Tag: CCS technology

Boondoggle: Carbon capture projects are worse than a public nuisance

The world of climate policy abounds with bad ideas – from force-feeding an increasingly reluctant driving public a steady diet of EVs, to regulating popular household appliances out of existence.

From CFACT

By Bonner Cohen, Ph. D.

The world of climate policy abounds with bad ideas – from force-feeding an increasingly reluctant driving public a steady diet of EVs, to regulating popular household appliances out of existence.

But one of the worst is megaprojects aimed at sucking carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the air and burying it deep underground. These pricey monstrosities, we are told, are necessary if the planet is to be saved from the onslaught of manmade greenhouse gases. Known as “direct air capture,” the unproven technology has attracted enough investor interest to finance decarbonization plants that are beginning to sprout up in the U.S. and elsewhere.

In southeastern Montana’s Snowy River region, two strange bedfellows – the Biden administration and ExxonMobil – are proposing a giant carbon sequestration project on and underneath federal land. It would be supported by a vast “carbon capture” network consisting of tens and thousands of miles of new pipelines and dozens of remote storage sites. The White House sees the scheme as advancing its decarbonization agenda, and ExxonMobil is eager to pocket what The Washington Post reports could be as much as $12.7 billion in federal subsidies for participating in the project.

But the Snowy River project is running into fierce resistance from locals, led by ranchers and county officials, who don’t want to see their part of the world used as a dumping ground for a technology they don’t trust. A similar uproar in the Midwest proved the undoing of the Heartland Greenway. Also known as the CO2 pipeline, the Heartland Greenway was supposed to pump 15 million tons of carbon dioxide captured annually from emissions of ethanol plants via a 1200-mile pipeline traversing five states to an underground site in North Dakota. Such was the outcry among landowners, regulators, and elected officials along the path of the pipeline that the developer, Navigator CO2, abandoned the project last October.

Louisiana has over 20 carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) projects in various stages of planning and development, most of them in the southeastern part of the state. Yet even in a state as historically friendly to the oil and gas industry as Louisiana, the projects are encountering stiff headwinds from residents concerned about the impact of injecting massive amounts of CO2 into ground overladen with bayous. In Iceland, Swiss start-up Climeworks recently opened the world’s biggest direct air capture facility, dubbed “Mammoth,” designed to remove 36,000 tons of CO2 from the air each year. After Climeworks captures the CO2, and has it pumped deep underground, it sells offsets based on the captured CO2.

But global carbon offset markets have become so dodgy that the Biden administration found it necessary to issue a set of voluntary guidelines to restore trust in the transactions. Released May 28, the new guidelines will “advance high-integrity” voluntary carbon markets, the White House said in a fact sheet.

Carbon offsets are an artificial commodity – completely unrelated to the climate or any other tangible asset. They are an open invitation to fraud, because it is impossible to say what effect buying or selling them will have on the climate. As even the Biden administration acknowledges: “In too many instances, credits do not live up to the high standards necessary for market participants to transact transparently and with certainty that credit purchases will deliver verifiable decarbonization.” A nine-month investigation in Europe into Verra, the world’s leading certifier of the voluntary carbon offset market, concluded last year that “more than 90% of their rainforest offset credits – among the most used by companies – are likely to be ‘phantom credits’ and do not represent genuine carbon reduction.” Companies using the Verra standard included Disney, Shell, and Gucci.

Corporate interest in the $2 billion carbon offset market has sagged in recent years, and it is not clear that the White House’s guidelines, including such things as voluntary disclosures by market participants, will improve matters. But carbon offsets and direct air capture and sequestration of CO2 fit neatly into the prevailing narrative that rising atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are dangerously warming the plant.

But are they? Atmospheric levels of CO2 began rising in the mid-20th century, but the slight warming the Earth is undergoing dates from the late 17th century. In other words, the planet’s slow rebound from the Little Ice Age (ca. 1250-1800) cannot have been caused by something that happened after World War II. Moreover, today’s higher levels of atmospheric CO2 – about 420 parts per million (ppm) compared with roughly 250 ppm in the Little Ice Age – are highly beneficial to plant life and essential to growing crops needed to feed the world’s 8 billion people.

Some entities – whether selling carbon offsets, providing software platforms to facilitate carbon market transactions, or pocketing taxpayer subsidies for carbon capture and sequestration – can make money on the scheme the White House is trying to rescue. But the price paid by ordinary people for solving a non-existent climate crisis is incalculable.

