I'm with Olaf on this one. Regardless of what happened at Weyburn and the Kerr farm, it's a sad day when CCS is put forward as the best and only technology between further AGW and 300 Gt of CO2 emissions we are committed to from point sources. There needs to be a much broader search for solutions rather than throwing more $Bs just at CCS. Some clues as to what to investigate are found in Hesse's article:
"In the United States, saline aquifers are believed to have the largest capacity for CO2 storage....... CO2 pumped into these formations are sealed under impermeable cap rocks, where it gradually dissolves into the salty water and mineralizes. " If mineralization of CO2 and it's storage in saline aquifers is such a great idea, then why don't we do this at the power plant, avoid making concentrated CO2, and utilize the largest saline aquifer on the planet as the resulting bicarbonate storage reservoir? The added alkalinity would actually help the ocean counter its acidification. Sure this would only be relevant at coastal power plants, but then CCS shaping up to be only a niche market itself. There's lots of CO2 to mitigate and plenty of niches to fill. Why all the focus on making concentrated CO2 with risky storage as the only solution? What other gaseous pollutant is mitigated in this way? Greg >________________________________ > From: "Schuiling, R.D. (Olaf)" <[email protected]> >To: "'[email protected]'" <[email protected]>; >"[email protected]" <[email protected]> >Sent: Saturday, October 18, 2014 5:36 AM >Subject: RE: [geo] Re: Storing greenhouse gas underground--for a million years >| Science/AAAS | News > > > >If there is anything easier than finding many gigatons of olivine (the rock >dunite has BY DEFINTION more than 90% olivine, and the remainder is mostly >pyroxene that also weathers, but not as fast) which is found in many countries >on all continents in large massives near the surface, permitting open pit >mining. The negative sounds are echoing the negative and unjust qualifications >that have always been issued by the CCS-boys, Olaf Schuiling > >From:[email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] >On Behalf Of Stuart Haszeldine >Sent: vrijdag 17 oktober 2014 20:06 >To: [email protected] >Subject: [geo] Re: Storing greenhouse gas underground--for a million years | >Science/AAAS | News > >Oliver, Olaf, > >I think that you should read the scientific evidence rebuttals of the Weyburn >allegations, not the newspaper feeds. Its VERY clear that geochemical >fingerprinting of the CO2 at the Kerr farm near Weyburn is SOIL CO2 of totally >normal origin. Nothing to do with the deep below ground oil extraction >operation, where the CAPTURED CO2 has distinct isotope compositions and >different trace gas fingerprints. The deep injected CO2 is also overwhelmingly >dissolved in the deep groundwater at Weyburn so it cannot leak. Try this from >a newspaper >http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/international-team-of-scientists-conclude-no-carbon-dioxide-co2-leaked-on-kerr-farm-135439598.html >Or this from the scientific report >http://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/homes/sgilfil1/Kerrreport.pdf > >On the real topic of this post, the work by Hesse shows beyond any reasonable >doubt that CO2 is securely stored for millions of years. This was also clear >from Italy - where the risk of death from leakage is tiny 1 in 35 million per >year. Try driving a car with many many tens more risk than that. > >On Olafs (usual) point - yes olivine weathering will absorb CO2. But do the >numbers - olivine is low cost at start, butto make any impact on total >Gigatonnes of CO2, the world needs to mine out most of Oman - so it gets more >expensive. And there are plenty of by-products because its very hard to find >Gigatonnes of pure olivine. > >All these remedies have a role, its not either or, as the world looks like its >so far past sustainable already. > >But, no point in discarding CCS for the paltry cost of a few extra dollars a >year at the start. > >ALL of the above does work - because so little has started. >The lowest cost of all is insulation, efficiency and demand reduction. >Take one less train or airplane. >But, we low from at least 30 years experience - that doesn't happen. > >My solution - taxing carbon extraction at source. Not taxing the users. >Did I hear - politically difficult or impossible ... ? > >Stuart > >On Thursday, 16 October 2014 15:51:36 UTC+1, andrewjlockley wrote: >http://news.sciencemag.org/chemistry/2014/10/storing-greenhouse-gas-underground-million-years >MARC HESSE >Storing greenhouse gas underground—for a million years >When Canada switched on its Boundary Dam power plant earlier this month, it >signaled a new front in the war against climate change. The commercial turbine >burns coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels, but it traps nearly all the >resulting carbon dioxide underground before it reaches the atmosphere. Part of >this greenhouse gas is pumped into porous, water-bearing underground rock >layers. Now, a new study provides the first field evidence that CO2 can be >stored safely for a million years in these saline aquifers, assuaging worries >that the gas might escape back into the atmosphere.