer contentious. Thatcher studied chemistry at Oxford University which gave her the knowledge to analyse the information put to her and realise the issues were real and helped her understand the real issues. Even now that influence continues in the British Conservative Party with the Tories quite rightly pressing the Labor Party for not doing enough, totally the opposite situation to here in Australia.
It is a sad fact of life that scientists are rarely drawn to go into politics with parliament tending to being filled with lawyers, accountants, bankers and union officials (on both sides of the house).
Margaret Thatcher was probably one of the first prominant politicians in recent times to start talking about environmental issues. Despite being slow to initially come around to seeing the problems of chlorflourocarbons on the ozone layer....
".........when British scientists were able in 1988 to bring the ozone issue personally before Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who had an academic degree in chemistry, the U.K. position changed almost overnight and the British thereafter became a leading proponent of phaseout for all ozone-depleting substances."
The change was so rapid that in a September 1988 speech to the Royal Society she was warning of the dangers of global warming, ozone depletion and acid deposition, the latter two are no longer contentious. Thatcher studied chemistry at Oxford University which gave her the knowledge to analyse the information put to her and realise the issues were real and helped her understand the real issues. Even now that influence continues in the British Conservative Party with the Tories quite rightly pressing the Labor Party for not doing enough, totally the opposite situation to here in Australia.
It is a sad fact of life that scientists are rarely drawn to go into politics with parliament tending to being filled with lawyers, accountants, bankers and union officials (on both sides of the house).
Friday, January 9, 2009
Journalistic Claptrap!
Over at the Dilly Telegraph (sorry Daily Telegraph) we're seeing a great example of piss poor journalism, it starts off like this:
NASA tells Barack Obama Australia is destroying earth with coal emissions
Now NASA never said anything of the sort, go a little further into the article you'll see:
AUSTRALIA'S use of coal and carbon emissions policies are guaranteeing the "destruction of much of the life on the planet", a leading NASA scientist has written in a letter to Barack Obama.
The head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Professor James Hansen, has written an open letter to Barack Obama calling for a moratorium on coal-fired power stations and the use of next-generation nuclear power.
In the letter he says: "Australia exports coal and sets atmospheric carbon dioxide goals so large as to guarantee destruction of much of the life on the planet."
So we've already seen a bullshit headline designed to stir up the masses and sell newspapers and now it looks like Hansen is using the letter to attack Australia (well if that doesn't stir people into a patriotic frenzy - and sell more fishwrappers - nothing will). But what did Hansen really say? Well with about 30 seconds on "the google" we can find Hansens letter. You'll need to scroll down a bit as there's various notes and other bits of correspondence there but when you do you'll eventually find:
The physics of the matter, together with empirical data, also define the need for a carbon tax. Alternatives such as emission reduction targets, cap and trade, cap and dividend, do not work, as proven by honest efforts of the ‘greenest’ countries to comply with the Kyoto Protocol:
(1) Japan: accepted the strongest emission reduction targets, appropriately prides itself on having the most energy-efficient industry, and yet its use of coal has sharply increased, as have its total CO2 emissions. Japan offset its increases with purchases of credits through the clean development mechanism in China, intended to reduce emissions there, but Chinese emissions increased rapidly.
(2) Germany: subsidizes renewable energies heavily and accepts strong emission reduction targets, yet plans to build a large number of coal-fired power plants. They assert that they will have cap-and-trade, with a cap that reduces emissions by whatever amount is needed. But the physics tells us that if they continue to burn coal, no cap can solve the problem, because of the long carbon dioxide lifetime.
(3) Other cases are described on my Columbia University web site, e.g., Switzerland finances construction of coal plants, Sweden builds them, and Australia exports coal and sets atmospheric carbon dioxide goals so large as to guarantee destruction of much of the life on the planet.
