Category: News

Calculations on Coal to Carbon Dioxide

From the Minister’s office

With historic global economic growth accompanied by an insatiable thirst for energy, coal and fossil fuels will continue to provide a significant proportion of the world’s energy for the foreseeable future.

It is worth noting that Australia’s coal resources alone, assuming the advent of successful clean coal technologies, are so large that they could be significant in the global energy mix for several hundred years.

I hope this project will encourage community acceptance of CCS and its potential role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

While the Otway Basin Project will demonstrate the carbon storage aspect of CCS, the Australian Government is also supporting projects to demonstrate post combustion capture at coal-fired power stations.

These projects form part of our National Clean Coal Initiative.

This initiative will be underpinned by a $500 million Clean Coal Fund.

Together with $1 billion from the coal industry through COAL21, the fund will support total investment of $1.5 billion in the development and deployment of clean coal technologies. 

From the CO2 Cooperative Research Centre’s newsletter

Monitoring at the CO2CRC Otway Project, Australia’s first demonstration of geological storage of carbon dioxide (CO2), has confirmed that the CO2 injected two kilometres below the surface is behaving as predicted.
Instruments at the Naylor-1 monitoring well, 300 metres from the injection site, have detected minute amounts of tracer gases with elevated CO2 content, confirming that
the CO2 is moving through the depleted underground gas reservoir at the rate and in the direction that researchers predicted using computer modelling.

The decommissioned Naylor-1 well was equipped with downhole sensors to monitor the injected carbon dioxide and confirm its arrival in the reservoir. Regular sampling using specially designed equipment has been underway since injection began.

CO2CRC Otway Project manager Sandeep Sharma says that the work put into the extensive monitoring program is now paying off.

“Monitoring and verification of the CO2 storage is a major part of the Otway Project,” he said. “It helps us demonstrate that CO2 can be stored safely and securely under Australian
conditions.

“The data from the monitoring well is also helping calibrate our computer modelling, ensuring that our monitoring tools are some of the most accurate in the world.”

The monitoring and verification program also includes regular sampling of soil, air and groundwater for CO2 content and has found no evidence of higher levels of CO2.

This is the article about the No Policy roulette wheel from MIT depicting the likely temperature rises under a lack of major policy agreement at Copenhagen this year.

No-Policy Case

The “roulette” wheel below depicts the MIT Joint Program’s estimation of the range of probability of potential global warming over the next hundred years, assuming a scenario in which “no policy” action is taken to try to curb the global emissions of greenhouse gases.

The face of the wheel is divided into six slices, with the size of each slice representing the estimated probability of the temperature change in the year 2100 falling within that range.

The size of the slice for greater than 7 degrees Celsius warming (shown in red) has a probability of 9%. Or, if stated in another way, that probability has the same likelihood as the “odds” of (about) 1 chance in 11. The slice representing the smallest predicted change, less than 3°C (shown in blue), has a probability of less than 1% (1 in 100 odds).

The median value, that level where there is a 50% chance of falling above or below (even odds) is 5.1°C. The other areas of the wheel have likelihoods of occurring: 3 to 4°C, 12% (about 1 in 8); 4 to 5°C, 30% (almost 1 in 3 odds); 5 to 6 °C, 33% (1 in 3 odds); 6 to 7 °C, 15% (about 1 in 7 odds).

For more technical detail see Sokolov et al., 2009.

Well that got ’em going. So far James Lovelock, Jim Hansen and Pushker Kharecha, Chris Goodall and Peter Read have all responded in the Guardian to my column on biochar.

Reading their responses, I realise that it was unfair of me to include James Lovelock and Jim Hansen on the list of those who have been suckered by the charleaders. Their position is more nuanced than I made out. Chris Goodall, to his credit, has accepted that he was too bullish about the technology. The points he makes in its defence seem fair and well-reasoned.

On the other hand, I wasn’t harsh enough about Peter Read. In his response column today he uses the kind of development rhetoric that I thought had died out with the Indonesian transmigration programme.

To him, people and land appear to be as fungible as counters in a board game. He makes the extraordinary assertion that “degraded land” – which he wants to cover with plantations – is uninhabited by subsistence farmers, pastoralists or hunters and gatherers. That must be news to all the subsistence farmers, pastoralists and hunters and gatherers I’ve met in such places. Then he repeats the ancient canard that, by denying such people the opportunity to have their land turned into a eucalyptus plantation/hydroelectric dam/opencast mine/nuclear test site/re-education camp or whatever project the latest swivel-eyed ideologue is trying to promote, we are keeping them in poverty.

Has he learnt nothing from the past 40 years of development studies? Does he not understand that development is something that people must choose, not something that can be imposed on them from on high by megalomaniacs?

As for the “unused potential arable land” he wants to use, that could apply to most of the surface of the planet that possesses a soil layer: rainforest, wetland, savannah – you name it. From my office window I can see a perfect candidate for his attentions: the brakes and thickets of the Cambrian Mountains. I can also see the kind of crop with which Read would cover them: the sitka spruce plantations that blight the lives of everyone who loves the countryside here. Yes this land is degraded, overgrazed and poorly managed. But is there anyone who would prefer that it was all converted to plantations?

But at least a debate is taking place. This technology has gone largely unchallenged by environmentalists for far too long, fooled perhaps by Read’s cunning rebranding of charcoal as biochar, on the grounds – wait for it – that this stuff is “finely divided”. By all means, as Hansen and Kharecha recommend, let’s use genuine waste – whether from crops, forestry, sewage or food – to make biochar. But let’s stop the charleaders from pyrolising the planet in the name of saving it.

monbiot.com