Earthquakes, Leakage, Expense, Death by Asphyxiation – Is There No Beginning to the Advantages of Carbon Capture?

If carbon capture and storage (CCS) was fracking for gas, it would have been banned years ago. Both processes can cause earth tremors – equivalent to a man falling off a chair in the case of fracking, but potentially much greater with carbon capture. This is because it involves millions of tonnes of pressurised carbon dioxide being pumped into rock cavities possibly compromised by prior drilling holes. Waste water from pressurised oil and gas projects has been known to escape from degraded drill plugs causing geysers 100-foot high. Such a catastrophe on land with millions of tonnes of CO₂ waiting to escape is not a good prospect. On August 21st, 1986 the sudden high pressure release of magmatic CO₂ from the bed of Lake Nyos in Cameroon led to heavier-than-air CO₂ suffocating all living beings in the surrounding villages including 1,746 people.

CCS divides a green movement riven with disagreements as its climate crisis grift starts to fall apart in the face of reality. Capturing CO₂ and burying it in the ground has been described by one influential green think tank as a “colossal waste of money”. Wasting taxpayers’ money is not something most greens lose sleep over, but they dislike CCS because it allows a role, albeit limited, for future hydrocarbon use. As we recently reported in the Daily Sceptic, the penny has finally dropped in the U.K. that there is no backup to a 2030 renewable energy grid except gas, so the Mad Miliband has authorised a £22 billion CCS black hole. It is a colossal waste of money, but it provides a fig leaf to cover the continued use of hydrocarbons.

If governments in the United States and Europe are going to pump many billions of tonnes of pressurised gas into the substrata beneath our feet heavily pockmarked with thousands of filled drill holes, it might be a good idea to look into the wisdom and safety of this course of action. Such a task cannot be left to mainstream media, although they were quick to run stories of earthquakes and tap water catching fire in the cause of demonising gas fracking (yes really, check it out).

First some geology. Natural gas is found next to oil fields near the surface but it also accumulates at much deeper levels. It is held in place by a layer of sedimentary rock such as limestone or sandstone. In the U.S., the Permian basin runs across west Texas and south western New Mexico and its rich deposits have been drilled for over a hundred years. The area is riddled with hundreds of thousands of drill holes. Location records and safety checks on some of these holes are now non-existent.

In 2016, a group of Penn State researchers observed that when CO₂ is stored underground in a process known as geological sequestration “it can find multiple escape pathways due to chemical reactions between CO₂, water, rocks and cement from abandoned wells”. There are concerns that CO₂ could leak into groundwater drinking aquifers or dissolve into saltwater deposits. As a result, the high acidity saltwater-CO₂ can dissolve certain types of rocks as well as cement casing on abandoned wells. There are fears that a plume of CO₂-saturated brine could break free to the surface, with presumably millions of tonnes of pressurised gas looking for a chance to follow.

Engineering professor Mary Kang of McGill University claims she has seen “countless instances” of plugged oil wells failing to hold. Cement is no match for earthquakes, heat and time, notes Eric Van Oort, an engineering professor at the University of Texas-Austin. “You have tectonic stresses, high temperatures – things are changing and shifting in the subsurface,” he said. He was of the view that plugged holes may start leaking in the future.

Current plans in the UK are to bury the CO₂ under offshore waters. Hence some of the staggering costs involved. But nowhere is safe from the forces of nature and the British Geological Survey recently said that CCS needed to be “vigorously monitored” to provide an assurance of long-term storage integrity. That would be vigorously monitored for the thousands of years it is planned to keep the CO₂ underground. Good luck with that one. Regulatory frameworks governing geological CO₂ storage are being developed worldwide with issues of leakage and long-term stewardship being addressed. Again, good luck with asking future generations thousands of years hence to keep coughing up £22 billion (note to reader: feel free to invent your own very large figure at this point) to ensure vast quantities of highly pressurised gas are safely stored beneath the surface.

DeSmog was recently topped up with £400,000 from the Left-wing money tree Rowntree Foundation to continue promoting fracking scare stories and its notorious ‘blacklist’ of so-called climate deniers. On October 4th, it reported that a blowout in the Permian basin had created a 100-foot tower of oily water. Drilling and fracking uses millions of gallons of water a day in the area, noted DeSmog. “It’s a ripper,” said Hawk Dunlap, a libertarian candidate for the Railroad Commission. “It could be coming from anywhere and it’s not going to be an easy fix,” he said. DeSmog reports that Dunlap said the region where the geyser erupted has been plagued by earthquakes amid record wastewater production.

DeSmog is all in on the invented climate crisis and a fervent supporter of the political Net Zero fantasy. It obviously hates all hydrocarbon use and has reported on the problems of carbon capture. For its part, mainstream media just sticks with demonising fracking. Donkey nodding politicians in many jurisdictions accept the need for huge quantities of money to be poured down the CCS hole but are obviously uninformed about the risks involved.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.