Will carbon capture and storage (CCS) ever pay off?
For many years, we've been told that CCS systems and processes will allow us to reduce carbon emissions and stop global warming while continuing to use fossil fuels. CCS has been a key assumption of the "450 Scenario" in the International Energy Agency's annual energy outlook reports, in which the world can meet its energy needs while keeping atmospheric carbon concentration below 450 parts per million (ppm). If you read the news, you might even think CCS systems are well on their way to becoming a commercial reality.
But the fact is, they aren't. And current trends suggest they never will be.
The main reason is the cost. Finding good data on the cost of CCS is difficult, because it simply doesn't exist. No commercial-sized power plants equipped with the technology have been built yet. All of the cost data we have are estimates based on engineering designs, which are notorious for being much lower than reality.
Two things are clear: Since 2004, the cost of building a new power plant equipped with CCS has been escalating rapidly along with the costs of all construction commodities (like oil and steel). And those costs are now rising above the cost associated with power generation from renewables.
High costs
CCS is really a catch-all term for a variety of technologies and processes. The first part, carbon capture, usually imagines that devices will be integrated into the exhaust end of coal- or natural gas-fired power generation plants, removing some of the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The second part, storage (aka sequestration), imagines that the captured CO2 will be compressed into a liquid, then either buried permanently underground or sold for use in industrial processes. For example, CO2 is used to make soft drinks fizzy, and to loosen up oil from old reservoirs as part of "enhanced oil recovery" (EOR) operations.
Various kinds of CCS have been imagined for capturing CO2 out of ambient air, as a way to deal with widely dispersed emissions from things like vehicles, but those ideas really belong in the category of "geo-engineering" and would be far more expensive and difficult than capturing concentrated CO2 straight out of a power plant. CCS has also been eyed for emissions from cement factories, blast furnaces for steel production, fertilizer factories, and other industrial facilities, but the main focus is on power plants. If we can't make CCS work for power plants, we probably can't make it work anywhere, so I am focusing on that here.
Cost estimates for CCS vary widely, by whether the capturing technology is to be added to an existing plant as a retrofit, or built into a new plant; by the type of power plant (such as a "supercritical" or "ultra supercritical" coal plant, or an "integrated gas combined cycle" plant); by the type of fuel (usually coal or natural gas); by when the carbon is captured (post-combustion, pre-combustion, or "oxy-fuel," in which coal is burned in pure oxygen rather than air to produce purer CO2 emissions); by the type of CO2 transport (pipeline or another method); and by the type of storage (porous underground saltwater formations, EOR projects, depleted oil and gas reservoirs, unmineable coal seams, and so on).
Given all the variations, one 2011 study from the Global CCS Institute, a group whose membership "covers more than 80 percent of the world's CO2 emissions from energy and industrial sources," offered a cost range of $38 to $107 per tonne of captured CO2, which isn't terribly helpful.
Many CCS cost studies cite data from 2009 and earlier, so they don't reflect current costs (after the commodity boom). The most recent cost data I was able to find was in a June 2012 paper from the U.S. Congressional Budget Office (CBO), "Federal Efforts to Reduce the Cost of Capturing and Storing Carbon Dioxide," which analyzed five engineering studies on building a new coal-fired power plant equipped with CCS.
In addition to ruling out retrofits, which are generally deemed to be cost-prohibitive, the CBO report focused exclusively on the post-combustion approach, "because that technology is the only one that is compatible with the most commonly used designs for electricity-generating plants."
The summary results are shown in the following table.
The right way to compare different power generation technologies is on a levelized cost of energy (LCOE) basis, which gives the average cost of producing electricity over the lifetime of a plant, including the costs of construction, financing and operation. Adjusted for inflation, the CBO chart shows that the LCOE of a new coal plant with CCS is about $90 to $150 per megawatt-hour (MWh) in 2013 dollars, or $0.09 to $0.15 per kilowatt-hour (kWh).
