Even our climate "solutions" are delusions

Composite: Alex Mellon for the Guardian: Getty Images/Tetra Images RF/Alamy

From The Guardian

We now face, on all fronts, a war not just against the living planet and the common good, but against material reality. Power in the United States will soon be shared between people who believe they will ascend to sit at the right hand of God, perhaps after a cleansing apocalypse; and people who believe their consciousness will be uploaded on to machines in a great Singularity.

The Christian rapture and the tech rapture are essentially the same belief. Both are examples of “substance dualism”: the idea that the mind or soul can exist in a realm separate from the body. This idea often drives a desire to escape from the grubby immanence of life on Earth. Once the rapture is achieved, there will be no need for a living planet.

But while it is easy to point to the counter-qualified, science-denying fanatics Donald Trump is appointing to high office, the war against reality is everywhere. You can see it in the British government’s carbon capture and storage scheme, a new fossil fuel project that will greatly raise emissions but is dressed up as a climate solution. And it informs every aspect of this week’s Cop29 climate talks in Azerbaijan.

Here, as everywhere, the living planet is forgotten while capital extends its frontiers. The one thing Cop29 has achieved so far – and it may well be the only thing – is an attempt to rush through new rules for carbon markets, enabling countries and businesses to trade carbon credits – which amount, in effect, to permission to carry on polluting.

In theory, you could justify a role for such markets, if they were used only to counteract emissions that are otherwise impossible to reduce (each credit purchased is meant to represent a tonne of carbon dioxide that has been reduced or removed from the atmosphere). But they’re routinely used as a first resort: a substitute for decarbonisation at home. The living world has become a dump for policy failure.

Essential as ecological carbon stores are, trading them against fossil fuel emissions, which is how these markets operate, cannot possibly work. The carbon that current ecosystems can absorb in one year is pitched against the burning of fossil carbon accumulated by ancient ecosystems over many years.

Nowhere is this magical thinking more apparent than in soil carbon markets, a great new adventure for commodity traders selling both kinds of carbon market products: official “credits” and voluntary carbon offsets. Every form of wishful thinking, over-claiming and outright fraud that has blighted the carbon market so far is magnified when it comes to soil.

We should do all we can to protect and restore soil carbon. About 80% of the organic carbon on the land surface of the planet is held in soil. It’s essential for soil health. There should be strong rules and incentives for good soil management. But there is no realistic way in which carbon trading can help. 

Here are the reasons why.

First, tradable increments of soil carbon are impossible to measure. Because soil depths can vary greatly even within one field, there is currently no accurate, affordable means of estimating soil volume. Nor do we have a good-enough test, across a field or a farm, for bulk density – the amount of soil packed into a given volume. So, even if you could produce a reliable measure of carbon per cubic metre of soil, if you don’t know how much soil you have, you can’t calculate the impact of any changes you make.

A reliable measure of soil carbon per cubic metre is also elusive, as carbon levels can fluctuate massively from one spot to the next. Repeated measurements from thousands of sites across a farm, necessary to show how carbon levels are changing, would be prohibitively expensive. Nor are simulation models, on which the whole market relies, an effective substitute for measurement. So much for the “verification” supposed to underpin this trade.

Second, soil is a complex, biological system that seeks equilibrium. With the exception of peat, it reaches equilibrium at a carbon-to-nitrogen ratio of roughly 12:1. This means that if you want to raise soil carbon, in most cases you will also need to raise soil nitrogen. But whether nitrogen is applied in synthetic fertilisers or in animal manure, it’s a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, which could counteract any gains in soil carbon. It is also one of the most potent causes of water pollution.

Third, carbon levels in agricultural soils soon saturate. Some promoters of soil carbon credits create the impression that accumulation can continue indefinitely. It can’t. There’s a limit to how much a given soil can absorb.

Fourth, any accumulation is reversible. Soil is a highly dynamic system: you cannot permanently lock carbon into it. Microbes constantly process carbon, sometimes stitching it into the soil, sometimes releasing it: this is an essential property of soil health. With rises in temperature, the carbon sequestration you’ve paid for can simply evaporate: there’s likely to be a massive outgassing of carbon from soils as a direct result of continued heating. Droughts can also hammer soil carbon.

Even under current market standards, in which science takes second place to money, you need to show that carbon storage will last for a minimum of 40 years. There is no way of guaranteeing that carbon accumulation in soil will last that long. But as a new paper in Nature argues: “A CO2 storage period of less than 1,000 years is insufficient for neutralising remaining fossil CO2 emissions.”

The only form of organic carbon that might last this long – though only under certain conditions – is added biochar (fine-grained charcoal). But biochar is phenomenally expensive: the cheapest source I was able to find costs roughly 26 times as much as agricultural lime, which itself costs too much for many farmers. There’s a limited amount of material that can be turned into biochar. While making it, if you get the burn just slightly wrong, the methane, nitrous oxide and black carbon you produce will cancel any carbon savings.

There is a kind of substance dualism at work here, too: a concept of soil and soil carbon entirely detached from their earthly realities. This bubble of delusion will burst. If I were a devious financier, I would short the stocks of companies selling these credits.

All such approaches are substitutes for action, whose primary purpose is to enable governments to avoid conflict with powerful interests, especially the fossil fuel industry. At a moment of existential crisis, governments everywhere are retreating into a dreamworld, in which impossible contradictions are reconciled. You can send your legions to war with reality, but eventually we all lose.

[Read more here]

90% of carbon credits/offsets are a furphy.  A lie.  Greenwashing.  So our companies and our politicians can pretend that they're doing something about the climate crisis.  One carbon capture and storage process seems to be genuine, provided all the energy used is green, and that's turning Co2 to rock.

