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It’s Not Easy Going Green, Part II

How in the world can you be *opposed* to fracking gas wells but *in favor* of storing millions of tons of liquid carbon dioxide underground forever?

By: Steve Maley (Diary)  |  July 17th, 2011 at 01:00 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

AEP's Mountaineer Power Plant in New Haven, WV.

This week, American Electric Power scuppered plans for a $668 million carbon sequestration project at the utility’s Mountaineer Power Plant in West Virgina. The Mountaineer project had been heralded as the flagship of “clean coal” technology: the process involves using an ammonia chilling process to extract CO2 from the combustion exhaust. The CO2 would then be injected in its liquid state into underground rock layers where it would presumably remain in perpetuity.

The technology had been heralded as the quickest solution to help the coal industry weather tougher federal limits on greenhouse gas emissions. But Congressional inaction on climate change diminished the incentives that had spurred A.E.P. to take the leap.

Company officials, who plan an announcement on Thursday, said they were dropping the larger, $668 million project because they did not believe state regulators would let the company recover its costs by charging customers, thus leaving it no compelling regulatory or business reason to continue the program.

The federal Department of Energy had pledged to cover half the cost, but A.E.P. said it was unwilling to spend the remainder in a political climate that had changed strikingly since it began the project.

As is the case with most green technologies, this one is a non-starter without a massive infusion of government money and mandates for its use. When those are no longer forthcoming, there is no compelling reason to do it. That’s several hundred “green” jobs down the drain.

But the issue that interests me, from the standpoint of earth science, is how one could be in favor of underground carbon sequestration while being opposed to hydraulic fracturing of natural gas wells. Scientific consistency is less important to politicians pushing a green agenda than their politics.

From a 2009 look at the project:

The technology is certain to devour a substantial amount of the plant’s energy output — optimists say 15 percent, and skeptics, 30 percent. Some energy experts argue that it could prove even more expensive than solar or nuclear power.

And as with any new technology, even the engineers are unsure how well it will work: will all of the carbon dioxide stay put?

Environmentalists who oppose coal mining and coal energy of any kind worry that sequestration could simply trade one problem, global warming, for another one, the pollution of water supplies. Should the carbon dioxide mix with water underground and form carbonic acid, they say, it could leach poisonous materials from rock deep underground that could then seep out.

Given the depths to which workers have drilled, they also fret that the project could cause earthquakes, although experts at the Environmental Protection Agency discount the risk of catastrophe.

[Emphasis added.]

Remember, the CO2 must remain in place beyond the “millenia” the Times article suggests; it must stay in place forever.

By contrast, the hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) process that the Times always refers to as “controversial” has been employed in over a million wells in the U.S. alone without any proven connection between the process and groundwater contamination. It involves pumping large amounts of water and sand, along with a small concentration of chemicals, to induce fractures in oil and gas saturated rock layers. Fracturing enhances the rocks’ natural permeability to fluids: it increases the rate fluids can flow out of the rocks.

But this is the key point: the fracking process takes place in a day, or a matter of days, during the “completion” process of a well. It is not an ongoing process lasting months or years.

The combustion of coal produces 50% more CO2 than natural gas. On that quality alone, you’d think the greenies would be high behind gas as America’s clean, abundant, domestic fuel of the future.

Cross-posted at stevemaley.com.


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  • http://www.downstateiladvocate.com anacreon

    with the FutureGen project (if it’s even still called that).

    Keeping CO2 underground indefinitely? Right. Next I supposed we’ll jettison our nuclear arsenal into the sun a la Superman IV.

