How feasible is carbon capture?

[Kitsune]

Has anybody looked into it? Kind of curious how feasible it is along with how expensive it might be?

[krakonfour]

Has anybody looked into it? Kind of curious how feasible it is along with how expensive it might be?

I think it is already being used in large scales in today's coal plants.
The main hindrance is not effectiveness, but cost. For the business man, the question is how much will the process cost compared to tax deductions of a greener plant?

[Darth Tanner]

It's not being used at any actual power stations yet - there are numerous small scale pilot programs and even some large scale facilities where carbon is captured for commercial reasons (but nowhere near all the plants emissions). There are big sites in development but they keep running into financial difficulty and getting scrubbed.

Even if you ignored the cost of adding the system it can use up 10-40% of a plant’s capacity. Some figure I've seen say that it would easily add 20-50% to the cost of generating electricity plant side.

However coal is still pretty cheap globally so even if you add 50% to its cost it can remain reasonably competitive with renewables. This of course is hindered by the fact no full scale plants have installed CCS systems yet so there could easily be big problems scaling the tech up from the pilot program sites.

The German plant at Schwarze (still only 30MW) is especially amusing as they load the carbon into trucks and apparently drive it 220 miles to store it. Not sure if that still works out carbon neutral but it’s not exactly in the spirit of the technology.

I’m not sure if there is green subsidy available to support large scale carbon storage?

[Kitsune]

Could use electric trucks to transport it?

[MrDakka]

World's biggest CCS plant in Norway got shutdown apparently due to cost: http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/09/no ... -plan.html

[Darth Tanner]

Could use electric trucks to transport it?

even more of the stations load reduced to run the CCS. Not sure if electric trucks would be up to it either, only heard of buses and milk floats being electrified.

The big plant being built with CCS at the moment are Jänschwalde (250MW) in Germany - The UK attempt at Hatfield (900MW) is up in the air as to if it ll be built or not despite £180 million of EU funding.

[Kitsune]

Need to understand I am still more of a supporter of nuclear, something like the CANDU reactors which create minimal waste, and thorium reactors.

[Darth Tanner]

In an ideal world we would have nukes to run everything... we don't speak French so must make do...

Coal with CCS that worked wouldnt be too bad compared to some of the other options (like coal without CCS)

I doubt we will see a fully functional coal CCS for a couple of generations though - there seems to be a lot of bugs to work out to make it workable without comical levels of subsidy.

[krakonfour]

there seems to be a lot of bugs to work out to make it workable without comical levels of subsidy.

Commercial solar panel businesses say hi!

[Kitsune]

In an ideal world we would have nukes to run everything... we don't speak French so must make do...

An event like Fukushima in the UK or German is almost impossible and it was an older reactor design yet it retards reactor development for several decades.

Coal with CCS that worked wouldnt be too bad compared to some of the other options (like coal without CCS)

I doubt we will see a fully functional coal CCS for a couple of generations though - there seems to be a lot of bugs to work out to make it workable without comical levels of subsidy.

Heard the claim that we would destroy the world economy fighting atmospheric CO2.
Just trying to find out how it will work

[Lord Revan]

Need to understand I am still more of a supporter of nuclear, something like the CANDU reactors which create minimal waste, and thorium reactors.

From what I've neard from my brother reason CANDU-style reactors aren't more common is that you can easily produce weapon-grade plutonium in them if you want to, granted he also said that you need to use the fuel rods for only short time or the fuel becomes "poisoned"(his words not mine) for weapon purposes.

[Magis]

Need to understand I am still more of a supporter of nuclear, something like the CANDU reactors which create minimal waste, and thorium reactors.

From what I've neard from my brother reason CANDU-style reactors aren't more common is that you can easily produce weapon-grade plutonium in them if you want to, granted he also said that you need to use the fuel rods for only short time or the fuel becomes "poisoned"(his words not mine) for weapon purposes.

There are several reasons why CANDUs are not more common than they are. Firstly, the regulatory regimes in many countries (including the USA) have different safety priorities than in Canada, and those priorities are not favorable to CANDU. Secondly, developed countries have unofficial trade barriers against foreign reactors for the benefit of their domestic reactor industry. Also, CANDU requires a much larger capital investment than light water reactors, and the former AECL, as a crown corporation, had difficulty competing in a private marketplace, such as being unable to offer a wider range of financing solutions to potential buyers.

From a proliferation perspective, CANDU can conceivably produce high grade Plutonium (i.e. Plutonium with a large isotopic ratio of Pu239), but it certainly isn't the easiest device for producing such materials.

[Simon_Jester]

The German plant at Schwarze (still only 30MW) is especially amusing as they load the carbon into trucks and apparently drive it 220 miles to store it. Not sure if that still works out carbon neutral but it’s not exactly in the spirit of the technology.

If you were using a pickup truck you'd burn something like 200 liters of fuel to transport several hundred kilos of carbon- and burning 200 liters of fuel will not liberate more than 200 kilos of carbon.

Bigger trucks are, so far as I know, more fuel-efficient. So it's not good, but it's at least not actively counterproductive.