The utter failure of Shell's massive carbon capture plant

From Vice

A first-of-its-kind “green” Shell facility in Alberta is emitting more greenhouse gases than it’s capturing, throwing into question whether taxpayers should be funding it, a new report has found.

Shell’s Quest carbon capture and storage facility captured 5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from the hydrogen produced at its Scotford complex between 2015 and 2019. Scotford refines oil from the Alberta tar sands.

But a new report from human rights organization Global Witness found the hydrogen plant emitted 7.5 million tonnes of greenhouse gases in the same timeframe—including methane, which has 80 times the warming power of carbon during its first 20 years in the atmosphere, and accounts for about a quarter of man-made warming today.

To put that in perspective, the “climate-forward” part of the Scotford plant alone has the same carbon footprint per year as 1.2 million fuel-powered cars, Global Witness said.

“We do think Shell is misleading the public in that sense and only giving us one side of the story,” said Dominic Eagleton, who wrote the report. He said industry’s been pushing for governments to subsidize the production of fossil hydrogen (hydrogen produced from natural gas) that’s supplemented with carbon capture technology as a “climate-friendly” way forward, but the new report shows that’s not the case.

In an email, Shell said the facility was introduced to display the merits of carbon capture technology, but didn’t directly respond to the allegation that its hydrogen component emitted 7.5 million tonnes of greenhouse gases.

“Quest was originally designed as a demonstration project to prove (carbon capture) technology and overall has met or exceeded our expectations,” said Shell Canada spokesperson Stephen Doolan.

Doolan also said that as of today, Quest has captured 6 million tonnes of carbon, but Global Witness noted that as time passes and the facility captures more carbon, it will also emit more.

Quest is the world's first commercial-scale carbon capture facility and one of few like it around the world today. But Global Witness’ findings throw into question whether carbon capture and storage technologies are as green as oil companies claim, or whether they amount to “greenwashing.” Lately, industry players have been saying that carbon capture technology is a key component in reaching net-zero.

“Shell has described the carbon capture facility at its Alberta plant as showing that carbon capture technology is an effective way of reducing carbon emissions, whereas our investigation shows that’s clearly not the case,” Eagleton said. “This should be a wake-up call for governments, not just in Canada, but across the world.”

Quest has already inspired a separate carbon capture project in Norway, and another large-scale project in the Alberta Scotford facility. Meanwhile, Germany announced this week that even though it’s opting to subsidize clean hydrogen, it won’t foot the bill for “blue hydrogen,” which uses fossil fuels during production and then sequesters carbon emissions using carbon capture technology (the same type of hydrogen production at Shell’s Scotford plant).

Global Witness’ report also notes that Canada’s federal and Alberta governments spent hundreds of millions of dollars of public funds—at least US$654 million—to pay for the billion-dollar Quest project.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a scam.  It's greenwashing.  It's pretend.  It doesn't actually reduce CO2 in the atmosphere.  It's a nonsense.  Shell can pretend to care about emissions while pocketing billions of our money.

The only CCS worth anything is the one where CO2 is turned into rock.  And that costs so much we'll need a carbon price of at least $100 to make it work.

Let's start with the cow

From a tweet thread by Tony Seba

Let me start with #insulin. In the 1970s, insulin was extracted from the pancreas of animals. In the 1980s, @Genentech, working with Eli Lilly (@LillyPad), developed insulin using a new technology that I call #PrecisionFermentation. It wasn’t animal insulin. It was human insulin.

The mainstream would say: “health care is slow, it can’t be disrupted.” Well, here’s the S-curve of #PrecisionFermentation human insulin. Human insulin disrupted animal insulin in about 13 years.









#PrecisionFermentation is a concept that I coined in my  @rethink_x report ‘Rethinking Food and Agriculture’ with @CatherineTubb in September 2019.

Think about beer #fermentation. You take a microorganism (a yeast) and feed it sugar, wheat, nitrogen.. and out comes beer.

The difference with #PrecisionFermentation: you genetically modify the yeast, so it can produce the ingredient you want. In this case, a #protein.

The #protein itself cannot be #GeneticallyModified. The yeast is, but there’s no genetic material in proteins. None. Anyone who tells you “#GMOprotein” is lying to you. Proteins have exactly no generic material.

How is #PrecisionFermentation going to disrupt #milk? — Milk is almost 90% water. 3.3% of milk is #proteins, and that is the commercially valuable part of #dairy. So, essentially, you disrupt 3% of that milk bottle and the entire dairy industry is gone.

The #PrecisionFermentation disruption of #dairy is a #B2B ingredient #disruption. No consumer behavior change is needed. All the industry needs to do is disrupt protein shakes, protein bars etc. and ⅓ of #dairy industry revenues go away.

This technology has existed for 40 years and they’ve gone through an incredible capability cost curve. #PrecisionFermentation dairy proteins are already in the market (cheese, chocolate, ice cream etc). This is not in the future. This is now.

To give you an idea of the cost curve of #PrecisionFermentation, between 2000 and 2020, the cost per kilo/pound went down by about 10,000x in 20 years from ~$1m to ~$100. That cost curve makes #MooresLaw (computing) look like a straight line into the future.




Over the next ten years, we’re going to experience the #disruption of #food and #agriculture. And I am going to focus on the cow.

Because the cow is — by far — the most inefficient food production technology on the planet.

Every #animal that we use for #livestock is going to be #disrupted. If the cost curve keeps improving the way it has over the last few decades, the cost-per-kilo of #PrecisionFermentation proteins will reach price parity with the cow by ~2025. That’s only three years away.

We know that in #food and #ingredients, #disruptions happen quickly and they happen as S-curves. Think about Pepsi and Coca Cola. In the 1980s, in the United States, they went from all cane sugar to all corn-based sugar in only four years.