The main reason CCS is expensive is that it takes a lot of equipment to capture, purify (if the CO2 is to be sold), liquefy, transport and bury CO2. According to the CBO analysis, the average capital cost of a CCS-equipped coal plant would be 76 percent higher than a conventional plant and the LCOE for a CCS-equipped plant would average 76 percent more than for a conventional plant.
All that equipment consumes a lot of energy.
The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that the energy requirements of post-combustion carbon capture reduce the plant's efficiency by 20 to 30 percent. A 2007 study from MIT found that a CCS retrofit of an existing subcritical pulverized coal plant would reduce the plant's electrical output by more than 40 percent. Reduced energy output means higher prices for the energy that's not consumed by the plant itself.
Cheaper alternatives
How does the $0.09 to $0.15/kWh cost of a CCS coal plant compare with competing alternatives, such as conventional natural gas-fired power plants not equipped with CCS or renewables?
According to the Annual Energy Outlook 2012 from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), the cost of power from a conventional natural gas power plant without CCS is $0.0686/kWh, making it the cheapest clean(-ish) way to generate power. This is one reason why natural gas has been pushing coal off the grid, as I detailed last year in "Regulation and the decline of coal power."
Now consider the cost of utility-scale solar power, which has been dropping like a stone in recent years. That data can be hard to come by, since the price of power embedded in a power purchase agreement (PPA) isn't usually disclosed, but we do have numbers from a few new PPAs.
In the California Public Utility Commission's Renewable Portfolio Standards report for the first and second quarters of 2012, the weighted average price of approved contracts for 140 MW of distributed solar PV was less than $90/MWh ($0.09/kWh).
On Jan. 8, 2013, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power reported, "Currently, the cost of solar energy through a power purchase agreement from a large solar power plant over 200 MW [megawatts] is about $0.095/kWh."
On Feb. 2, 2013, Greentech Media reported that the PPA price for the 50 MW Macho Springs solar project in New Mexico was $0.0579/kWh; after including the state production tax credit, the price was $0.0849/kWh.
Recent plants under contract in Michigan are coming in at about $0.091/kWh, according to Energy Fact Check.
Greentech Media solar analyst Scott Burger gave me a few final data points. The 23 MW SunEdison project in Hemet, Calif., came in at around $0.08/kWh, he estimated. Generally, his organization is seeing PPAs in the $0.07 to $0.09/kWh range.
At that price, a new coal plant is already a non-starter. Michigan's Public Service Commission estimates that a new coal plant would cost ratepayers around $0.133/kWh, and Bloomberg says the average price of power from a new coal plant is $0.128/kWh.
Meanwhile, the cost of CCS keeps going up, and the cost of solar keeps going down.
Massive subsidies needed
The fossil fuel industry and its partners in government realize that CCS isn't going to work without massive public sector investment.
In answer to my questions about Shell's Quest CCS project in the Alberta tar sands, a PR spokesperson with Edelman Digital Public Affairs in Washington, DC, told me that "current carbon prices do not support the economics of the project, which is why government support is required for the project to proceed." But Shell hopes that "as the costs of the technology come down and the price of carbon increases, CCS will become more economic."
"Without government support, CCS will not become economic," echoes ICO2N (the Integrated CO2 Network), a group of Canadian companies representing the coal and tar sands industries. They hope that with hundreds of millions of dollars of investment by the Canadian government into CCS research, CO2 sales for EOR will make the economics work in the meantime.
But the CBO study questions whether CCS could ever scale up to the point where it could stand on its own. It would take more than 200 gigawatts (GW) of new generating capacity equipped with CCS to reach that point, the report suggests, and "under current laws and policies, utilities are unlikely to build that much new generating capacity. . . or invest in adding CCS technology to much of their existing capacity for many decades."
All these studies agree that carbon emissions allowances must be priced much, much higher for CCS to become economically viable.
The Global CCS Institute estimates that CO2 would have to be priced at $23 to $92 per tonne. In a 2011 paper, the European Technology Platform for Zero Emission Fossil Fuel Power Plants found that coal-fired CCS power plants would be "close to becoming commercially viable" only at €35 ($46) per tonne of CO2.
