There is a certain tragicomic quality to Britain’s current climate policy. Having long proclaimed itself a “climate leader” on the world stage, the United Kingdom is now preparing to stake tens of billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on technologies that have failed everywhere else. At the centre of this quixotic crusade is carbon capture and storage (CCS), with a special emphasis on its most extravagant and least viable variant – direct air capture (DAC). The problem is simple: CCS has an abysmal track record, DAC is even worse and no commercial project anywhere in the world has succeeded in delivering on the promises made with such fanfare.
And yet, here we are.
The Times reports that Energy Secretary Ed Miliband is negotiating with Swiss firm Climeworks to develop Britain’s first DAC plant under the Government’s HyNet cluster. The proposal – code-named Silver Birch – would join a £21.7 billion CCS programme, with £9.4 billion earmarked for just the next four years.
It is worth pausing to consider what Britain is signing up for: paying prohibitive prices per tonne of CO₂ to bury molecules of a trace atmospheric gas essential to photosynthesis under the Irish Sea, with no evidence that the technology can be deployed at scale and with a track record of serial disappointment worldwide.
The Abysmal Record of CCS
CCS has been the subject of countless reports, academic papers and optimistic government pronouncements. Michael Cembalest, Chairman of Market and Investment Strategy for J.P. Morgan Asset &
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There appears an underlying assumption through the article and most comments that CO2 removal from the atmosphere is desirable. Why?
Atmospheric CO2 is the very basis for life and looking back over the last 500m years is currently at extreme low levels. There are credible suggestions that plant life died off over large areas (at higher altitudes) during the last ice age due to low CO2 levels.
The very notion of CO2 removal is anti-life.
Religious people would call this the literal work of the devil. I would agree it is.
In the article, I state “Future historians may indeed view this era not as the moment humankind rose to the “climate challenge”, but as one where governments squandered resources tilting at an imaginary enemy, vilifying a trace gas that sustains plant life, while ignoring the real challenges of energy security, economic growth and prosperity.”
So I disagree that the article assumes that removing CO2 from the atmosphere is desirable. I also note in the article about NASA data showing planetary greening due to increase in CO2.
Carbon capture is not only catastrophically expensive in generating nothing, it is completely futile. Removing CO2 from the air from its already low level threatens plant growth. CO2 is the basis of all life on earth through its use in photosynthesis by green plants. Those advocating CC must be completely insane.
As to practicality of storage, is Miliband sure that it won’t leak back into the atmosphere through fissures in the sea floor beds of rock in which it is to be purportedly stored.?
Intrigued by the concept of a “climate control knob”….. nominations on a postcard please……
Much like heat pumps trying to extract heat from freezing temperature air in the winter. Why would you even want to reduce carbon dioxide levels when it has been shown that vegetation thrives with higher levels of this life giving gas.
Wasn’t there a UK based CCS project that collapsed in the form of converting from coal to pelleted wood shipped across the Atlantic? That is, Drax power station, that originally would have used locally mined coal as it’s fuel.
I’m confused. The aim is to emit no CO2 by 2050, so we shall have none to capture. What am I missing? Or are we hoping to capture all the CO2 wafting over from China’s and India’s coal-fired power stations?
Time for Reform UK to step up and commit to, if elected, recovering all subsidies doled out for Net Grifto boondoggles, and criminal prosecutions for company directors and managers and scientists who take them knowing that the projects are not achievable and that means it’s a case of defrauding the public purse.
100% – to be fair there idea of a tax to recover subsidies is a good one, and won’t break any existing contracts. I’m sure it’s probably made some companies consider their plans…
The aim is to destroy Britain’s industry, and Britain itself.
Why else would the government end oil production, while allowing imports from Norway, possibly from the same oil field from which we are barred.
it’s beyond parody, or even madness. There can only be one explanation, and that is the deliberate destruction of the UK, probably to replace it with a dogmatic Marxist regime like North Korea,
At a time when our finances are in such a mess, p!ssing all this money against a wall should be considered an actual offence. No public services work properly. There are real world consequences for this, and there should be real world consequences for Millibrain.
So why aren’t Reform shouting that from the rooftops then? If I was them, I’d delight in sticking it to Millitwat…
Because it’s led by Farage, who joins crusades after they have peaked.