This is not a “veggie revolution”.  What is happening today is the ‘Second Domestication of Plants and Animals’. We’re going from domesticating large organisms — cow sheep horse chicken — to microorganisms as a source of food.

#PrecisionFermentation proteins are 5-100x more resource-efficient than the cow. #PFproteins, casein and whey, can be made today using 100x less land than the cow. Think about it. 100x less land.

An Israeli company called @Remilk_Foods announced that they’re going to open the world’s largest facility to create cow-free milk in Denmark. They’re going to make the dairy equivalent of 50,000 cows on 750,000 sq-ft = a standard industrial-size facility. A fermentation farm.

Canada’s dairy industry has about 1 million cows (whole country). Take 20 @Remilk_Foods facilities, i.e. #PrecisionFermentation farms, and they could produce the equivalent of 1m cows. This would take 344 acres and disrupt the whole dairy industry in Canada. That’s it. Gone!

How quickly is this going to happen? — The CEO of @Remilk_Foods says they can produce dairy as cheap as animal protein by 2024, which is within the cost curve that I published 3 years ago. That’s only 3 years away, not 20 or 30 as the mainstream would suggest. We need to prepare.

#FermentationFarms are the new #FoodFarms where we are going to create our proteins. New business model innovations and possibilities will open up, in this case, for example: #FoodAsSoftware.

The #proteins we eat today come from just a few #plants and #animals that we domesticated thousands of years ago. 12 plants and 5 animals account for 75% of food. There are millions of plants & animals on Earth. There’s a huge possibility space out there. #PrecisionFermentation

With #FoodAsSoftware and #PrecisionFermentation, we can make proteins from any animal, from any plant, at speed and scale. The number of possible #proteins mathematically is infinite. I did the numbers. It is larger than the number of atoms in the universe.

And it’s not just about the cow. It’s not even about food. #PrecisionFermentation is disruptive across many sectors. It’s being used for #cosmetics. #Collagen, for instance. #HumanCollagen is being made with precision fermentation. Today!

#SweetProteins are going to be so disruptive! One of those proteins — #brazzein — is ~1000x sweeter than cane sugar. 1 pound of brazzein can sweeten the equivalent of 1000 pounds of sugar. Think about that! Without the #insulin reaction.

The magic #ingredient that makes  @ImpossibleFoods’ meat smell and taste like meat is #heme. Heme is only 2% of their burgers. Think about how  @generalelectric got disrupted with only 2% market penetration of solar, wind & batteries (#SWB). Same thing is happening with #meat.

And you may think: “will this fly in x” or “will they eat it in #Texas?” — Yes, they will. I was at the airport in #Houston, and sure enough, they’re selling #ImpossibleNachos & #ImpossibleQuesadillas. And the menu doesn’t even say it’s vegetarian.








This is not just the #disruption of the cow. This is the disruption of all food that comes from animals: pork, fish eggs etc. All of them can be, and will be, disrupted by #PrecisionFermentation and #FoodAsSoftware.

I expect three phases in the “#Disruption of #Food & #Agriculture”. What we’re undergoing now is the first phase, which is #ingredients, #B2B etc.

The second phase, which starts around 2024, is more complex proteins & meats that will be made with #PrecisionFermentation, and later, #CellularAgriculture.

I expect that the animal extraction industry, the livestock-as-food industry, will be gone by 2035. It’s pretty much over. I expect the dairy industry to be bankrupt by 2030 — that’s less than 10 years away — and the whole livestock industry by 2035.

That doesn’t mean you can’t eat a cow after 2035. You can, but it’s going to be a little bit like the horse and the car. You can still ride horses, but it’s not a mainstream form of transportation, and it’s very expensive. Eating cows will be just like owning a horse today


For those of you who think Tony Seba's views are way out there .... you're wrong. He has consistently called it right for at least a decade. He understands that new technologies grow *exponentially*, not linearly.  And given how high emissions from beef, mutton and other meats are, this could save the world.  Because if we're all eating vat meat and vat eggs and drinking vat milk, then all that land freed up by ending animal husbandry will be able to revert to forest.  And that will be the most powerful carbon capture and storage process we could have.

"Clean" brown coal hydrogen project a dud

From RenewEconomy

A proposed expansion of a controversial brown coal-to-hydrogen project in Victoria is under increasing pressure, with a new report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis finding that it’s likely an economic dud.

The Hydrogen Energy Supply Chain (HESC) is a project jointly run by the Australian and Japanese governments to take brown coal from the Latrobe Valley and produce liquid hydrogen to then ship to Japan.

The pilot project was completed last year, with just 2.6 tonnes of liquefied hydrogen delivered to Japan. Now HESC is moving towards commercialisation with a Green Innovation Fund grant from Japan of ¥220 billion (approximately AU$2.35 billion) to upscale to 30,000 to 40,000 tonnes of hydrogen a year.

Using coal to produce hydrogen is the most emissions-intensive way to do it, creating 18 to 20 times more CO2 than the amount of hydrogen produced.

If this isn’t sounding very ‘green’ to you, you’d be right. The project is classed as “clean” blue hydrogen only due to carbon capture and storage, which so far hasn’t worked in any meaningful way around the world. It is also not yet operational at the HESC site.

The report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis notes that currently coal-based hydrogen is cheaper than renewable hydrogen. However, this won’t be the case for long.

“As renewable energy scales up, its costs are expected to fall, as are the costs of electrolysers used to produce the renewable hydrogen; so much so that by 2030, just when the HESC reaches full-scale production, it will be based on a more expensive technology,” Coal Sector Energy Finance Analyst Andrew Gorringe wrote in the report.