The non-industry view is much less optimistic. A new research paper by Richard Middleton of Los Alamos National Laboratory and Adam Brandt of Stanford University estimates that "significant capture and storage occurs only above $110/tonne CO2 in our simulations."
Unfortunately, global carbon markets aren't pricing CO2 emissions anywhere near these levels.
The current price for carbon in the EU Emissions Trading System is just €5 per tonne. The new California CO2 allowance is $13.62 per ton, and the proposed U.S. carbon tax would be about $20 per ton.
With the future of carbon policy so uncertain in the United States and abroad, it's not at all clear that carbon prices will rise to the point where investing in CCS makes sense.
At the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi in January, I asked Maria van der Hoeven, Executive Director of the IEA, what would happen to their 450 Scenario if CCS didn't work out. "We need at least 10 large demonstration projects to scale up from pilots to commercial installations," she acknowledged. "But nevertheless you can see it has slipped down the political agenda. It's true. It's costly, there are too many other issues at stake, people are afraid of it sometimes because they don't want to have it stored underground, because it's 'terrible,' it's something they are afraid of. So in some way or the other at this moment CCS doesn't fly. It doesn't."
Cancellations and delays
A handful of demonstration-scale CCS projects are in progress, with most of them hoping to become operational over the next several years.
Aside from the Shell project, a December 2012 update by Politifact lists six more that are well under way, including the roughly $200 million Illinois Industrial Carbon Capture and Storage project in Decatur, Ill.; the $2.88 billion Kemper Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle plant in Kemper County, Miss.; the $2.5 billion Texas Clean Energy Project in Penwell, Texas; the $2.8 billion Hydrogen Energy California Project in Bakersfield, Calif.; and the $1.65 billion FutureGen 2.0 project in Meredosia, Ill., a revival of the original (and much-ballyhooed) FutureGen plant that was scotched in 2011 over escalating costs.
But the recent cancellation of several large projects doesn't bode well.
The $278 million Swan Hills Synfuels project and the $1.4 billion TransAlta project, both in Canada, have been scrapped due to cost and cheap natural gas. American Electric Power's $668 million Mountaineer Station in New Haven, West Va., which used gasified coal, was recently cancelled due to the "current uncertainty of U.S. climate policy and the continued weak economy." FutureGen 2.0 is reportedly months behind schedule. SourceWatch lists many other delayed or cancelled projects around the world.
These may sound like big-ticket items, and they are. One wonders if that money wouldn't be better spent on building already-cheaper renewables, and it would. But the coal companies and tar sands operators are fighting for their lives, and spending a few billion here or there on a saving grace like CCS probably seems like a relatively small price to pay.
I am doubtful that CCS will ever pay. The cost curves for renewable power suggest that solar and wind will undercut the cost of CCS on new or retrofitted gas and coal plants before 2020, when CCS proponents hope that it will become economically viable.
One new analysis by UBS found that the LCOE from unsubsidized new rooftop solar photovoltaic in the United States is $0.24/kWh, making it cheaper than grid power in 11 European countries. And U.S. utility-scale solar power priced at less than $0.09/kWh (and falling) is very tough to beat.
Unless the world decides to price carbon aggressively before those renewable cost curves fall much lower, CCS looks like a dead man walking.
Photo: eyeliam/Flickr
* Correction: Several cost/kWh figures were incorrectly stated in the original version of this article. They have been corrected. I regret the errors.
