Greg, Your points about underfunding of alternatives to CCS are valid but it does not follow that the remedy, either from a systems perspective or a policy perspective, is to reduce CCS funding. That might result in less funding for CCS and no increase in funding for alternatives.
Many advocates for various methods of cutting CO2 emissions and/or drawdown of atmospheric concentrations suffer from a zero-sum syndrome, believing the only viable path for more funding for their favored idea is to argue that some other currently funded approach is receiving too much money. Given where we are on (not) managing human GHG emissions, it is hard to support a claim that CCS or any other approach is receiving too much money. The money may not be being spent optimally on each option but fixing that requires a more surgical approach than just saying don't spend so much. The amount of public funding for different mitigation/compensation approaches is a political matter and requires a political strategy. Part of such a strategy is developing and publicizing analyses showing the potential payoff for investing in each approach. Another, probably more important part of the strategy, is building a substantial constituency for a portfolio of approaches. For the latter, we need to map the potential constituencies and determine the valid messages that are most likely to engage and activate them. (I feel the need to add "valid" since so many conversations about messaging do not seem to be concerned with whether a message has validity.) I, like many active environmental advocates, assign a high priority to mitigation, with efficiency, renewable energy, and forest protection ranked at the top of the mitigation hierarchy. But I (and a number of advocates I know) do not argue for this trio of actions to the exclusion of other complementary approaches. In my opinion, all potential mitigation approaches should be provided enough private and public funding to assess whether they should be kept in a portfolio. So too with CDR concepts, with due attention paid to ecosystem impacts of such approaches. And even SRM, which I find least appealing, should in my view receive sufficient research dollars to better understand and assess the implications of real-world deployment, should our failures in other areas cause humanity to want to turn to SRM as a complement to mitigation. But to succeed in getting more funding for all these potentially meritorious approaches we need a much bigger constituency than just the members of this listserv and a handful of similar ones. We need to make the case for a portfolio in terms that will appeal first, to committed environmental advocates; second, to industrial players that understand we cannot escape bad results by simply denying the seriousness of climate disruption; third, to business interests who see a market opportunity in helping to implement a climate protection portfolio; fourth, to citizens who believe that governments have an important role to play in helping complex industrial societies pursue human development paths that minimize adverse side effects; fifth, to religious communities that recognize human responsibility to care for our planet as part of their faith. I'm sure others can add to this list. What will not succeed, I am quite sure, is the discourse that happens often on this list, where approaches not favored by a poster are dismissed as a waste and the opinions of groups who have not been persuaded to recognize the value of a broad portfolio approach to climate protection are derided as no-nothings. Greg, please understand I am not aiming these remarks at you. Your post simply stimulated me to pose this topic for a broader discussion on the list. David Sent from my iPad On Oct 5, 2014, at 12:57 PM, "Greg Rau" <gh...@sbcglobal.net<mailto:gh...@sbcglobal.net>> wrote: What happens if full scale demonstrations of CCS simply confirm what we know so far - that CCS is too expensive in most applications (except for extracting more oil/CO2 out of the ground)? Yes, we need to evaluate "a full suite" of other point source mitigation options. That is not happening because CCS is viewed as the only game in town in terms of R&D funding and in terms of policy formation. We are placing the planet at great risk and strangling technology development if those controlling R&D investment and policy continue to think that CCS is our only and best hope for mitigating the >300 GT of CO2* we are now committed to. And while we are at it how about investing in CDR R&D, just in case none of the above save the day? Imagine what $2B could do if diverted from one CCS demonstration (of the obvious) project to explore potentially cheaper, better, faster technologies. *http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/9/9/094008/pdf/1748-9326_9_9_094008.pdf Greg ________________________________ From: "Hawkins, Dave" <dhawk...@nrdc.org<mailto:dhawk...@nrdc.org>> To: "<andrew.lock...@gmail.com<mailto:andrew.lock...@gmail.com>>" <andrew.lock...@gmail.com<mailto:andrew.lock...@gmail.com>> Cc: geoengineering <geoengineering@googlegroups.com<mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com>> Sent: Saturday, October 4, 2014 11:58 AM Subject: Re: [geo] 'Clean Coal' With Carbon Capture Debuts in North America (Not in U.S.) - NBC News.com<http://News.com> I went to the launch. CCS is currently expensive but the cost assessment needs to be done in the context of a full suite of methods to achieve deep reductions. When real market drivers for such reductions are adopted we should see cost-reducing innovations stimulated for CCS and a range of competing technologies. It's way to soon to write-off any of the candidates as "too costly." Typed on tiny keyboard. Caveat lector. On Oct 4, 2014, at 1:42 PM, Andrew Lockley <andrew.lock...@gmail.com<mailto:andrew.lock...@gmail.com><mailto:andrew.lock...@gmail.com<mailto:andrew.lock...