“HESC will struggle to prove commercially viable in the medium term as it competes with other suppliers of hydrogen beyond the initial short-term off-take agreement with Japan.”

The other problem the report highlights is just how far the hydrogen has to go to get from Victoria to Japan. Hydrogen – being the smallest element – is prone to large losses even in liquid form. The liquification process, where the hydrogen is cooled to -253 degrees, takes up over 30% of the energy of the hydrogen itself.

Plus the long shipping journey from Victoria to Japan also causes a large loss of hydrogen in the form of ‘boil off’.

“The hydrogen lost for boil-off and fuel use for propulsion for the 9,000km journey could be up to 40% of the cargo, and boil-off could be as high as 9 times that of the equivalent loss experienced in LNG shipping,” says the report.

See this, too : The Hydrogen Furphy 

A microbe which gobbles up CO2

The microbe was discovered in volcanic seeps near the Italian island of Vulcano. Photograph: Fabrizio Villa/Getty Images

From The Guardian

A microbe discovered in a volcanic hot spring gobbles up carbon dioxide “astonishingly quickly”, according to the scientists who found it.

The researchers hope to utilise microbes that have naturally evolved to absorb CO2 as an efficient way of removing the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere. Ending the burning of fossil fuels is critical in ending the climate crisis, but most scientists agree CO2 will also need to be sucked from the air to limit future damage.

The new microbe, a cyanobacterium, was discovered in September in volcanic seeps near the Italian island of Vulcano, where the water contains high levels of CO2. The researchers said the bug turned CO2 into biomass faster than any other known cyanobacteria.

In February the team also explored hot springs in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, US, where levels of CO2 are even higher. Those results are now being analysed. The researchers said all their data on microbes would be published and made available to other scientists as a database that pairs DNA sequences with banked samples of the bacteria.

Dr Braden Tierney, at Weill Cornell Medical College and Harvard Medical School, said: “Our lead collaborator at Harvard isolated this organism that grew astonishingly quickly, compared to other cyanobacteria.”

“The project takes advantage of 3.6bn years of microbial evolution,” he said. “The nice thing about microbes is that they are self-assembling machines. You don’t have that with a lot of the chemical approaches [to CO2 capture].”

The new microbe had another unusual property, Tierney said: it sinks in water, which could help collect the CO2 it absorbs.

The idea of using bacteria to capture CO2, potentially enhanced by genetic engineering, is an active research area. A recent review suggested that bacteria could produce useful chemicals, as well as trapping CO2, saying: “Using modified bacteria to manage CO2 has the added benefit of generating useful industrial byproducts like biofuels, pharmaceutical compounds, and bioplastics.”

The US company LanzaTech already uses bacteria to convert CO2 into commercial fuels and chemicals. The UK-based CyanoCapture, backed by Shell and Elon Musk, is harnessing cyanobacteria to produce biomass and biological oils. Numerous companies are working on using algae to produce biofuels, although ExxonMobil ended its research on this recently.

When biofuels are burned, the CO2 captured returns to the atmosphere. But research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the US is exploring the use of bacteria to precipitate carbon-capturing minerals from seawater, locking up the CO2. This work is based on a catalyst enzyme that is also being examined by scientists in China, who are looking at hot vents on the ocean floor for heat-resistant enzymes.

Bacteria found in caves have also been shown to turn CO2 into minerals. Other scientists are aiming to use bacteria to cut CO2 emissions from cement production.

It's not clear from the article or the company's website just how much CO2 is needed in the water for this process to work.  And the problem is that CO2 makes up only a small proportion of the atmosphere, and that's a key part of the cost of  carbon capture and storage.  However, the exhaust flues of gas power stations contain concentrated CO2.  If this could be dissolved in water, the magic of this cyanobacteria could be put to use. This could be a game-changer.

Removing 1 million tons of carbon a year

From Interesting Engineering

Carbon capture technologies have great potential for helping in the fight against climate change, and big names such as Bill Gates and Elon Musk are showing their faith in the technology by investing in new solutions.

Now, the world looks set for a breakthrough moment in carbon capture technologies, with a new facility set to open in Scotland that will remove up to one million tons of carbon [dioxide] from the air each year, a press statement reveals.

The direct air capture (DAC) facility will be built by UK energy transition company Storegga Geotechnologies in collaboration with the Canadian carbon capture technology firm Carbon Engineering.

The facility, which will be the largest in the world, will extract the equivalent carbon (one million tons) that would be absorbed by 40 million trees over the course of a year. All of the absorbed carbon will then be deposited in storage sites under the sea.

The facility will feature large fans that pull air into a liquid-filled vat that binds the carbon dioxide. Once bound, the captured carbon is refined and transformed into calcium carbonate pellets.

These pellets, in turn, are heated and decompose into a CO2 stream alongside calcium oxide. This stream is then cleaned of impurities, after which it is pumped into an undersea storage site.

The new facility joins a host of other carbon capture technology innovations aimed at meeting the requirement of reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere if we are to reverse the adverse effects of climate change.

As the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) points out on its website, "to reach net-zero emissions, we need to do more than just reduce our emissions: we need to actively remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or offset its effects."

Another new system, the Bill Gates-backed Carbfix, will extract carbon from the atmosphere and turn it into rocks. One devised by UCLA scientists, meanwhile, takes inspiration from seashells to extract carbon from the ocean, which would, in turn, absorb more out of the air.

While the Scottish facility from Storegga Geotechnologies and Carbon Engineering will mainly be aimed at removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, both firms do say they want to eventually sell carbon dioxide collected from their plants.

The two companies are currently seeking a site location for their new facility in the country of Scotland, which was chosen due to the fact that a large number of its labor force is already trained in the skills needed for such projects — renewable energy met over 97 percent of the country's energy demands in 2020.