    • http://pocketchangeproductions.net/ anotherindyfilmguy

      (Obama at the podium)
      Well… ten minutes ago I disposed of all of our active nuclear weapons by firing them into the sun… um… our boys at Norad called me to tell me that the missiles were something called “suborbital” and would be coming back down… I know that sounds complicated and everything but don’t worry – Joe Biden and I are both safe here in the Whitehouse where Norad assures me is the safest place to be in such an event…. So in a few minutes when some trivial nuclear explosions begin I’d advise you to, on immediately observing them to———————————-

  • http://pocketchangeproductions.net/ anotherindyfilmguy

    there would be no “going green” movement…

  • ohiohistorian

    Burying CO2 is dumb; even taking a 30% hit on power (that is what the REALISTS say; the pessimists are closer to 50^) for “carbon sequestration”. They looked at burying it in Greenville, OH from fermenters, in the most active earthquake zone in OH, below a city. All it would take is one fissure, and it would be like the Andean city that was suddenly obliterated. This is research that is writ as gospel, just like global warming.

    But you think this can hurt AEP, look at the latest EPA implementation of Regional Air Transport of Ozone http://www.epa.gov/ttnnaaqs/ozone/rto/rto.html which may shut down many Ohio River power plants, several of which are those belonging to AEP. Power rates in Ohio will go up. Remember Obama promised us that rates would skyrocket? Well, he is doing as he promised to kill our civilization. There is NO economic benefit analysis on any of these things that can be shown to make them beneficial; why Congress allows EPA to continue to violate that part of the Clean Air Act is beyond me.

  • johnms

    Obviously this scheme was designed by someone who was sleeping in high school chemistry. It won’t work, and it has the potential of creating environmental havoc and life threatening danger around the sequestration site.

    To explain:

    Carbon dioxide is a gas at room temperature. Compress it and cool it enough, and it will become a liquid. Pump it underground, and it will become a hyper-cold underground solid. As it absorbs heat from the surrounding earth, it will turn back into a gas and start filtering up through the ground.

    First of all, if even 1% of the carbon dioxide being stored underground were to leak out, that would apparently nullify all of the supposed benefits of sequestration. See:

    http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=can-stored-carbon-dioxide-leak

    Second, once the carbon dioxide is put underground, it will be absolutely impossible to “pump it out” again, because it will have turned into solid form. Doing this is irreversable.

    Third, when carbon dioxide seeps through soil, it kills the plant life above it. There’s a great example of this effect at the Mammoth Mountain volcano in California. See:

    http://dwb4.unl.edu/Chem/CHEM869J/CHEM869JLinks/quake.usgs.gov/prepare/factsheets/CO2/index.html

    The carbon dioxide seeping through the ground is killing all of the trees and plant life in the area. And there’s absolutely nothing they can do about it.

    Fourth, if carbon dioxide seeps through the ground, it will seep through foundations and into basements and into houses. Because it is a heavy gas, it will accumulate at the bottom of the room and gradually fill the room with CO2. To quote from an article on the dangers of high concentrations of carbon dioxide:

    http://www.rimbach.com/scripts/Article/IHN/Number.idc?Number=92

    “Carbon dioxide is heavier than air, with a density of 1.5 times that of fresh air. While present as a natural component in fresh air, at higher concentrations exposure symptoms include headaches, dizziness, shortness of breath, nausea, rapid or irregular pulse and depression of the central nervous system. Besides displacing the oxygen in fresh air, high concentrations of CO2 may exacerbate or worsen the symptoms related to oxygen deficiency, and interfere with successful resuscitation. Concentrations of 40,000 ppm or higher should be regarded as immediately dangerous to life and health. Exposure to very high concentrations (e.g. exposure to 6% volume CO2 for several minutes or 30% volume CO2 for 20-30 seconds), has been linked to permanent heart damage, as evidenced by altered electrocardiograms. Concentrations greater than 10% are capable of causing loss of consciousness within 15 minutes or less.”

    So, to sum this up. Putting enormous amounts of carbon dioxide underground is an irreversable step. If and when it starts seeping through the soil, it will kill all the plant life in the seepage area and create significant danger to human life by filling underground cavities with an invisible poison gas that can cause heart damage in 20-30 seconds and death within minutes. It is insane for anyone to do something like this, especially in areas of human habitation.

