Study: CCS No Remedy For Warming
US research paper
questions viability of carbon capture and storage
Document from Houston University claims
governments overestimated CCS value
The Guardian
(U.K.), April 26, 2010
A new research
paper from American academics is threatening to blow a hole in growing
political support for carbon capture and storage as a weapon in the
fight against global warming.
The document from
Houston University claims that governments wanting to use CCS have
overestimated its value and says it would take a reservoir the size of a
small US state to hold the CO2 produced by one power station.
Previous
modelling has hugely underestimated the space needed to store CO2
because it was based on the "totally erroneous" premise that the
pressure feeding the carbon into the rock structures would be constant,
argues Michael Economides, professor of chemical engineering at Houston,
and his co-author Christene Ehlig-Economides, professor of energy
engineering at Texas A&M University
"It is like
putting a bicycle pump up against a wall. It would be hard to inject CO2
into a closed system without eventually producing so much pressure that
it fractured the rock and allowed the carbon to migrate to other zones
and possibly escape to the surface," Economides said.
The paper
concludes that CCS "is not a practical means to provide any substantive
reduction in CO2 emissions, although it has been repeatedly presented as
such by others."
The report has
come at a critical time when British and other governments worldwide
have started to fast-track a series of CCS prototype schemes as a way of
removing carbon from the atmosphere and helping with climate change..
On 8 April, Royal
assent was given on to what is now the Energy Act 2010, which made law
plans to raise a levy on power users to establish four CCS projects in
Britain. Ministers see this as a potentially planet-friendly way of
building new coal fired power stations, such as the one E.ON wants to
construct at Kingsnorth, in Kent.
The Carbon
Capture and Storage Association (CCSA), which lobbies on behalf of the
sector, says Britain is now at the forefront of new technology with a
legislative framework in place that offers the opportunity for long-term
investment.
Projects are
proceeding in the US, such as the experimental coal-fired Mountaineer
plant in New Haven, West Virginia, which began small-scale carbon
capture last year, as well as in Canada, China and other countries.
Jeff Chapman,
chief executive of the CCSA, believes Economides has made inappropriate
assumptions about the science and geology. He believes the conclusions
in the paper are wrong and says his views are backed up by rebuttals
from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Pacific Northwest
National laboratory and the American Petroleum Institute.
The British
Geological Survey confirmed it was looking at the Economides findings
and was hoping to shortly produce a peer-reviewed analysis.
Economides, who
has a PHD from Stanford University, said he had seen the arguments
against his paper from the API and dismissed them as "nonsense" saying
vested interests are protecting a new concept foisted on the world by
geologists without proper thought.
"I was a
[practising] petroleum engineer for many years and soon realised that
geologists did not understand flow and the laws of physics, against
which you can't argue."
Chapman pointed
out that Statoil, a Norwegian oil company, had been injecting CO2 into
an old reservoir on the North Sea Sleipner field for some time as a
successful experiment in carbon storage. But Economides says the
Sleipner scheme involved a million tonnes over three years, while one
500mW commercial station would need to absorb and store 3m tonnes
annually for 25 years.Economides, who admits he veers towards being
something of a climate change sceptic, says the oil and coal industries
see these schemes as potential solutions so they can keep on doing what
they have been doing in the past, but "CCS is the last refuge of the
scoundrel," he said.
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