In their statement, Carbon Engineering says both partners aim for the facility to be operational by 2026.

Sounds good, doesn't it?  But there are a few problems.  First, although a million tonnes a year seems a lot,  China's and the USA's annual emissions total 15 billion tonnes of CO2 a year, about 40% of global emissions.  We would need 15,000 of these plants just to offset the emissions of these countries.  Still, if we put our minds to it, and our shoulders to the wheel, etc., etc., we could in principle achieve that.  

However, that's not the only problem.  To permanently store the CO2, we need to either put it into caverns where it can never escape, otherwise it'll just go straight back into the atmosphere; or convert it to rock by dissolving it in water and pumping it into basalt.  In the manufacturing process, calcium carbonate (i.e., limestone) is produced, which could simply be dumped into the sea, but the calcium needed for this is produced by energy-intensive methods, either electrolysis or by reducing lime at high temperatures. 

Also, these guys are also going to be selling their carbon dioxide.  Which means it's not being withdrawn from the atmosphere.  I understand it's a startup, and they may need temporary expedients to help it survive until the carbon price is high enough to make direct air capture of CO2 profitable.  All the same.

The best way to slash net emissions is to replace coal power stations with wind and solar and other renewables, and to replace ICEVs with EVs or PHEVs.  But carbon capture and storage(CCS) will be needed, if only to reverse the emissions of cement production and air travel, together (depending on your data source) around 10% of global emissions.  These sectors will need to pay a carbon tax to fund this and other CCS schemes.  And if we need to offset just these sectors, the number of CCS plants needed will be much fewer.

So, not as big a step forward as the article is trying to make out, but still worthwhile.

The ill-fated Petra Nova carbon capture project

Source: ResearchGate

From IEEFA

NRG Energy Inc. just sold its 50 percent stake in the world’s largest carbon capture plant for only about $3.6 million, less than a half-percent of the Texas project’s roughly $1 billion construction costs. The sale leaves JX Nippon Oil & Gas Exploration Corp. as the sole owner of the 240-MW coal-fired Petra Nova power plant.

S&P Market Intelligence described the deal as “a setback for supporters of carbon-capture projects at existing fossil fuel plants.” It is far more.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) sank $195 million into the carbon capture and storage (CCS) plant, hoping to demonstrate the potential for the technology to counteract greenhouse gas emissions of coal plants. The NRG fire sale of its half of the project is a declaration that the taxpayer investment was a technological failure and a financial loss.

The U.S. government needs to ask hard questions about investing more taxpayer dollars in CCS for coal plants. The CCS technology used in the Petra Nova project was not new. The DOE called it “proven.” But it did not work as well as promised. Other CCS projects attempted at power plants have failed, as well.

The Petra Nova facility began operations in 2017. The CCS equipment was installed to capture CO2 from a slipstream of the W.A. Parish Unit 8’s flue gas. The captured CO2 traveled via 80-mile pipeline to an oilfield near Houston for use in enhanced oil recovery (EOR) operations to increase extraction. Petra Nova’s target CCS capture rate was 90 percent. NRG claims it met the target.

But Petra Nova’s owners have never provided the actual data behind that claim. Emissions data for Parish Unit 8 reported to the EPA suggests the actual CO2 capture rate was substantially lower than 90%, perhaps as low as 65% to 70%. And the average capture rate does not include emissions from the gas-fired combustion turbine used to power the facility. Adding those emissions lowers the overall on-site capture rate to perhaps as low as 55% to 58%.

Petra Nova also was expected to be in operation some 85% of the time but failed to meet its target because so many technical problems and so much downtime were experienced—not just in the CCS facility and in Parish Unit 8, but also in the CO2 pipeline and the oilfield where the captured CO2 was injected. Similar problems can be expected to affect any carbon capture project, especially at an aging coal plant.

The unit was taken offline in May 2020 and remains down. JX Nippon now says it anticipates bringing Petra Nova back online in the second quarter of 2023 but has not provided an exact schedule or cost estimate.

Methane emissions from the mining of coal, which have received too little attention to date, also weren’t reported. Using the coal-fired San Juan Generating Station as an example, IEEFA found that even if a CCS system could achieve 95 percent capture rate from the plant—which based on IEEFA’s research is not at all likely—taking the coal mining methane emissions into account would drop the actual capture rate to 72 percent.

IEEFA observed in a 2020 report that NRG Energy recorded three impairment charges related to the plant and to Petra Nova Parish Holdings, a subsidiary. The charges, recorded in 2016, 2017 and 2019, totaled $310 million. NRG Energy had written off essentially all its investment in the project. This is striking, given that Petra Nova not only benefitted from the U.S. Energy Department’s $195 million grant but also had received $250 million in concessionary lending from the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) and Mizuho Bank, Ltd.

The actual costs of carbon capture at Petra Nova have never been officially released. An assistant DOE secretary for fossil energy said at a June 2020 webinar that the cost of carbon capture would need to drop by half, to $30 per metric ton, to be commercially viable. Since Petra Nova was the department’s flagship carbon capture project at the time, the comment may be an indication that the cost of carbon capture may have been $60 per ton, but it is not clear. Also, the figure did not include the costs to compress the CO2 for pipeline transport, or the pipeline transport and underground injection costs.

Southern Co.’s Kemper CCS project was designed to gasify lignite (a soft coal formed from peat) and capture the carbon before combustion. The cost initially was estimated at $3 billion, but it ballooned to $7.5 billion. Also, the project’s coal gasification process did not operate reliably during pre-operational testing, and the CCS capture portion of the project was scrapped. The unit now runs solely on natural gas with no CO2 controls.