Why aren't we seeing anything from this company. www.cleanenergysystems.com Kimberlina Power Plant Clean Energy Systems' Kimberlina Power Plant (KPP) is the world largest oxyfuel combustion facility. This former 5MWe biomass power plant is now host to most of CES' testing and demonstration equipment. It is laid out primarily for R&D and sub-commercial operations and today is home to the CES 4" Gas Generator the G2S2 SAGD Gas Generator and Steam Separator commercial scale test bed the CES 12" Gas Generator the CES OFJ-79 30MWe expander turbine the 150MWe OFT-900 expander turbine (arriving June 2012) a fully operational 100% carbon-capture ready, 1,500 Mscfd CO2/5MWe steam turbine cycle for continuous operations a full-scale solar and geo-thermal steam booster test-bed, and much more... The 40-acre site provides ample space for both future R&D programs and continuous full scale commercial operations. It is ideally situated - wedged in between heavy and light oil fields thirsty for steam and CO2, in the middle of the water-deprived nut and fruit orchards of of the Central Valley, and sitting on top of a WESTCARB-identified CO2 storage field. The site is host to Areva Solar's Kimberlina Solar-Thermal demonstration facility.
Your contents are too straightforward to browse and easy to understand. http://www.theboilieshop.co.za/
Use CO2 to grow Spirulina algae. Spirulina algae is around 65% protein and is regarded as one of the healthiest "superfoods" on the market. The algae can also be aged and used as bio-diesel for fuel. Algae is grown through photosynthesis and therefore only needs sunlight, nutrients and carbon dioxide to grow. This process takes the issue of carbon dioxide and turns it into a solution for the two largest markets in the world, Energy and Food. Tell me what you think! http://agcoretech.com/
You can't burn carbon and capture it without losing energy in the process. You're looking at 1 billon years of photosynthetic carbon capture to produce all our fossil fuel resources. Unless you decide to start putting up solar powered satellites to beam clean energy to the planet, the only way to "undo" CO2 buildup in the atmosphere is time and plants.
I have come with an invention that will catch a lot of toxic gases from the atmosphere. I use electrons to break open the CO2 atoms for example in their two only atoms, carbon and oxygen atoms. I store the carbon atom in something made of it as like steel for example and release the oxygen back into the air to repeat it all over again. If us as humans we make it we can and destroy it. Nuclear power is the way to go. If I had a little nuclear waste I can show how to destroy it, not burning it or burying it in mountains for lots of years to see again. Why can they just leaving it alone and let nature take it's time on it. I can also use this way to end a lot of diseases by using a very high electrical current that is produce our bodies. If you use a different electrical current it will not work on us. If you have notice that sharks or other aquatic animals like fish have it. Please stop over fishing and look at the nature and try not to destroy it.
I have develop a way to hold the carbon in a way that is safe and reusable. The carbon will be held in something that contains carbon in it like steel or pig iron. I have proof in the invention but don't know what to do next. My favourite idol is great brains of all time like Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison. I have a way to destroy all the toxic gases like suflur dioxide and CFC's. Nuclear power is the way to go because it can be destroyed very easy. All I do is use electrons to destroy the atoms of nuclear waste to the point of were it is safe. I ask one question how will help me on this. I don't think anyone really cares about this problem.
there are two types of useful PLANTS: * GREEN PLANTS (I mean trees and grass, etc.) to bring back the CO2 * Nuclear PLANTS, to produce energy without releasing CO2
CCS is a bizzaro-world bonkers idea, for Engineering firms to make a packet,. on someone else's dollar, which will never really work. If you can't safely store virtified Nuclear waste underground, pressurized CO2 will be a non-starter. How about just planting 100 trillion f***ing tree's, nature's own CCS device. With a bit of an effort, you might even be able to push back the Sahara. http://saharaforestproject.com/
As is the case with US shale gas, current prices for solar PV are the product of an unsustainable glut, and are actually below the raw cost of production: http://qz.com/59666/suntech-china-solar-industry-collapse/ Solar PV costs are done going down (for awhile), and probably will go up in the near future. More significantly, renewables like solar and wind will not account for more than a small fraction (~20%) of total electricity generation for the forseeable future, due to their intermittentcy. This is about the other ~80%, for which CCS is in competition with nuclear and gas, as opposed to renewables. The article is right, however, about how CCS will never be competitive. Not competitive with nuclear or gas, that is.