Indeed, ‘goals’ and ‘caps’ on carbon emissions are practically worthless, if coal emissions continue, because of the exceedingly long lifetime of carbon dioxide in the air. Nobody realistically expects that the large readily available pools of oil and gas will be left in the ground. Caps will not cause that to happen – caps only slow the rate at which the oil and gas are used. The only solution is to cut off the coal source (and unconventional fossil fuels).
So did you see it? (You should've I put it in bold for you) One line, hardly a letter bagging just Australia, it sticks the boot into many other countries. And as for our carbon dioxide goals well Kevin 05 has figured a 5% cut is good enough which will do nothing to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere so technically the statement is right.
And the letter is signed:
James and Anniek Hansen
Pennsylvania
United States of America
He and his (I'm presuming, I couldn't be bothered searching) wife have signed it as private citizens, not as the head of NASA's Goddard Institue nor as a Professor from Columbia University, so NASA hasn't told Barack that Australia is destroying the earth. More hard hitting factual journalism brought to you by the Dilly Telegraph.
NASA tells Barack Obama Australia is destroying earth with coal emissions
Now NASA never said anything of the sort, go a little further into the article you'll see:
AUSTRALIA'S use of coal and carbon emissions policies are guaranteeing the "destruction of much of the life on the planet", a leading NASA scientist has written in a letter to Barack Obama.
The head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Professor James Hansen, has written an open letter to Barack Obama calling for a moratorium on coal-fired power stations and the use of next-generation nuclear power.
In the letter he says: "Australia exports coal and sets atmospheric carbon dioxide goals so large as to guarantee destruction of much of the life on the planet."
So we've already seen a bullshit headline designed to stir up the masses and sell newspapers and now it looks like Hansen is using the letter to attack Australia (well if that doesn't stir people into a patriotic frenzy - and sell more fishwrappers - nothing will). But what did Hansen really say? Well with about 30 seconds on "the google" we can find Hansens letter. You'll need to scroll down a bit as there's various notes and other bits of correspondence there but when you do you'll eventually find:
The physics of the matter, together with empirical data, also define the need for a carbon tax. Alternatives such as emission reduction targets, cap and trade, cap and dividend, do not work, as proven by honest efforts of the ‘greenest’ countries to comply with the Kyoto Protocol:
(1) Japan: accepted the strongest emission reduction targets, appropriately prides itself on having the most energy-efficient industry, and yet its use of coal has sharply increased, as have its total CO2 emissions. Japan offset its increases with purchases of credits through the clean development mechanism in China, intended to reduce emissions there, but Chinese emissions increased rapidly.
(2) Germany: subsidizes renewable energies heavily and accepts strong emission reduction targets, yet plans to build a large number of coal-fired power plants. They assert that they will have cap-and-trade, with a cap that reduces emissions by whatever amount is needed. But the physics tells us that if they continue to burn coal, no cap can solve the problem, because of the long carbon dioxide lifetime.
(3) Other cases are described on my Columbia University web site, e.g., Switzerland finances construction of coal plants, Sweden builds them, and Australia exports coal and sets atmospheric carbon dioxide goals so large as to guarantee destruction of much of the life on the planet.
Indeed, ‘goals’ and ‘caps’ on carbon emissions are practically worthless, if coal emissions continue, because of the exceedingly long lifetime of carbon dioxide in the air. Nobody realistically expects that the large readily available pools of oil and gas will be left in the ground. Caps will not cause that to happen – caps only slow the rate at which the oil and gas are used. The only solution is to cut off the coal source (and unconventional fossil fuels).
So did you see it? (You should've I put it in bold for you) One line, hardly a letter bagging just Australia, it sticks the boot into many other countries. And as for our carbon dioxide goals well Kevin 05 has figured a 5% cut is good enough which will do nothing to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere so technically the statement is right.
And the letter is signed:
James and Anniek Hansen
Pennsylvania
United States of America
He and his (I'm presuming, I couldn't be bothered searching) wife have signed it as private citizens, not as the head of NASA's Goddard Institue nor as a Professor from Columbia University, so NASA hasn't told Barack that Australia is destroying the earth. More hard hitting factual journalism brought to you by the Dilly Telegraph.