IEEFA’s recent review of carbon capture efforts in other countries found similar problems abound. It concluded that using carbon capture to extend the life of fossil fuels power plants is a significant financial and technical risk.

Recommendation: Stop taking U.S. taxpayers for a ride on a CCS money guzzler

The U.S. government must sharply scrutinize all claims made by applicants for federal dollars to promote CCS technology. IEEFA research indicates that the technology is far from proven. Claims of high capture rates are meaningless when:The claimed high capture rates for CCS have not been sustained on an annual and multi-year basis;
The data needed to verify Petra Nova’s claim of a 90% capture rate at any point has not been made public;
The technology does not capture all air pollution emission streams from the site;
The upstream extraction or mining emissions are not taken into account; and
The downstream emissions from the plant and from the use of captured CO2 for EOR are not considered.

Given the amount of funds involved and the exposure of taxpayer dollars to risk, the U.S. government must implement robust due diligence and get beyond the advertising hype to the actual facts about carbon capture technology. It should not tolerate any more wasteful Petra Nova debacles.

Carbon capture at $1000/tonne

 From the Guardian

A solar-powered and tent-sized Australian prototype machine that can suck CO2 from the air has secured a $700,000 contract to capture and store carbon.

The deal, part of a project backed by corporates including the owners of Google and Facebook, is thought to be the first time an Australian company has secured a deal to remove CO2 using direct air capture (DAC) technology.


AspiraDAC will deploy about 180 of the machines, developed and made in Australia, to capture and store 500 tonnes of CO2 by 2027 at an agreed US$1,000 (AU$1,469) a tonne.

In April several major corporates, including the owners of Facebook and Google, announced a new venture called Frontier that would commit US$925m (AU$1,359) to projects that pull CO2 from the air and then store it.

In the first major purchase under the venture, technology company Stripe, one of the partners in Frontier, announced this week it was spending US$2.4m (AU$3.5m) on six direct air capture projects around the world, including AspiraDAC.

The executive director of AspiraDAC, Julian Turecek, said up to 180 modules would be needed to fulfil the contract and these would cover an area of less than half a hectare.

He said the company had not confirmed the location or the geological storage for the site, but confirmed depleted oil and gas reservoirs at Moomba, in South Australia, were being considered.

“We really think this is a launch moment for direct air capture in Australia,” Turecek said. “This is the start of what could be a significant industry.”

He said the carbon removal off-take agreement with Frontier was likely to be the first of several that AspiraDAC would deliver.

Southern Green Gas has developed the machines in partnership with the University of Sydney, and will build and deliver them to AspiraDAC.

The business development manager and co-founder at Southern Green Gas, Brett Cooper, believed the contract to deliver the emissions reductions using DAC was a first in Australia. Each module can capture two tonnes of CO2 a year.






Cooper said: “This is a quintessential Australian solution because not everyone has the land area that also has the intensity of solar energy that we have.”

The amount of CO2 reduction under the new contract is tiny, but Cooper said the deal is a major step for the industry which he believes has big growth potential in Australia.

At the core of the Australian machine is a sponge-like material developed at the University of Sydney that holds on to CO2 molecules as air passes through it.

Fans draw air into canisters containing the sponges, and then heat is used to extract the pure CO2 that can be pumped and stored underground. All power comes from the solar panels that cover the units like an A-frame tent.

The Sydney team of scientists and student researchers won a $250,000 prize last

year to support the development of the material from tech billionaire Elon Musk’s US$100m (AU$147m) X-Prize that is trying to establish large-scale carbon removal projects.

Prof Deanna D’Alessandro, who supervises the Sydney team, said: “Carbon drawdown is going to be absolutely essential. This is directly addressing the problem and that is really powerful.”

“The students are seeing the materials they’re making having a real-world impact on carbon drawdown.”

Turecek said: “Nature has designed the perfect air capture machine and that’s a tree. But DAC is doing that mechanically and once we can do that at scale we can control that CO2 removal and make it permanent.”

An International Energy Agency plan for the world’s economies to reach net zero emissions by 2050 says direct air capture technologies will need to deliver more than 85m tonnes of CO2 capture by 2030. Currently, the agency says the technology can deliver just 10,000 tonnes around the world.

In May, the US government announced a US$3.5bn program to build four major hubs for direct air capture projects.

The world’s biggest direct air capture plant is in Iceland and the company behind the plant, Climeworks, announced this week it was expanding capacity to 36,000 tonnes of CO2 a year.

Dr Paul Feron, a scientist working on carbon capture technologies at CSIRO, said the agency was working on three different DAC technologies that he hoped would be commercialised within a decade.

“We have got to the point in terms of the CO2 levels in the atmosphere that we need to have an ‘all of the above’ approach,” he said.

“We need to be good at using as little energy as we can and we need to replace our fossil fuels with renewable energy as quickly as we can. But that most likely won’t be enough and we need to manage the carbon that is already delivering climate change. That’s why there is enormous interest in DAC.

“We need to plant as many trees as we can, but it’s a reflection on the severity of the problem that we now have to look at [DAC] as well.”

$1000/tonne!  This is absurdly expensive.  It may be that a steep learning operates, as has happened with wind, solar and batteries.   So we shouldn't dismiss it.   All the same ...... CO2 emissions are currently 35 BILLION tonnes per annum.

Source: Our world in data

Multi-billion project to kickstart carbon capture

 From CNN

The US Department of Energy is announcing a massive investment in direct air carbon removal projects, in hopes of kickstarting an industry that energy experts say is critical to getting the country's planet-warming emissions under control.

