Posted on 08/21/2010 7:11:18 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
One German Town's Fight against CO2 Capture Technology
By Jessica Donath in Beeskow, Germany
The next Chernobyl? A death blow to tourism? Poisoned drinking water? The residents of Beeskow, Germany worry that a planned CO2 storage facility under their town could end in disaster and are fighting the project. Europe, though, hopes the technology will drastically reduce emissions.
The signs are everywhere -- on church towers, on fences surrounding private homes and in storefronts. At first glance, the scenes evoke the large-scale protests against nuclear power that rattled Germany in the 1970s and 1980s. The resemblance is no accident. Residents in the quiet town of Beeskow in the eastern German state of Brandenburg are gearing up for a fight. They fear the pollutants that are about to be pumped beneath their homes could become the next Chernobyl.
"A field trial under our community is not acceptable," says Beeskow Mayor Frank Steffen.
The town's residents are upset about plans by a German division of Swedish energy giant Vattenfall to build a carbon dioxide (CO2) storage facility in a saline aquifer far beneath Beeskow's cobblestone roads. The site is one of a handful across Europe where companies and governments want to test a process known as carbon capture and storage (CCS), a technology that proponents say will massively reduce CO2 emissions from coal-fired power plants. Instead of belching the emissions into the sky, CCS technology would capture, liquefy and then pump the CO2 into underground storage sites.
(Excerpt) Read more at spiegel.de ...
Liquefied CO2 bomb, ping!
It didn’t work out so well for those around Lake Nyos.
"... on August 21, 1986, a limnic eruption occurred at Lake Nyos which triggered the sudden release of about 1.6 million tonnes of CO2; ... The gas s.... rushed down two valleys branching off it to the north, displacing all the air and suffocating some 1,700 people within 25 kilometres (16 mi) of the lake, mostly rural villagers, as well as 3,500 livestock."
They are upset about a giant underground seltzer pool?
While the whole thing is a scam... isn’t CO2 what is added to soft drinks - and people consume a bunch of it all the time?
Look at the links to the Lake Nyos Disaster.
Let say that, for whatever engineering reason, the containment tanks leak and liquid CO2 starts pouring out. As the liquid CO2 turns to gas, it will expand and then rise out of the cramped earth into the open space of the ground surface.
Then what?
CO2 is heavier than air so it will pool at the ground surface. That is why a container of dry ice will have that cool looking cloud of CO2 in it.
The CO2 will displace the oxygen and every human and animal in the area of the CO2 cloud will suffocate.
At Lake Nyos, 1,700 people and 3,500 head of livestock died of suffocation.
The doll in the photo had a gas mask but only a SCUBA tank or other oxygen supply would keep you alive in such an environment.
CO2 is not poisonous. You are correct that we breathe and swallow CO2 every minute of our lives.
However, the fact that a heavier-than-air CO2 cloud will dispalce oxygen will kill you by suffocation. At Lake Nyos, 1,700 people died of suffocation.
See my Post 7.
Why is it that the solution to Mann Made global warming always seems much worse than the warming they claim they are trying to control? We will be destroyed by these fools.
Other notable wacky solutions from the experts.
1) Move the moon
2) Reduce the world population by 90%
3) Giant space mirrors
4) Cow fart tax
5) Fleeing the planet
***It didn’t work out so well for those around Lake Nyos.***
In North East New Mexico there is an underground formation called the Bravo Dome that has trapped natural CO2. Some wells drilled have found the CO2 to be so pure it was used in dry ice manufacture.
No one in that area is in a panic about it.
If these were widely spread, they could theoretically be “used for a purpose” by those who controlled them, and perhaps a radical federal government under siege could unleash a terrible slaughter upon it's own populace. Or perhaps the powers that be could decide that there were too many humans on the earth and decide to “thin out the herd”, or they could simply be used as a threat to keep the peons in line.
These things would also be a prime target for terrorists for obvious reasons.
Well, these people are protesting a stupid idea, but they’re missing the main reason why it’s stupid.
CO2 is absolutely necessary for all life. If we start purposefully removing it from the air, we won’t see drops in the concentration of atmospheric CO2 for a long time.
What we will see is plants dying off.
The concentration of CO2 has dropped throughout the history of the Earth due to natural processes. There is almost none in the air, compared to its concentration during dinosaur times. Plants can only extract CO2 from the air if it is above a certain concentration—which we don’t know, but we’re likely to be close to it now, considering how little CO2 is left in the air. Plants that are more sensitive to low CO2 will die off first, freeing up their carbon for other living things. Meanwhile, idiots all caught up in global warming hysteria will continue to try to remove CO2 from the air. They may even step up their efforts, since they won’t see much of a change in CO2 concentration for their efforts (carbon from the dying plants will end up in the air eventually, preventing much of an actual change in concentration). More plants will die, and much of the CO2 thus released will end up being “captured.” When plants (and other photosynthetic organisms) die off, organisms that depend on them for carbon will also die off.
Carbon dioxide capture efforts will not show results in the form of decreased atmospheric CO2 concentrations until the biosphere has been significantly reduced, and many many species have gone extinct. This is a technology whose potential harmful effects far outweigh any perceived benefits.
Either way it will reduce CO2 emmisions.
They are planning on putting CO2 detectors in and around the town and are giving each family a six foot ladder per person so if the alarms go off one can get above the CO2 until it blows away.
The ancient Egyptians squandered resources and slave labor building useless pyramids for their divine kings. We blow billions on idiotic carbon capture schemes which are the equivalent of building a smokestack that vents not into the sky but into the ground
What a joke
No kidding. Stupid idea.
Instead, pump the CO2 ito glass-topped troughs filled with ameaba-laden water, and produce diesel.
And they piped it to the oil fields for oil recovery. Made little Clayton a boom town for a few years in the mid 80s.
1. Bravo Dome is in the middle of nowhere. If there is a massive CO2 spill, Union County and Harding County New Mexico will only be missing a few lizards.
2. Unlike Lake Nyos, Bravo Dome has a history of millions of years of geological stability.
3. A massive, man-made resevoir has a much greater chance of failure that a geological formation that has been stable for millions of years.
What is truly pathetic is that Governments have reached the point of such absurdities that there is a good chance that you are joking and there is an equally good chance that you are telling the truth. :-)
***1. Bravo Dome is in the middle of nowhere***
You are dissing my home area! I remember when Farley was a living, thriving town and began to die after they closed the school. Gladstone is still open and doing well. My great grandparents are in the Gladstone cemetery.
When the CO2 boom began my dad checked to see if we still had mineral rights to the ranch we sold back in the 1950s. Unfortunatly he sold them with the property.
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