Monday, June 30, 2008
New publication from the Department of Climate Change
For those of you still to be convinced on the whole climate change thing or you work in NRM and need a bit more infor the federal Department of Climate Change has just released "Managing Australian landscapes in a changing climate - a climate change primer for regional natural resource management bodies". I've only just skimmed through it but if it gets more people thinking and planning about it, it will be a good thing.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Tis trickery.....
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has recently announced Toyota will be building hybrid cars in Australia with a healthy incentive from the Australian government. I will be (mostly) keeping away from the issues of hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate welfare given to the car industry by both side of politics, but will look at some of the issues.
The move will be good for local suppliers particularly if locally made batteries are used, hopefully with flow on effects for other battery consumers (the solar industry for example). It will also be good for reducing inner city air pollution. Now those sort of things are great, but what about the big one, the big question? Will hybrid cars make a difference to greenhouse gas output? Will they save the planet?
We like to look at the fuel consumption, the better the fuel consumption the better it is for the planet right? We don't look at the energy that goes in to building these cars in the first place. Cars are built from steel, aluminum, copper, lead (and nickel in the case of hybrids) and petrochemical derived rubber and plastic all of which require mining, transporting and processing going through numerous steps, and consuming large amounts of energy before taking their final form. So how far do you need to drive that new fuel efficient car (or indeed how many times do you need to use that more efficient fridge/dryer/washing machine etc) to have a positive impact? To use less energy overall than just running the old one? In many cases it will probably never happen. If you really want to make an impact, keep your car well serviced, ensure the tyres are at the correct pressure and use it when you need to. Newer isn't necessarily better.
Or alternately get a motorbike, a tenth the resources to build, twice the fuel economy, no parking problems and ten times the fun.
Wired has an article over here.
The move will be good for local suppliers particularly if locally made batteries are used, hopefully with flow on effects for other battery consumers (the solar industry for example). It will also be good for reducing inner city air pollution. Now those sort of things are great, but what about the big one, the big question? Will hybrid cars make a difference to greenhouse gas output? Will they save the planet?
We like to look at the fuel consumption, the better the fuel consumption the better it is for the planet right? We don't look at the energy that goes in to building these cars in the first place. Cars are built from steel, aluminum, copper, lead (and nickel in the case of hybrids) and petrochemical derived rubber and plastic all of which require mining, transporting and processing going through numerous steps, and consuming large amounts of energy before taking their final form. So how far do you need to drive that new fuel efficient car (or indeed how many times do you need to use that more efficient fridge/dryer/washing machine etc) to have a positive impact? To use less energy overall than just running the old one? In many cases it will probably never happen. If you really want to make an impact, keep your car well serviced, ensure the tyres are at the correct pressure and use it when you need to. Newer isn't necessarily better.
Or alternately get a motorbike, a tenth the resources to build, twice the fuel economy, no parking problems and ten times the fun.
Wired has an article over here.
Sunday, June 8, 2008
Game, offset and match
Offsets look to be the next big thing, they're based on the idea that it's ok to do something over here (clear rainforest, belch out shitloads of pollution etc) provided you do something to "offset" it over there. Hey I'll club this harp seals head in but to offset it I won't do it to those ones over there.
Anyway I found an interesting article on Carbon Offsets over at MotherJones which says things far more eloquently than I could.
..........Yet an astounding 51 percent of those offsets have been generated by paying refrigerant manufacturers to incinerate HFC-23, an industrial byproduct and potent greenhouse gas, instead of spewing it into the atmosphere.......
Anyway I found an interesting article on Carbon Offsets over at MotherJones which says things far more eloquently than I could.
..........Yet an astounding 51 percent of those offsets have been generated by paying refrigerant manufacturers to incinerate HFC-23, an industrial byproduct and potent greenhouse gas, instead of spewing it into the atmosphere.......
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