Direct air carbon removal projects are like giant vacuum cleaners that suck planet-warming carbon dioxide out of the air and lock it away. They use chemicals to remove the gas from the air and store it in rocks deep underground or put it to use in materials like concrete.

Nature can do this on its own -- forests, bogs and oceans all suck carbon out of the atmosphere -- but not nearly fast enough to keep pace with human fossil fuel emissions. Experts tell CNN these giant, carbon-removing machines are the next frontier to bring CO2 levels down.

The Department of Energy on Thursday is releasing a notice of intent for developers for four direct air capture hubs -- each capable of removing over a million tons of CO2 per year -- using $3.5 billion from the bipartisan infrastructure law. Removing 1 million tons of CO2 per year is equivalent to taking around 200,000 gas-powered cars off the road.

"The UN's latest climate report made clear that removing legacy carbon pollution from the air through direct air capture and safely storing it is an essential weapon in our fight against the climate crisis," Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said in a statement. Granholm said the infrastructure law funding "will not only make our carbon-free future a reality but will help position the U.S. as a net-zero leader."

Department officials say the notice, which was shared first with CNN, is a crucial step in building this industry in the US.

"For us to get to millions of tons [removed from the air] per year through these demonstrations will be critical," said Jen Wilcox, principal deputy assistant secretary in DOE's Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management.

President Joe Biden is targeting net-zero carbon emissions in the US by 2050, but experts say that isn't achievable by simply transitioning from fossil fuel energy to renewables -- the country must also actively remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere because of how much it has already emitted.

Direct air removal "is a suite of tech and strategies to get to this multi-gigaton carbon removal scale we need to get to in roughly 25-30 years," said John Larsen, a partner at the nonpartisan firm Rhodium Group.

The US needs to decarbonize and to dramatically scale up direct air removal, Larsen said, to the point that these machines can remove not millions but billions of tons of CO2 per year. A billion tons of CO2 removed in a year would be equivalent to taking over 215 million vehicles off the road.

Climeworks' direct air removal project in Iceland is the largest, according to the company, removing about 10 metric tons of CO2 every day -- about the same amount of carbon that 500 trees could remove in a year.

The US hubs envisioned by DOE will be much larger. Humans have not yet built a megaton-sized direct air removal system, Larsen said, and DOE's hubs are an important first step to both dramatically scale these projects up and to find out what works and what doesn't.

"What you're really building is an entire carbon removal industry," Larsen said. "The chances of getting to gigaton scale go down dramatically if we don't start this decade. It's way, way harder."

The momentum is growing quickly for direct air removal. Before 2018, the amount of money going to these projects in the US was miniscule -- about $11 million per year. The $3.5 billion Congress recently passed for carbon removal, as part of the bipartisan infrastructure law, is a significant increase in funding.

"There's a huge emphasis around carbon removal as a critical tool that needs to be scaled up today," Wilcox said. "We're definitely going to see the needle move in this space over the next 5-10 years."

DOE said it wants to see applications from different regions in the US that can demonstrate a high potential for carbon sequestration, can be scaled up even further and can create long-lasting jobs. It's also looking for applications from fossil fuel communities or communities with industrial capacity.

DOE officials are also aiming to create hubs that are themselves carbon neutral. For instance, the Iceland project runs on clean geothermal energy.

"Thinking about places where you're going to integrate these with other decarbonization efforts are really important," said Erin Burns, executive director of Carbon180, an organization focused on carbon removal. "We want to see these powered by zero-carbon energy, by renewables. It's essential for climate that this does not slow down or delay mitigation in any way."

Separately, DOE announced nearly $25 million for six new clean hydrogen projects in several states, including a new hydrogen production plant that captures 90 to 99% of its CO2 emissions, and new research on hydrogen fuels.

[I've talked about this before]

The Climeworks carbon dioxide removal site in Iceland.

Fake whale poo and decarbonisation

 From The Guardian

Scientists and engineers have pumped 300 litres of simulated whale poo into the ocean off Sydney as part of efforts to snag a share of Elon Musk’s US$100m prize for capturing and storing carbon.

The team, known as WhaleX, carried out its first open-ocean experiment on Sunday about eight kilometres off Port Botany in New South Wales after gaining clearance from the federal government.

The 12-strong team are racing to carry out a follow-up experiment using up to 2000 litres of the simulated poo – a mix of nitrogen, phosphorus and trace elements – before the end of January.

Tesla and SpaceX founder Musk announced in February he was funding a US$100m competition through the XPrize Foundation to find methods that could safely capture and store carbon dioxide at a scale of a billion tonnes or more a year.

Musk said at the time the competition was not “theoretical” but was looking for teams that could “build real systems that can make a measurable impact and scale to a gigaton level.”

WhaleX registered for the four-year competition and will send a report before February hoping to be selected for one of up to 15 “milestone” prizes of U$1m each.

Whale faeces is known as an ocean fertiliser and a food for phytoplankton. When phytoplankton grow and multiply, they absorb carbon. When they die, they sink to the ocean floor taking much of the carbon with them.

Dr Edwina Tanner, a climate scientist who is leading the WhaleX project, and colleagues said they targeted a 225sq km area off Port Botany where their previous water sampling had shown a deficiency in nutrients.

From a small boat, the team aerated the formulation with a gel made from seaweed and mixed that with a dye so they could see from a drone how it dispersed.

The formulation, manufactured as an aqua food by a fertiliser company in regional New South Wales, was formulated to match the deficiencies in nutrients in the area where the trial was carried out.

The amount released was about the equivalent of a Humpback whale doing two poos, Tanner said. To be successful, she said the aqua food mix needs to stay in the top 20 to 30m for at least a day.

“It was incredible. The food stayed buoyant and well within the trial zone location,” Tanner said.