[Kitsune]

The German plant at Schwarze (still only 30MW) is especially amusing as they load the carbon into trucks and apparently drive it 220 miles to store it. Not sure if that still works out carbon neutral but it’s not exactly in the spirit of the technology.

If you were using a pickup truck you'd burn something like 200 liters of fuel to transport several hundred kilos of carbon- and burning 200 liters of fuel will not liberate more than 200 kilos of carbon.

Bigger trucks are, so far as I know, more fuel-efficient. So it's not good, but it's at least not actively counterproductive.

Could also use trains to be even more efficient

[Irbis]

Has anybody looked into it? Kind of curious how feasible it is along with how expensive it might be?

In short: it's nonsense. Smoke and mirror nonsense drawing focus from other areas. This at least seems to be consensus of university ecology departments in Poland (disclaimer - Poland uses a lot of carbon energy and our politicians heavily lobby for carbon capture to weasel out of EU-wide carbon reductions to move issue one more election cycle forward with empty promises 'we can just capture!') after analysing what we'd really need to do to meet EU reduction targets.

I can look for the paper tomorrow, but IIRC, trying to sustain current level of carbon energy production would require creating infrastructure 1.4 times larger than current oil infrastructure. And by oil infrastructure they mean the whole she-bang - pipelines, gas stations, cars, oil power plants, fertilizer and plastic factories, everything. You especially need a lot of underground carbon storage tanks, and there is no guarantee carbon won't escape them without ridiculously high costs.

[Korto]

+1
Australia, and we have a BIG interest in it working, but the only people here who have any belief in it are the coal producers, and the government. Anyone independent thinks it's rubbish.

There is small scale carbon capture from factory smokestacks for the gasses industry. They catch the CO2, bottle it, and sell it. But having willing buyers is a completely different economic proposition.

[aerius]

The only feasibly large scale system I've seen proposed is building the power plant near an oil field, then pumping the CO2 underground to push the oil out. After they're done pumping oil, the wells are sealed and the CO2 stays underground where the oil used to be. In theory. There's not many places in the world where you can make it work, not every oil field is big enough or has the right geology for this to work.

[Irbis]

In theory. There's not many places in the world where you can make it work, not every oil field is big enough or has the right geology for this to work.

Yeah. Poland actually had oil fields that we used up, plus salt mines that could also serve as storage, yet even most optimistic surveys and estimations established they would last a few months worth of CO2, then we would need another solution. Also, they happen to be on wrong end of country.

To put things in perspective, just one thermal power plant in Bełchatów produces ~31 million tonnes of CO2 per year, and it will be enlarged soon. To capture all of this, you'd need several times more storage than all current global capture efforts. One plant. Even liquid CO2 has 3/4 density of water, meaning you'd need something capable of holding 42 million tons of water, container 220 meters tall and 460 meters long/wide, cooled whole time so it doesn't burst. Nope, it can't be realistically done.

[Kitsune]

Reading a couple of potential items of good news
http://theconversation.com/new-carbon-c ... soda-18847
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57608 ... cheap-too/
Maybe they never will work out quite right

[Irbis]

Look at how limited amounts they will capture. But ok, let's assume they can capture 100%. He says cost of capture is about 20$ per tonne. Given the amount I quoted above, Bełchatów would need 620 mln dollars per year to capture its output (soon to be about 1 bln $ after expansion). I don't know, what is more sensible - produce a billion dollar mountain of soda/chalk waste 500 meters high every year or use to money to buy nuclear power plant or whatever and close the coal plant for good reducing emissions to zero?

Anyway, baking soda production sounds nice (despite the obvious issue of demand, Bełchatów alone would produce 100x times current world soda output), but I wonder how good the scrubbing is. Coal smoke contains quite a lot of radioactive elements, it would be sad if any established business used the dread word 'nuclear' to scare everyone away from it

[Kitsune]

Never have to mine gypsum for sheetrock again

I agree as well but just throw up as potential option
Electricity generation has to vastly increase if we go to electric cars primarily as well

[Sea Skimmer]

The only feasibly large scale system I've seen proposed is building the power plant near an oil field, then pumping the CO2 underground to push the oil out. After they're done pumping oil, the wells are sealed and the CO2 stays underground where the oil used to be. In theory. There's not many places in the world where you can make it work, not every oil field is big enough or has the right geology for this to work.

One proposal was that natural gas power plants could install buffer tanks for CO2, and actually reverse the pipelines supplying them with natural gas from time to time to send the gas back to the natural gas fields to inject underground. It'd still require a major investment modding the pipe, but its pretty feasible if the original carbon capture tech ever worked well. Of course the CO2 emissions from CO2 are also much less, making it far more realistic then coal to even think about.

[energiewende]

I remember reading an IEA report some years ago suggesting that the CCS cost premium was comparable to the nuclear cost premium. I will try to dig it out. Both are significantly better than renewables and the nuclear cost is backed by data rather than projections, so I would guess CCS will likely compare badly to nuclear, and only in ideal circumstances match. That's without further technological advances anyway.

He says cost of capture is about 20$ per tonne.

That's not bad at all. Significantly less than most estimates of the externality cost of emissions.