This article originally appeared at Real Clear Energy

The Biden Administration Ever More Delusional On Energy

Three and a half years into the Biden Administration, and to an ordinary citizen on the ground it might seem like not that much has changed as to energy. Despite hundreds of government actions and initiatives in an all-of-government regulatory onslaught to transform the energy economy, the important things have been remarkably stable. Production of oil and gas are actually up, and prices increases have been relatively modest — far less than one might have anticipated from the extreme regulatory hostility to production.

From The Manhattan Contrarian

Francis Menton

Three and a half years into the Biden Administration, and to an ordinary citizen on the ground it might seem like not that much has changed as to energy. Despite hundreds of government actions and initiatives in an all-of-government regulatory onslaught to transform the energy economy, the important things have been remarkably stable. Production of oil and gas are actually up, and prices increases have been relatively modest — far less than one might have anticipated from the extreme regulatory hostility to production. The percentage of what is called “primary energy” (that is, energy for everything, not just electricity) coming from fossil fuels has remained nearly unchanged. EIA data here for 2022 (latest I can find) show about 79% of U.S. primary energy from fossil fuels, barely changed since Biden took office, and indeed very stable for decades.

Perhaps this situation of stable energy production and consumption results because it reflects what markets and consumers want and need to satisfy their demand for energy. So do you think that the hyperactive regulators might just relax and let the consumers have what they want?

Unfortunately, that is not how this works. Even as the energy producers and consumers have figured out endless workarounds to avoid the fossil fuel suppression that the Bidenauts attempt to impose, the little regulatory tyrants have been busy preparing new bouts of punitive restrictions. Last week saw a round of some of the most sweeping regulatory edicts yet. The regulators really plan to put the people in their place this time.

In the new round, the regulators have gotten farther and farther away from anything realistic, anything consistent with the laws of physics or thermodynamics, anything that might actually work. We are now well into the world of fantasy and delusion.

On last Thursday (April 25), the Administration, via the EPA, announced a suite of no fewer than four final rules “to Reduce Pollution from Fossil Fuel-Fired Power Plants.” Essentially, this is the replacement for the Obama Administration’s so-called “Clean Power Plan,” that ordered a complete re-do of the electricity generation system to gradually shutter fossil fuel plants and replace them with unworkable “renewables.” That Plan got struck down by the Supreme Court in June 2022 for being far beyond anything the EPA was authorized to do under its statutes.

So here is the new Rule covering the comparable subject. The title is “New Source Performance Standards for Greenhouse Gas Emissions from New, Modified, and Reconstructed Fossil Fuel-Fired Electric Generating Units; Emission Guidelines for Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Existing Fossil Fuel-Fired Electric Generating Units; and Repeal of the Affordable Clean Energy Rule.” The document is 1020 pages long because, hey, we’re the EPA, and anything worth doing around here deserves a Rule of at least a thousand pages.

And how does this new Rule achieve the goal of reducing “greenhouse gas emissions”? You could probably spend all week trying to read the thing without ever figuring that out. EPA’s press release makes the following claim:

“EPA’s final Clean Air Act standards for existing coal-fired and new natural gas-fired power plants limit the amount of carbon pollution covered sources can emit, based on proven and cost-effective control technologies that can be applied directly to power plants.”

And what is the “proven and cost-effective control mechanism” they are talking about? The AP summarizes it here in a few words:

Coal-fired power plants would be forced to capture smokestack emissions or shut down under a rule issued Thursday by the Environmental Protection Agency.

It’s the “capture of smokestack emissions” — otherwise known as carbon capture and storage, or CCS. I had a post last August at the time this Rule had been proposed and comments were being received. In my August post I highlighted some of the comments, including those from the states of Ohio and West Virginia. Those comments made mincemeat of any possible claim that CCS technology was either “proven” or “cost-effective.” Not only has it never been proven, but it’s impossible for it ever to work economically. There are many long quotes from comments in that post. Here are just a few.

From the Ohio comment, page 4:

A study of 263 carbon-capture-and-sequestration projects undertaken between 1995 and 2018 found that the majority failed and 78% of the largest projects were cancelled or put on hold.  After the study was published in May 2021, the only other coal plant with a carbon-capture-and-sequestration attachment in the world, Petra Nova, shuttered after facing 367 outages in its three years of operation. . . . [T]his [SaskPower] facility is the world’s only [remaining] operating commercial carbon capture facility at a coal-fired power plant.   And it has never achieved its maximum capacity.  It also battled significant technical issues throughout 2021—to the point that the plant idled the equipment for weeks at a time.  As a result, the plant achieved less than 37% carbon capture that year despite having an official target of 90% . . . . 