The team thinks the experiment, which was to test the method used to disperse the formulation and to see how buoyant it was, will have sequestered about two tonnes of carbon dioxide.

Tanner said “a lot of science” would need to be done to make sure the approach is not damaging the marine environment, but she said as it closely mimicked a process that has been happening for millions of years “we’re confident we can do this safely.”

A further trial is being planned before the end of January and will see up to 2000 litres dispersed from a larger boat in the same area of ocean.

If scaled up, WhaleX would fall into a broad category of carbon reduction efforts known as negative emissions technologies – an approach where more CO2 is sequestered than is used during the process.

WhaleX is looking along whale migration routes for suitable sites for further trials, including near Morocco, Oman and Kenya. An area off Western Australia over the north-west shelf has also been selected.

Managing director of Ocean Nourishment Corporation (ONC) and one of the partners in the project, John Ridley, said work would continue even if it was not successful in the XPrize competition.

He said the process was currently costing about $25 to $30 to sequester a tonne of carbon dioxide.  [This suggests the minimum necessary carbon price to lead to de-carbonisation]

He said investors were being attracted to it because of the potential scale and, he said, it could store carbon securely and for longer than some land-based methods. ONC was actively speaking with more than 10 investor groups from Europe and Australia.

He said the world’s climate crisis was pushing the planet close to “several dangerous tipping points”.

“We need emissions reductions and carbon removal and we have to escalate both of those really fast, almost at military scale.”

This month the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report summarising the potential risks and benefits of a range of supposed ocean-based methods to remove and store CO2.

The report said there was medium to high confidence that adding nutrients to the ocean to promote phytoplankton growth could be “effective and scalable”.

There was less confidence about the potential environmental risks of the method on a very large scale, but the report said “there are deep-ocean impacts and concern for undesirable geochemical and ecological consequences.”

The report added: “No matter what the impact of [ocean fertilisation] on the deep sea, it should be noted that what deliberate and large-scale [ocean fertilisation] would do is essentially speed up the natural processes that are already happening, under any current scenario of enhanced CO2 in the atmosphere.”

A department of agriculture, water and the environment spokesperson said it was aware of the WhaleX project and the department had confirmed the experiment could go ahead without the need for any permit.

A statement said the WhaleX trials were “considered to be genuine scientific research” under the London Protocol that covers dumping at sea as it was considered a “placement” of materials.

The statement said: “For future trials involving larger volumes of material, the department has advised WhaleX that additional information would be required for the department to determine whether the activity could still be defined as ‘genuine scientific research’ under the London protocol.”

“If the department considers that future trials are of a scale that cannot be considered to be genuine scientific research, the activity would be considered as dumping under the sea dumping Act.”

The spokesperson said the government did not have any policies on ocean fertilisation that would regulate future large scale activities.

But the spokesperson also said: “However, work is under way with reference to Australia’s obligations under the London protocol to consider ocean fertilisation as a future regulatory area.”

In November, teams of Australian university students at Monash University, the University of Sydney and the University of Tasmania each won a $250,000 prize in the competition for proposed carbon projects. Judges were looking for student projects that would make them “competitive applicants” in the overall competition.

After four years XPrize judges will pick one U$50m grand prize winner and a U$30m prize to go be shared among up to three runners up.

Burying coal pollution a waste of time and money

 

From Environment Victoria

1. IT CAN’T DELIVER IN TIME OR AT SCALE

Capturing, transporting and burying millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide from coal power stations is impractical and expensive. So much so that even this coal baron admits that CCS ‘does not work’ and ‘is just cover for the politicians.’

Whether or not CCS ever becomes a viable technology, the United Nations Development program has said it “will arrive on the battlefield far too late to help the world avoid dangerous climate change”.

Of course coal lobbyists are always pointing to the future, saying that CCS is just on the horizon. The problem is they’ve literally been saying that for decades. For example, in this 2009 Lateline report a coal industry executive says that commercial CCS plants would be up and running in Australia by 2015. Well, we’re still waiting …

2. IT WASTES WATER AND ENERGY

Because of the energy it takes to capture, compress and transport greenhouse pollution, CCS uses a huge chunk of the energy the power station produces in the first place. (They also use a third more water than conventional coal-fired power stations).

3. IT CREATES A LONG-TERM, POTENTIALLY DANGEROUS LIABILITY

If CCS is going to work it needs to ensure that greenhouse pollution stays underground forever. Can the coal industry really guarantee that this will happen? And who will accept liability for fixing the problem if/when something occurs?

4. IT’S EXPENSIVE AND UNDERMINES FUNDING FOR SUSTAINABLE SOLUTIONS

Despite Australian governments pouring $1.3 billion into CCS research since 2007, there are still zero large scale operational projects to show for it. And this report by CO2CRC found retrofitting a hypothetical 2100-megawatt brown coal-fired power station in Victoria would “conservatively” cost an incredible $2.45 billion per boiler.

The numbers involved are staggering, and every cent spent on CCS is a cent not going to proven clean technologies.

5. TRIAL PROJECTS HAVE OVER-PROMISED AND UNDER-DELIVERED

In 2007, eleven CCS projects were scrapped globally. More recently a flagship carbon capture experiment in the US was abandoned after 11 years and $7.5 billion (US) wasted.

6. IT’S COMPLETELY UNNECESSARY

Detailed analysis shows that Australia, one of the sunniest and windiest countries on earth, can be powered by 100% clean energy — no CCS required.

 CCS will be necessary to suck CO2 out of the air in the 2050s and after, but only after we have stopped adding it to the air before that.  Cement production will be difficult to de-carbonise because emitting CO2 is part of the process whereby limestone is converted to cement.  But as for using CCS to "offset" coal emissions, it makes no sense at all.