THE MYTH OF CARBON CAPTURE AND STORAGE,
IT’S NOT CLEAN OR GREEN
Eugene Plawiuk,
5th Class Certified Power
Engineer
Last week Saskatchewan Power
announced with much fanfare the first ever North American Carbon Capture and
Sequestration or Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) project at Boundary Point
Power Plant.
This coal fired power plant
will capture carbon dioxide (CO2), hence the name carbon capture, compress it
and place it in geological formations underground to be held infinitum. The
federal government and provincial government of Saskatchewan touted this as great for the
environment, for the climate, for Green House Gas (GHG) reduction and for
creating some strange alchemical beast called clean coal.
I am afraid that like clean
coal and other unicorns, Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage have nothing to do
with cleaning anything from the climate, to coal. In fact what most news
reports, especially those from the home province, did not report the real
reason for the creation of this vastly expensive, untested technology.
While reporting almost
verbatim the talking points of Sask Power and the conservative provincial and
federal politicians touting this project, the media overlooked one simple fact,
dirty coal goes into the power plant, dirty coal is burned giving off toxic
gases to create electricity for our homes there is nothing clean about it.
An extension on the exhaust
towers and use of scrubber technology has been around a lot longer would also
reduce toxic emissions and is cheaper. But utility companies have resisted
these retrofits in the past, so why their sudden enthusiasm for the expensive
greening of dirty coal fired power plants using Carbon Capture and Storage?
For oil, oil in the Bakken
shield in Saskatchewan
but more importantly for oil still insitu underground in conventional wells. And
potentially in oilsands in Northern Saskatchewan and Alberta,
and in heavy oil in the provinces southern city of Lloydminister.
In fact along with Saskatchewan and the
federal government, Alberta
too put money into these projects.
However this fact was hardly
ever mentioned in the media boosters of this project, or if it was it was thought
of en passant, as they say in chess. Perhaps a sentence or two three quarters
down the page.
The headlines said nothing
at all about oil, it was all about how this magical process still to be put on
line and proven to work, would clean coal, scrub clean the climate and cost
taxpayers billions. This is and will be the constant claim by the coal and oil
industries and their backers in the government
The Alberta government in 2008 announced a
whopping $2 Billion dollar investment fund for Carbon Capture and Storage
technology development, supposedly for the oilsands industry to reduce its
carbon footprint. It is this fund that invested in the Sask Power project that
still exists and has yet to fund a single oilsands project around CCS
technology.
Why, well because Carbon
Capture and Storage, sounds great, doesn’t it, it rolls off the tongue of
politicians especially right wing ones who promote business over the
environment. Why would these folks who call opponents of dirty energy like coal
and bitumen, radical environmentalists, eco terrorists, embrace a green
anything.
Because it is not green,
does not clean coal, and does nothing for climate change contrary to all claims
made for it. It is about taking Carbon Dioxide (CO2) from coal emissions from
power plants and then compressing it into a liquid pumping it through a
pipeline and then pumping it into underground chambers full of fractures that
absorb the carbon dioxide and hold it forever.
The story often stops here.
What does the carbon dioxide displace underground?
Oil, the storage areas are
oil fields that can no longer be tapped using conventional methods. Yet almost
60% of the oil remains making it viable for extraction by a variety of methods,
including fracking as well as steam extraction such as done in the oilsands
now.
Once the carbon dioxide is
sequestered it displaces the oil pushing it to the surface along with some
residual carbon dioxide. The rest remains underground; the residual CO2 that
escapes with the oil to the surface is minimal according to several scientific
studies.
And here is the point not a
single scientific study, easily found by Googling Carbon Capture and Storage,
says that this process is about doing anything other than being used to create
what the industry calls Enhanced Oil Production (EOP) and in fact many industry
and scientific studies are entitled CCS
for EOP.
The most recent studies state that any so called green impacts are minimal, from reducing the impact on climate change to magically turning dirty coal clean.
That is not its purpose
never has been never will be. For the Alberta
government the big lie they used was that Carbon Capture and Storage will
reduce carbon emissions from the oilsands. And yet when oilsands researchers
were offered money for CCS projects they all said no because it has nothing to
do with oilsands or reducing their carbon footprint.
When coal powered utilities
claim they are creating a cleaner form of energy and helping green the
environment because they are capturing storing and pumping CO2 from coal into
oil fields, well that’s more than a fib it’s a big lie.
The engineering and science
behind CCS has always been part of the process of extracting oil from old
fields. It was developed fifty years ago at the same time the oil industry was
developing fracking and steam extraction
technologies. It was used with existing naturally occurring and some man made
CO2. Eventually the natural sources of CO2 have disappeared and in order to
extract more oil we would need to produce what the industry calls, ironically
enough, ‘anthropogenic’ CO2, this man made CO2 can only be effectively made by
coal fired power plants.
The coal, oil and utility
companies and their allies in engineering
and scientific R&D in post secondary institutions and private industry have
all known about the potential of this technology for half a century, why have
they waited till now to develop it.
Because our conventional oil
and gas reserves will be tapped out by 2020 in Alberta,
Saskatchewan as well as in Europe and the US the conventional
oil fields are drying up. They still contain lots of oil it’s just harder to
get to.
Fracking is big right now
and is being widely used in these fields as it has for fifty years, it is
controversial because now it is being used for shale gas and oil fields, and
currently CCS will not replace it because CCS is so expensive. But if CCS could
be developed for use in conventional as well as shale oil fields and eventually
even tar sands then it becomes more cost effective.
How does old King Coal the
oldest of our fossil energies, benefit from this, after all oil and gas are its
competitors. It’s about keeping the existing coal fired power plants working
rather than replacing them with natural gas fired ones, or nuclear powered
ones.
While Canada, the US and
Europe are reducing the use of coal fired plants they are increasingly being used
in India, China and the BRICS where they have produced a Fordist manufacturing
economy of coal, steel, cars.
The potential for this
technology is that it will be needed in the future for use on EOP fields, and
it can benefit countries that want to reduce their emissions, while still using
coal. It’s a win-win-win except for the environment, and you and me.
The environmental concerns
we have with fossil fuel use both coal and oil, will not be addressed by CCS.
But you and I will be told it will be because we are paying for it.
The industry has not
developed CCS for EOP because it is too costly, so who better to pay for it
than you and I, the taxpayers of Canada,
Alberta and Saskatchewan.
Billions of tax dollars as
credits, loans, subsidies, research and development grants, university funding
for CCS projects etc all this has not cost the coal or oil industries a penny.
But it is costing us.
In order to sell us on this
waste of money, doing nothing for the environment while investing in more oil
production, business, lobbyists, politicians, oil, gas and coal spokespeople
and their paid scientific talking heads do not deny this is
for Enhanced Oil Recovery, its just that they talk about Clean Coal and Green Energy
and stopping Climate Change more. The benefits they tout are the same as those
for the Emperors clothes.
It is the ultimate in Green
Washing, the advertising campaign to make things appear healthy and good for
you when they aren’t. It’s a way of directing more taxpayer money to the
already ludicrously wealthy energy industry.
It is also good for right
wing politicians to pretend to be doing something for the climate and
environment in a single sound bite Carbon Capture and Storage sounds so Green
until you finish the sentence; ‘for Enhanced Oil Production’.
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