From the West Virginia comment, pages 24 – 25:

Take efficiency to start. CCS units run on power, too. An owner can get that power from the plant itself. But this approach makes the plant less efficient by increasing its “parasitic load”—and CCS more than triples combustion turbines’ normal parasitic load. . . . This is the cause the Wyoming study analyzed that showed installing CCS technology would devastate plants’ heat rates and lower net plant efficiency by 36%.

There is endless more of same. The fact is that CCS technology is neither “proven” nor “cost-effective.” It is nowhere after 30 years of trying because it cannot be done economically. It cannot be done economically because it is, in effect, a war against the Second Law of Thermodynamics. To capture more and more of the CO2 from the plant takes more and more of the plant’s output of energy, until in the limiting case you use all the energy of the plant and still some small amount of the CO2 escapes. The whole idea of CCS is to avoid having the disorder of the universe increase by the method of putting sufficient energy into trying. Won’t ever work. See also, perpetual motion machines.

Well, the sensible comments have all been rejected and EPA has just gone ahead and done what it was always planning to do, which is to order up something that can’t ever work economically and can only result in forcing the closure of an energy system that works without any idea of something realistic to replace it.

The deadlines for this start around 2030. Most likely between now and then either the Supreme Court will strike this down, or we’ll get a Republican administration that will sweep it all away. In the meantime we have completely ignorant and tyrannical regulators ordering up an energy system that can’t possibly work and heedless of the enormous destruction that they will likely cause if not stopped.

And that’s only part of what these fools were up to last week on the energy front. Here from Wednesday (April 24) is a “Fact Sheet” issued by the White House on another totally delusional effort: “Biden-⁠Harris Administration Sets First-Ever National Goal of Zero-Emissions Freight Sector, Announces Nearly $1.5 Billion to Support Transition to Zero-Emission Heavy-duty Vehicles.”

I’ve got some news for them: the freight transportation sector (trucks and railroads) is not going to convert to electricity any time soon. At least this announcement was not a regulation mandating the conversion, but only the supposed setting of a “national goal,” with no idea of how it could possibly be achieved or at what cost. The $1.5 billion mentioned is an irrelevant rounding error of a figure that maybe could buy 10,000 new electric trucks (in a sector with at least 3 million existing non-electric ones), and the 10,000 trucks would be mostly useless for the purposes in question.

These people become more and more detached from reality with each passing day. They seem to have no idea how much damage they are doing, and they don’t care a bit. Somehow they have convinced themselves that they are “saving the planet,” when if they could do even a little arithmetic they would know that their efforts cannot possibly move the needle on that effort. It’s just another week in the Biden Administration energy clown show.

Fritz Vahrenholt: Incompetent energy policy

The incompetence of the Ministry of Economic Affairs, led by Robert Habeck’s Graichen family, continues: withdrawn gas levy, phase-out of nuclear power plants in the middle of Germany’s biggest energy crisis (Habeck: “We don’t have an electricity crisis”), restarting coal-fired power plants without CO2 capture, the heat pump disaster and no end in sight.

From KlimaNachrichten Redakteur

By Fritz Vahrenholt

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

In April 2023, the deviation of the global temperature from the 30-year average of satellite-based measurements from the University of Alabama (UAH) fell slightly to 0.18 degrees Celsius (see graph above). The average temperature increase per decade since 1979 is only 0.13 degrees Celsius.

The incompetent energy policy of the Ministry of Economy
 

The incompetence of the Ministry of Economic Affairs, led by Robert Habeck’s Graichen family, continues: withdrawn gas levy, phase-out of nuclear power plants in the middle of Germany’s biggest energy crisis (Habeck: “We don’t have an electricity crisis”), restarting coal-fired power plants without CO2 capture, the heat pump disaster and no end in sight.

Manuel Frondel of the Leibniz Institute for Economic Research estimates the costs of the Heat Pump Act at €225 billion. Robert Habeck speaks of €130 billion. He talks about money that most people don’t have. Even if only the cost of the heat pump of €25,000 is taken into account, by 2030 (excluding the cost of building investments) 6 million heat pumps will cost €150 billion.

In an answer by State Secretary Graichen to the minor question by MP Bartsch, we learn about the “sensational” CO2 reduction of this impoverishment program for the middle class: If 2030 million heat pumps were to be installed in 6, 10.4 million tonnes of CO2 would be avoided by this effort. This is roughly equivalent to the emissions that occur when a nuclear power plant is shut down when the electricity is replaced by lignite.