Chris, if you haven't seen it yet you might be interested in this report It says the reason there isn't more drilling on public lands is because over 90% of the shale oil plays are on non-federal lands and that's where the drilling rigs are. http://westernpriorities.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/CFWPreport_030513_v9.pdf
The containers are called 'plants', and anyone can store them in their own garden. There are also larger containers which are called 'forests', but their use is in principle the same. Just don't cut them down or burn them without replanting them. Problem solved.
So let's compress a couple of million pounds of CO2 and put it in a hole in the ground. When a fault occurs and all that gas escapes, we could asphyxiate a small city. Does this sound like a good plan to you?
Why sequester carbon, when we can use renewable energy to extract it from the air and turn it into fuel? We kill two birds with one stone...we reduce greenhouse gasses, and we store surplus renewable energy for use later.
Put all this CO2 into Coke. Drink it to the tune of 10 barrels p.c. on daily basis. Problem solved, planet saved, and a ton of well paid jobs.
"Finding good data on the cost of CCS is difficult, because it simply doesnt exist." Wha? Really? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakota_Gasification_Company I'm sure they'd give you a tour Chris. They gave me one. This is journalism 101 here, people. Every major magazine gave Belulah some love when CO2 sequestration became more widely known 5 years ago. Unclear if Chris was sleeping, or just forgot. Undeground coal gasificiation is waiting in the wings. And, yes, it will come with CO2 sequestration, no subsidies required. CO2 is valuable for oil recovery.
Estimating that it is a trillion tonnes of extra atmospheric CO2 that is now causing trouble, what if it snowed out uniformly over the continents' 148 million km^2 of surface? At density 1500 kg/m^3, this 667 km^3 of stuff would make a layer 4.5 mm thick. Now, why is this arithmetic worth doing? Because the precipitation can be made to occur, and in fact *has* been made to occur, as a side effect of mining. The solid precipitate would not be pure CO2: it would be magnesite, MgCO3, a mineral that contains 1570 kg CO2 per cubic metre. And while magnesite is a natural, innocuous substance, it wouldn't end up forming an actual 4.5-mm layer, because it washes away in the rain, and ends up in the sea. More at http://www.innovationconcepts.eu/res/literatuurSchuiling/olivineagainstclimatechange23.pdf
The lifetime CO2 emissions of an average coal plant would require the pore space of a giant oil field, so EOR (CO2 into depleted reservoirs to scavenge oil) can't possibly scale to the size of the utility emissions problem. The only other significant pore space is occupied by salt water at high pressure. There are no big empty caverns down there, as everyone seems to imagine. So what happens to the ocean of brine that will have to be displaced to make room for the CO2? Prominent petroleum engineering experts call sequestration "profoundly non feasible." See http://www.vorsana.com/co2andairpollution/ccstimetopunt.html DOE spending a billion dollars on Future Gen trying to make sequestration work when it is profoundly non feasible. The danger of brine intrusion into the groundwater as a result of obstinate sequestration efforts is worse than the danger (climate change) motivating Future Gen. And there is also the danger of CO2 eruptions killing people. Informed citizens are increasingly unwilling to assume such risk. Government won't insure it. Chemical CO2 capture from smokestacks is another non-scalable "proven" solution being confidently touted as "all the technology we need." Adding chemical capture -- even if they can make it work at utility scale with hot and dirty flue gas -- would double the water consumption of coal plants. Power generation is already the largest consumer of fresh water, and there is a drought. There are other post-combustion capture and ultimate disposal alternatives being developed, but they get conflated with chemical capture and underground storage (conventional CCS) and dismissed as more of the same. At least make clear, Chris, that conventional CCS is not the final word.
Seems to me that carbon capture _must_ cost more in energy than not producing/burning carbon in the first place. It's kind of like losing weight. It's more effective to not put it on in the first place. However, without a cap&trade program on carbon, it's going to be a long time before wind and solar are 'cost-effective' (looking only at generating cost and not at global pollution costs). The reason is because every time the price of oil goes up--gets closer to being equivalent to solar--that means it is now cost-effective for companies to drill for more oil. Basic economics.
