There is a lot going on in the informative article in the url below about climate change and carbon emissions reduction:
“The chief goal of European environmental policy is to curb fossil energy consumption. … These programmes cost billions - and probably achieve the exact opposite of what policymakers intend: the global extraction of coal, gas and oil shoots up instead of sinking.”
For this Newsletter, however, I want to focus on what the author has to say about carbon capture and sequestration. This is one of the areas scientists are working on to minimize the carbon emitted into the atmosphere from the consumption of fossil fuels (see the U.S. Department of Energy for an overview: http://www.fe.doe.gov/programs/sequestration/overview.html). I knew the technology was still underdeveloped and, intuitively, the idea seems too good to be true, but I had no idea the barriers to progress were as seemingly insurmountable as the author suggests:
“Burying carbon is easier said than done. The process of capturing CO from a chimney and turning it into a liquid consumes a third of the energy generated by burning the fuel in the first place. On top of that, the amount of storage volume required would be gigantic, as each carbon atom is joined by two oxygen atoms upon combustion - and they all need to be stored. Carbon captured from anthracite coal would occupy five times as much space underground as the coal itself; in the case of crude oil, three times the volume would be needed. According to estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the earth's depleted coal mines, oil and gas deposits, and natural caves will offer room for barely a 10th of the CO that would be generated by all the recoverable carbon resources.”
Take care,
David
Bill Werther & David Chandler
Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility
© Sage Publications, 2006
http://www.sagepub.com/Werther/
How to resolve the green paradox
Hans-Werner Sinn
932 words
27 August 2009
Financial Times
Asia Ed1
07
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2992000e-92a0-11de-b63b-00144feabdc0.html