We continue to calculate: that’s a measly 1.4% of Germany’s CO2 emissions (746 million tonnes of CO2 in 2022). For every tonne of CO2 avoided, a whopping €14,423 (€150 billion divided by 10.4 million tonnes of CO2) is invested.
A similar CO2 reduction would be achieved if a single lignite-fired power plant were equipped with CO2 capture. The Schwarze Pumpe power plant emits around 12 million tonnes of CO2 and would become CO600-free with an investment of €2 million. This is an investment cost of €2 per tonne of CO50.

Why is the effect of the heat pump so puny ? This is shown in the following table. compared to my last newsletter, the figures are not from the literature but they are manufacturer’s information. The heat pump has a CO2 footprint due to CO2-heavy electricity generation. Incidentally, the above-mentioned measly reduction will only occur if, according to the plans of the Federal Government, an 2030% share of electricity is actually generated from renewable energies (80% gas-fired power plants) by 20. If, as expected, this CO2 reduction does not materialise, the billions spent are almost a zero-sum CO2 game (see table)

According to Vaillant, the CO2 emissions of a gas condensing boiler are 0.178 kg per kWh (0.2 kg gas boiler – 11% condensing efficiency). A heat pump with a usual efficiency of COP = 3 (COP = Coefficient of performance) turns 1 kWh of electricity into 3 kWh of heat. To compare a natural gas heating system with a heat pump, you have to divide the CO2 footprint of a kWh of electricity (2022 : 0.494 kg/kwh) by 3. That’s 0.165 kg/kWh for the heat pump: over 100 billion in expenditure with almost zero CO2 effect.

What would be an effective CO2 reduction instead?
 

If one wanted an effective and efficient CO2 reduction, one would have to equip all East German lignite-fired power plants that can still be operated until 2038 with CO2 capture. The East German lignite-fired power plants produce 50 TwH of electricity and emit about 50 million tons of CO2. In order to make the 14 power plant units CO2-free, about 8.4 billion would have to be invested. So for a small fraction (1/20) of Habeck’s monster plan of investments in heat pumps, you get five times the amount of emission reduction. Investing in exhaust gas purification in lignite-fired power plants would thus be more efficient by a factor of 100.

Why don’t politicians do that? I don’t have an answer.

In this way, Germany would have an incredibly high impact on the world’s CO2 balance. Not because of their own emissions, but because it shows a way in which China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan and the rest of the world can free their planned use of their coal reserves from CO2 emissions in a technologically brilliant and cost-effective way.
I am firmly convinced that the capture of CO2 and injection in deep rocks (preferably basalt) is on the verge of a breakthrough. Experts estimate that the cost of CO2 capture and injection into deep rock (CCS) costs around $70 per tonne of CO2 (for sources, see my book “The Great Energy Crisis”, Chapter 4 “Ending the War on Coal”).

After all, the market economy will prevail here as well. The costs of around €70 per tonne of CO2 are offset by savings of €100 per tonne of CO2 for CO2 certificates that no longer have to be paid. And according to the EU’s plans, these “penalty” certificates are to rise to €200 per tonne in the near future.
But one will argue that the technology must first be developed. However, until the ban on CCS in Germany, they existed in the form of a pilot plant in the Schwarze Pumpe. In 2014, the main mastermind behind the CCS ban in Germany decided in 2014 was the then Schleswig-Holstein Energy Transition Minister Robert Habeck: “We do not want CCS as a clean-up technology for climate-damaging coal combustion”.

The Miracle of Hohenmölsen
 

I’m currently on the road a lot to distribute my book. A few days ago I was in Hohenmölsen, a small town on the edge of the PROFEN lignite mining area in Saxony-Anhalt. After the event, a LEAG employee pulled me aside and told me that I had been caught up in a fake when I found out in my new book that the CCS Schwarze Pumpe plant had been sold to Canada. With regard to politics, LEAG had led the public to believe that the plant had been sold to Canada so that no one would get stupid thoughts and could demand the reactivation of the plant. The system is still in place, the measurement and control technology has been expanded, but it can be reactivated. Political correctness is already blossoming strangely in Germany.
But now Olaf Scholz, who I know is a supporter of CCS technology (Hamburg and Brandenburg were the only states to oppose the CCS ban in the Bundesrat in 2014), can advocate for the reactivation of Schwarze Pumpe’s CCS plant.

I learned a lot in Hohenmölsen. Did you know that up to 15% wax is extracted from the waxy lignite mined there and that the wax producer Romonta is one of the largest wax producers in the world? These jobs are also highly vulnerable. Which country is destroying itself as radically as Germany under the Green government command?

With best wishes
,
Fritz Vahrenholt