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CO2 capture and storage: The economic costs
Rembrandt, The Oil Drum: Europe
Capturing carbon dioxide from coal (and gas) fired electricity plants. Subsequently transporting the carbon dioxide from the plant and storing it underground in (abandoned) oil/gas fields, in other geological formations or on the ocean floor. It seems like an excellent solution for continued fossil fuel use in the coming decades.

The European Union wants to have 12 large CO2 capture and storage demonstration projects in place by 2015, requiring an investment of 5 billion euro. The expectation is that this development will lead to significant cost reductions, making the technology affordable by 2020. There are however two large drawbacks, it will keep costing large sums of money and the process is quite energy intensive. In this post the economic viability of the process is scrutinized. In a previous post the impact of the extra energy cost of the process on coal depletion was quantified.

Not so long ago, I visited a discussion evening about possibilities for the Dutch economy in capturing and storing carbon dioxide. After two interesting talks, one outlining the technical possibilities for storage in the Netherlands and the other the commercial possibilities, one of the other participants made a remark that was spot on. No matter how wonderful the idea of capturing and storing carbon dioxide may sound, it will always be costly to do so.
(30 July 2007)
Besides cost, another issue is how permanent carbon sequestration would be. For example, at what rate would CO2 leak from storage? In the meantime, the coal industry is pushing carbon sequestration as a way to continue burning coal in an era of global warming. -BA

Earth too warm? Bury the CO2.
Mark Clayton, The Christian Science Monitor
Texas alone could hold 40 years' worth of US emissions.
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Snyder, Texas - Under a blazing west Texas sun, with a whiptail lizard and cattle looking on, Rebecca Smyth works with an assistant to lower a measuring line, then a hose, and finally a slender plastic capsule down an old water well 200 feet deep.

She's hoping the water samples she collects will yield clues to what is, arguably, one of mankind's most pressing environmental questions: Can nations bury their greenhouse gases?

If they can, then governments will have bought themselves a decades-long respite as they search for less carbon-intensive energy sources. If they can't, then a significant rise in global temperatures by 2100 looks inevitable, if fossil-fuel consumption continues at its current pace.

And the answer may well lie here, atop an old west Texas oil field known simply as SACROC, where more CO2 has been pumped underground over a longer period of years than anywhere else on Earth. Her efforts - and those of the rest of a small army of scientists funded by the US Department of Energy - are being closely watched. Energy companies want to know their options as Congress mulls over legislative options to global warming. Environmentalists are eager to find ways to slow the rise of greenhouse gases.

"If we don't sequester carbon from coal, we won't be able to stabilize the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere," says John Thompson, director of the coal transition project of the Clean Air Task Force, a Boston-based environmental group. "It's the linchpin."
(31 July 2007)

Esso reckons 20 more years of oil left in Bass Strait
Barry FitzGerald, Sydney Morning Herald
SUCCESS in life extension work by Bass Strait operator Esso has prompted the ExxonMobil subsidiary to predict that the region still has more than 20 years left of oil production and more than 30 years of gas.

A $400 million seismic data and infill drilling program, involving wells at the Kingfish, Bream, Halibut and Fortescue fields, is adding 30,000 barrels of crude oil to daily production, worth close to $1 billion a year on current prices.

But Esso's success has implications for the planned $5 billion Monash Energy coal-to-liquids project in the Latrobe Valley, a joint venture between Shell and Anglo American.

The Monash project would turn brown coal into gas for further conversion into 60,000 barrels a year of synthetic diesel. A key element of the project is the separation of a concentrated stream of carbon dioxide for geosequestration. Without carbon capture and storage (CCS), the greenhouse gas emissions would be at unacceptable levels.

The potential for CCS in Bass Strait's reservoirs was the subject of a Federal Government-funded study by Monash that found there was massive storage capacity in depleted hydrocarbon reservoirs or in deeper geological structures.

But success in the Esso infill program suggests that the implementation of CCS in Bass Strait could be further off than first thought, given the intention of draft legislation that existing oil and gas production not be affected by licences issued for CCS.

Monash countered that there was "still no new information to challenge the initial conclusion that hydrocarbon extraction and CCS can be entirely compatible activities in the Gippsland Basin [Bass Strait]".
(30 July 2007)
Contributor Stuart McCarthy writes:
Yet another setback for the 'just bury it (CO2)' school of 'clean-coal' technology advocates.