    But then, environmentalism isn’t really about science or common sense. It is a religion, and that makes it OK to cause environmental disasters so long as you mean well.

    • lineholder

      .

  • Wayne

    to develop a sanity meter that can be applied to the emotional factors influencing liberal/progressive causes. If the meter enters the “red zone” the theory must be discarded out of hand.

  • belcatar

    Rather than sequester CO2 underground, it makes more sense to use that CO2 to grow algae. There are a number of companies in the growing algae industry that are on the verge of commercial-scale algal oil production. Solazayme, Amyris, and Origin Oil are all close to commercial scale. Origin Oil has a 80 hectare project at the Tarong Power Station in Australia, and if that project works as planned, MDB Energy (which runs Tarong) intends on creating much larger projects at other power stations.

    Using algae to sequester CO2 turns CO2 into a legitimate commodity. It also enables energy producers to get more out of coal by creating oil from the coal plant’s exhaust. Algae can also be used to create plastics and animal feed. It’s not a magic pill that can replace coal or natural gas, but it might be a way to improve the energy industry’s bottom line.

    • johnms

      Nice writeup of efforts to do this here

      But apparently it went badly.

      • belcatar

        Extraction has been the sticking point in commercial algal oil production for a long time. There are two main problems with extraction. The first is cracking the cell wall of the algae cell to get the oil out, and the second is separating the oil, water, and biomass in a cost-effective way.

        The company that comes up with a workable, cost-effective solution to extraction will be well-positioned to make a lot of money. Hopefully, I bet on the right horse when I invested in Origin Oil.

        • dennism

          80 hectares of land, 200 acres. Yikes, I get chills thinking about the initial cost of a facility that would cover 200 acres of surface. I think potential locations for facilities like that are few and far between. They’d need lots of flat surface and lots of water. Taking energy this way is horizontal. Drilling is vertical.

          I also think that energy can be produced from – what do you think Vladimir? – 1200 acres of minerals, and in doing so, use up only a couple of acres of surface. So I think subsurface can produce more energy at a lower cost, and create a considerably smaller footprint. I could be wrong.

          Besides, taking energy vertically leaves those other 1198 acres available to produce arugula or maybe cattle that have been genetically modified to expel oxygen.

          • http://stevemaley.com Steve Maley

            Like most new technologies, they just have one or two hurdles to get over…

            Here, the problem is one of scale. It’s one thing to show that something works in a lab, but quite another to scale it up to a commercial scale.

  • loganyung

    Read about Lake Nyos in Africa if you want to know what can happen to submerged CO2. A landslide into the lake caused the release of a mass of C02 in Laky Nyos, killing 1700 people and countless livestock. People quickly suffocated, because the C02 displaced all the oxygen at ground level, up to about 30 feet high.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Nyos

    So, what will happen if an earthquake occurs at the sequestration site? It’s a time bomb.

  • spinoneone

    Oh, well, yes, if you pump any liquid into a fault you may do two things that could cause it to move: 1) lubricate both slip surfaces; and, 2) spread it, reducing the friction holding the rock in place. Happened in Denver in the ’50′s and ’60′s when the Department of Defense pumped contaminated water into the ground at various locations at Rocky Mountain Arsenal.

  • drfredc

    Seems it would be more cost effective to just let plants do what they do — sequester C02… Who cares if its in some government sponsored plant or not…?

    As far as long term C02 storage goes, we have, or used to have, a pretty good industry related to C02 sequestering — it’s (was) called home building using wood framing… However, like most things given away for free by the government, there were ‘problems’…

  • Menlo

    I’ll bet they have no problem with the government’s unwarranted, unethical, and dangerous tainting of their municipal water supplies with toxic Chinese-made poison “for the children.”

    Genuine environmentalists would have priorities and concerns that none of today’s “green” lobbyists and corporations do. Like most people with legitimate concerns, they are marginalized and never taken seriously.

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