Posted on 05/10/2024 7:39:06 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Carbon capture and underground storage (CCUS) tops the list of silly schemes “to reduce man-made global warming.” The idea is to capture exhaust gases from power stations or cement plants, separate the CO2 from the other gases, compress it, pump it to the chosen burial site, and force it underground into permeable rock formations. Then hope it never escapes.
An Australian mining company who should know better is hoping to appease green critics by proposing to bury the gas of life, CO2, deep in the sedimentary rocks of Australia’s Great Artesian Basin.
The people running this company have chosen the Precipice Sandstone for their carbon cemetery. However, the chances of keeping CO2 gas confined in this porous sandstone are remote. This formation has a large area of outcrop to the surface, and gas will escape somewhere, so why bother forcing it into a jail with no roof?
Glencore shareholders should rise in anger at this wasteful and futile pagan sacrifice to the global warming gods. It will join fiascos like Snowy 2, pink bats, and SunCable (a dream to take solar energy generated in the Northern Territory via overhead and undersea cable for over 3,000 miles across ocean deeps and volcanic belts to Singapore).
Engineers with buckets of easy money may base a whole career on CCUS. But only stupid green zealots would support the sacrifice of billions of investment dollars and scads of energy to bury this harmless, invisible, life-supporting gas in the hope of appeasing the high priests of global warming.
The quantities of gases that CCUS would need to handle are enormous, and the capital and operating costs will be horrendous. It is a dreadful waste of energy and resources, consuming about twenty percent of power delivered from an otherwise efficient coal-fired power station.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Is there not a commercial market for CO2? Beer, soft drinks, baking, etc.
Yes (for soft drinks anyway. CO2 arises during the fermentation process that occurs during beer production and dough rising) but not enough demand to match the production of CO2 by power plants and vehicle emissions. Plus there is a purity issue. CO2 in the capture BS could contain all kinds of impurities. CO2 for beverage use must be relatively pure or it will affect the flavor of the final product.
“With time, heat, and pressure, wouldn’t
Carbon Capture make... ..coal?”
Not coal no. Coal is the remains of swamp plants you need a certain carbon to hydrogen ratio for coal.
CO2 has no hydrogen and the rocks it is injected into would not have much either chemically bonded in them. Sandstone is SiO4 silicates mostly. I guess under near mantle conditions you might get graphite and the oxygen would bind to the silicate host rocks in a SiO6 octahedra. Graphite<> coal plus it would be so deep as to never be exploitable as a carbon source at that point.
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