For some time I have had the feeling that the "carbon markets" were going no where. Studying both the economics and the associated technologies (your article confirms) it's clear that neither are functional with regard to achieving the stated goals of reducing atmospheric CO2. In a world where intelligence superseded greed and self-interest, our government would be placing a much greater emphasis on industrial scale electrical storage for solar and wind. Solar and wind already have made fossil fuels obsolete (and nuclear if the waste storage and maintenance cost are ever included) on an electrical generation basis. A functional and economic storage system will completely eliminate fossil fuel generation technologies in most areas of the world. Thorium based reactors in low photo energy areas would complete a global non-fossil, non-polluting, non-dangerous, environmentally friendly grid system. Of course the scary part is that our nation's political leaders have a long and intellectually reprehensible record of doing the "wrong thing" -which coincidentally seems to generally enrich them.
CO2 storage has the distinct disadvantage that it can show up again when and if it leaks. As a thought experiment, imagine a gasoline-burning automobile equipped with a carbon-recovery system that electrolyzed the CO2 it produces. Plainly, the energy cost would be the difference between the energy from hydrogen burned and carbon, plus the losses in concentrating and electrolyzing CO2. That is no more than "back-of-the-napkin scribbling," so to speak, but illustrates the dilemma. If we could capture *only* carbon, the cost of clean energy from coal and oil might -- might -- be less than it is. There is currently no way to do so, but if we could make carbon a useful industrial material, however -- and we getting closer to being able to -- and sell it for less than the price of getting it directly from coal, we might recoup all of that cost and have less CO2 to worry about. Plus cleaner air.
Solar power was for decades uneconomic. And the creators of the copier envisioned a need for a few dozen of these things. Computers had the same history. Perhaps it would be worth considering that technology does make it possible to do harder and harder things. It certainly would help if there were a more concerted effort to recognize the true cost of carbon emissions. It is valuable that the author cited the work of my colleague Adam Brandt, as it gives a good picture of what must be achieved. Having just seen a paper discussing an option that might currently capture 30% of CO2 from flue gas for $6.50 per ton, prior to any optimization, it should be possible to consider that breakthrough technology, the lifeblood of hypemeisters and doomsayers (like Mr. Nelder) alike, might happen in the places where they think it won't. [http://www.wyomingcarbonstorage.com/sites/default/files/WCTI%20Interview%20with%20DrKJReddy.pdf]
This is why Nuclear power is the only avenue. We have to use a energy source that does not produce CO2. The energy available in the nuclear weapons and LWR spent fuel can be extracted via Dr Eugene Wigner and Dr Alvin Weinberg's Thorium Molten {LIQUID} Salt Breeder Reactor technology engineered at Oak Ridge in the 1950s and 60s is just that {CO2 free} and more as it also eliminates the high cost of the need for the 10,000 year Yucca Mountain type storage. It only gets better are you sitting down ? The funding is there, by reducing the nuclear arsenal by 1/3 to begin with we are well on our way.
because, as Mackay truly says, "the rocks pay the energy cost". (http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c31/page_246.shtml ). Also follow the links in my other comment.
Bryan, perhaps you mean to use neutrons to convert long-lived worrisome stuff like plutonium into fission products that have half-lives of 30 years and less, rather than Pu-239's 24,000 years. What most people (including Amory Lovins, whose Rocky Mountains have higher rates of natural radiation than most of the lowlands) do not appreciate is that radioactivity is inversely proportional to half-life. Radium, half life 1600 years, is far more radioactive than plutonium-239. But radon, the gas that leaks through the soil from even the tiny amounts of radium in granite, has a half life of 3.8 days, and chemically undetectable quantities will kill you
People in favor of shifting to massive use of renewables point to places like Germany and California. What they don't say is that the German consumer pays the equivalent of 7 US cents per KWH to subsidize the transition from conventional and nuclear to renewables (that does NOT include the cost of paying for the actual electricity). In California, which has a 33% renewables mandate by 2020, state regulators and power utility executives got together recently to consider how to deal with massive power disruptions that could occur as early as 2015 because of the intermittent nature of renewables (see http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424127887323699704578328581251122150-lMyQjAxMTAzMDAwOTEwNDkyWj.html?mod=wsj_valettop_email ). And last year the wind industry in the US almost collapsed until the 2.2 cents per KWH federal subsidy was restored (see http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052702303684004577509120742881442-lMyQjAxMTAzMDAwOTEwNDkyWj.html?mod=wsj_valettop_email ).