Every time one of our morons says ‘world-leading’ then you just know it will be a costly failure for the taxpayers. Recall the lying oaf Johnson’s claim that the Covid Track & Trace was ‘world-leading’ but was destined to be anything but without visits in person as so wasted £millions of our money.
Storing CO₂ forever
CO₂ is a gas at normal atmospheric pressures and temperatures. It can be changed to a supercritical fluid by applying sufficient pressure. Applying that pressure takes energy. As a supercritical fluid its density is 467.6 kg/m^3. The intention is then to pump it down holes in the ground to store it forever. Hooray!
A cubic metre of green pine weighs about 675 kg of which about 240 kg is water. The other 435 kg is a mixture of cellulose (wood fibre) and terpenes (resin). Depending on the amount of resin in it, if the pine were burned it would release around 950kg of CO₂.
Just growing pine and storing it in underground caverns (old salt workings under Cheshire spring to mind) would store twice the amount of CO₂ as storing pure CO₂ as a supercritical fluid. I’ll admit it would be more difficult to pump though.
Thanks for the numbers – they are about right for softwood. But once cut down, the bacteria in the wood start to decompose it. And release the CO2 in the cellulose and resin. A bit slower in the cool of Winsfords salt caverns but in a few decades it will all be back in the atmosphere. Wood structures in the slate caverns in N Wales have been broken down in the pitch dark by fungi over 50-100 years.
Keeping CO2 supercritical requires around 74 bar ( 7.4 MPa ) which could be stored on the seabed 750m down or deeper but would need a membrane to avoid it simply passing into solution in the seawater. I worked on the proposal stages of such a project intended for S Korea’s East sea, which reaches these depths. The Korean engineers proposing it all knew CCS for climate mitigation was nonsense but if the govt have the money to give out, why not ?
🙂
Supercritical CO₂ is about half the density of water – so it will float up if not contained and weighed down.
With that in mind wrap the pine in a membrane and weigh it down and sink it below 750m. If anaerobic bacteria can break down the wood and resin then any CO2 will be compressed by the weight of seawater. Eventually (!) it will start turning into new coal and oil.
The point I wanted to make is that there’s already a very efficient way of capturing CO₂ directly from air and there’s almost no need to build any expensive infrastructure. The storage bit is more complicated but not too surprisingly storing it as fuel (wood and resin) is more CO₂ dense than as the pure compound.
If we do store it underground instead then when the Net Zero insanity ends there’ll be all this dry fuel neatly stored and ready to burn.
Edit: That word ‘eventually’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
Oh yes, one more thing: Rather than attempt CCS at Drax power station it would probably be cheaper to just store all those wood chips on the seabed..
The density point is right and the deep sea CO2 needed piling to anchor structures to hold the membrane tanks to the seabed. Yes, sinking wood enclosed in membrane would work until the finite supply of oxygen needed to decompose cellulose was exhausted which would kill the colonies of bacteria and preserve the wood. The point you made was not lost on me – forest management is another hat I have acquired. Here in N Wales any woodland available is snapped up at exhorbitant prices thanks to the Carbon Credit scam. I long for the whole ‘ climate emergency ‘ mass psychosis to collapse so we can get back to something like real metrics to base viable business on.
The Anglo centric global elite that has run the world for the best part of the last 200 years is desperately trying to cling on.
But how do they do that with waning economic influence?
It all seems to be based on moralistic ideology. They are all projects that are based on some sort of moral superiority and if you don’t play along, you’re evil.
If you don’t go along with Net Zero you are evil because you don’t care about destroying “the planet”
If you don’t go along with mass immigration you’re evil because you are a cold hearted racist.
If you don’t go along with gay and trans ideology you’re evil because you are a bigot.
If you dont go along with fighting Russia, you’re evil because you enable horrible dictators like Putin.
If you don’t along with diversity programmes, you’re evil because you are a white supremacist.
The western ruling establishment have turned into these kind of woke mullahs that bludgeon everyone into obedience with their moralistic programme.
Here in western countries we are subjected tonit and can hardly avoid it. But the rest of the world isn’t buying it. They’re laughing at us and… Read more »
All the talk of this being made profitable…. How can completing a pointless, and therefore, by traditional values ‘valueless’ task ever make any profit? It’s simply a way to grift money from the state…
Reform need to challenge the government openly about them choosing to spaf £30billion on this vs paying down some debt / borrowing less…