“ >It's a very comprehensive piece of work,” says geochemist Stuart Gilfillan of >the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom, who was not involved in the >study. “The approach is very novel.” >There have been several attempts to capture the carbon dioxide released by the >world’s 7000-plus coal-fired plants. Pilot projects in Algeria, Japan, and >Norway indicate that CO2can be stored in underground geologic formations such >as depleted oil and gas reservoirs, deep coal seams, and saline aquifers. In >the United States, saline aquifers are believed to have the largest capacity >for CO2 storage, with potential sites spread out across the country, and >several in western states such as Colorado also host large coal power plants. >CO2 pumped into these formations are sealed under impermeable cap rocks, where >it gradually dissolves into the salty water and mineralizes. Some researchers >suggest the aquifers have enough capacity to store a century’s worth of >emissions from America’s coal-fired plants, but others worry the gas can leak >back into the air through fractures too small to detect. >To resolve the dilemma, geoscientists need to know how long it takes for the >trapped CO2 to dissolve. The faster the CO2 dissolves and mineralizes, the >less risk that it would leak back into the atmosphere. But determining the >rate of dissolution is no easy feat. Lab simulations suggest that the sealed >gas could completely dissolve over 10,000 years, a process too slow to be >tested empirically. >So computational geoscientist Marc Hesse of the University of Texas, Austin, >and colleagues turned to a natural lab: the Bravo Dome gas field in New >Mexico, one of the world's largest natural CO2 reservoirs. Ancient volcanic >activities there have pumped the gas into a saline aquifer 700 meters >underground. Since the 1980s, oil companies have drilled hundreds of wells >there to extract the gas for enhanced oil recovery, leaving a wealth of data >on the site’s geology and CO2storage. >To find out how fast CO2 dissolves in the aquifers, the researchers needed to >know two things: the total amount of gas dissolved at the reservoir and how >long it has been there. Because the gas is volcanic in origin, the researchers >reasoned that it must have arrived at Bravo Dome steaming hot—enough to warm >up the surrounding rocks. So they examined the buildup of radiogenic elements >in the mineral apatite. These elements accumulate at low temperatures, but are >released if the mineral is heated above 75°C, allowing the researchers to >determine when the mineral was last heated above such a high temperature. The >team estimated that the CO2 was pumped into the reservoir about 1.2 million >years ago.Then the scientists calculated the amount of gas dissolved over the >millennia, using the helium-3 isotope as a tracer. Like CO2, helium-3 is >released during volcanic eruptions, and it is rather insoluble in saline >water. By studying how the ratio of helium-3 to CO2 changes across the reservoir, the researchers found that out of the 1.6 gigatons of gas trapped underground at the reservoir,only a fifth has dissolved over 1.2 million years. That’s the equivalent of 75 years of emissions from a single 500-megawatt coal power plant, they report online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. >More intriguingly, the analysis also provided the first field evidence of how >CO2 dissolves after it is pumped into the aquifers. In theory, the CO2 >dissolves through diffusion, which takes place when the gas comes into contact >with the water surface. But the process could move faster if convection—in >which water saturated with CO2 sinks and fresh water flows into its place to >absorb more gas—were also at work. Analysis revealed that at Bravo Dome, 10% >of the total gas at the reservoir dissolved after the initial emplacement. >Diffusion alone cannot account for that amount, the researchers argue, as the >gas accumulating at the top of the reservoir would have quickly saturated >still water. Instead, convection most likely occurred.Hesse says constraints >on convection might explain why CO2 dissolves much more slowly in saline >aquifers at Bravo Dome than previously estimated, at a rate of 0.1 gram per >square meter per year. The culprit would be the relatively impermeable Brava Dome rocks, which limit water flow and thus the rate of convective CO2 dissolution. At storage sites with more porous rocks, the gas could dissolve much faster and mineralize earlier, he says.Even so, the fact that CO2 stayed locked up underground for so long at Bravo Dome despite ongoing industrial drilling should allay concerns about potential leakage, Hesse says. Carbon capture and storage “can work, if you do it in the right place,” he says. “[This is] an enormous amount of CO2 that has sat there, for all we can tell, very peacefully for more than a million years.” >Posted in Chemistry, Earth > > >-- >You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >"geoengineering" group. >To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an >email to [email protected]. >To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. >Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. >For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. >-- >You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >"geoengineering" group. >To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an >email to [email protected]. >To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. >Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. >For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "geoengineering" group. 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