What is the total cost of manufacturing PV pannels?. I mean including sequestration of all the CO2 you have to release to produce each Kg of silicon. Taking into account the overall efficiency of PV solar it will never payback in terms of green.
I just want to point out that you quote what many experts say. The cost of PV is at a record low, but the on the street retail price has dropped very little. Are the consumer installing companies padding their profits by keeping prices up?
They're called coal seams. They were indeed created from plants, forests, maybe even sphagnum moss (it's called "peat" when it siks oonto the bog). But it took 64 million years to creae that supply, not to mention the fossil oxygen that we breathe. To the extent that we've used it up, and note that at least half the great forests of the tenth century CE have been cut down and burned, we are reversing that process. Strangely enough, when I was eleven years old, an enlightened government a short sea journey away had decided to embark upon "re-afforestation", and our family moved from Scotland to Northern Ireland, because that provided my father an opportunity for advancement in Forestry.
You do realize that every year, every 12 million tons of the carbon that is burned produces 44 million tons of CO2. It takes about four million tons of coal to fuel just one base load generator, 1000 MW.
I agree, that is the long term strategy. The easiest fuel to make is natural gas (CH4) which is why it makes sense to switch our infrastructure over to natural gas now while it's cheap. The other fossil fuels are harder to produce synthetically. CH4 isn't easy, but it's the easiest.
For a moment I thought you were making a drug reference...goes to show how MY mind works!
at http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/savvy-scientist/throwing-rocks-at-co2/275 . And yet there is an apparently endless supply of unhelpful savants willing to discuss CO2 sequestration as if this self-demonstrating method had never existed.
Southern California Edison has one of the most favorable climates for solar. But if you look at their figures for wind, solar, environmental impact (dead big birds in Altamont Pass) and theenergy contribution, you'll find that not even California can produce as much solar energy, or wind energy, as the San Onofre reactors, obsolete as they are. Indeed, hydro-electric power, by far the most reliable, turned out to be sufficiently dependent upon the winter snows that when they failed, California's peak demand response had to be bought from companies so ruthlessly and unmanageably greedy that the voters fired their Governor, and got themselves another actor in his place.
Yes indeed. A breeder reactor, whether thorium to U-233 or U-238 to Pu-239, creates less than a ton of waste, solid waste, short-lived waste, for a reactor delivering 1000 MW (electric) at 90% capacity factor for a year. The Integral Fast Reactor also needed none of the Yucca Mountain nonsense. Plutonium is not a waste product, it is a fuel, and we get about one third of the 20% of our electrical energy consumption from fissioning it, int the ordinary LWR's. To generate that much energy from carbon takes aboout a million tons, and every ton produces three tons of carbon dioxide.
http://www.coal2nuclear.com/
I realize he has acknowledged working for the oil and gas companies for decades, but I don't think he's quite that rich yet.
This has been well analyzed. For each 1kWh of energy produced, every power source including solar, wind, nuclear has a small CO2 emission relative to straight up fossil fuel which comes from the mining, building, ongoing costs and decommission of all power plants. Coal about 900-1000g Nat gas about 450-500g Solar about 50g Wind about 15g Nuclear about 15g Look for "CO2 emissions per kWh". So solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear are all vastly better than nat gas and esp coal over their lifetimes, we just don't put a value on the damage from coal and gas yet.