@gmail.com>>> wrote: Poster's note: potentially of interest to air capture types. Cynics may claim that this is simply an expensive piece of subsidized greenwash for the fossil fuels industry - and one that's being used partially to extract even more fossil fuels via EOR. http://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/clean-coal-carbon-capture-debuts-north-america-not-u-s-n218221 'Clean Coal' With Carbon Capture Debuts in North America (Not in U.S.) BY JOHN ROACH A first-of-its-kind coal-fired power plant retrofitted with technology to capture and store most of the carbon dioxide produced at one of its boilers officially began operations this week in Saskatchewan, Canada. Meanwhile, a similar project in Illinois to demonstrate a cleaner way to burn the world's most abundant fossil fuel remains in legal and financial limbo.Whether the U.S. government-backed project in Meredosia, Ill., will advance so-called carbon capture and storage, or CCS, technology is an open question, but experts deem the technology itself vital if the world hopes to stand any practical chance at staving off catastrophic climate change.advertisement And CCS is being propelled forward by pollution-control measures such as the Obama admnistration's proposed rules to limit carbon emissions from new and existing power plants. "The reason that you want to look at CCS is the math," John Thompson, the director of the Fossil Transition Project at the Clean Air Task Force, a nonprofit that advocates for low-carbon energy technologies, explained to NBC News. About two-thirds of the roughly 30 gigatons of carbon dioxide released by human activity each year comes from the power sector and industrial activities such as oil refining and fertilizer production. These activities are all "amenable to carbon capture and storage," Thompson said. "In fact, you can capture 90 percent of the CO2 from any one of those particular sources." 'Great bumper sticker' While increased use of nuclear, solar and wind power could replace some coal, gas and oil-fired power plants, they are not an option for most industrial sources of carbon dioxide, he added. "Eliminating fossil fuels is a great bumper sticker," he said. "It is an ineffective climate solution." To boot, global greenhouse gas "emissions are higher than they have ever been and we are building more coal plants every year," Steven Davis, an earth systems scientist at the University of California, Irvine, told NBC News.In fact, current emission and construction trends suggest that the international goal to limit warming to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit is "completely implausible," he said during a presentation of his research at a recentclimate conference in Seattle. Getting anywhere close to the goal, he added in a follow-up interview, will almost certainly require massive deployment of solar and nuclear power along with CCS."But there is a big cost associated with CCS," he noted. "It is like 40 or 50 percent more expensive to get energy from a fossil plant if it has CCS." How CCS works Carbon capture and storage is a basket of technologies used to prevent carbon dioxide from escaping to the atmosphere in the course of power generation and other industrial activities. The captured gas is typically injected deep underground where, in theory, it will stay forever. In some cases, this injected gas is used to force out remnant oil from underground deposits, a process known as enhanced oil recovery." It is a natural next step especially for the fossil fuel industry which sees value in CCS because it means we can continue to keep burning their products," Davis said. The Boundary Dam Power Station, owned by SaskPower, is near Estevan, Saskatchewan. The world's first commercial-scale carbon capture and storage project officially opened there this week. The carbon capture approach used at SaskPower's newly retrofitted Boundary Dam Power Plant in Saskatchewan removes the carbon dioxide with a chemical solution after the coal is burned to generate electricity. The captured gas will be used for enhanced oil recovery; some will be stored 2.1 miles deep in the Earth in a layer of brine-filled sandstone. A second method called coal gasification employs heat and pressure to convert coal into gas before it is burned, easing the removal of carbon dioxide. A Southern Company power plant under construction in Kemper County, Miss., due to come online in 2015 uses this approach. The captured carbon dioxide will be shipped via pipeline to nearby oil fields.The project in Meredosia, Ill., is backed by a $1 billion federal stimulus grant and aims to demonstrate a technology known as oxy-combustion, where the coal is burned in oxygen and carbon dioxide instead of air to produce a concentrated stream of carbon dioxide for transportation and storage in saline rock deep underground. FutureGen delays That Illinois project, known as FutureGen 2.0, will retrofit and restart a boiler at a retired coal-fired power plant. It is the second iteration of a demonstration project originally conceived under the George W. Bush administration in 2003. The original project was scrapped due to cost overruns.The scaled-back version also faces financial hurdles, including efforts to secure $650 million in private sector financing that have been hindered by a legal challenge from the Sierra Club, which opposes coal plant construction, according to MIT Technology Review.advertisement NBCNEWS.COM<http://NBCNEWS.COM><http://NBCNEWS.COM<http://NBCNEWS.COM/>> "The lawsuit is really about the integrity of the permitting process," Eva Schueller, an attorney for the Sierra Club, told NBC News. The current permit, she explained, will allow the project backers to operate the refurbished plant as a traditional coal plant without limits on the amount of carbon it can release into the atmosphere. The environmental group and the project backers are working together "to resolve issues related to the air permit," Lawrence Pacheco, a spokesman for the FutureGen Alliance, told NBC News in an email. Meanwhile, he added, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently issued the project an underground storage permit for carbon dioxide and limited construction has begun at the plant. 'The world changes' Thompson with the Clean Air Task Force holds a dim view on the FutureGen 2.0 project, which he noted even if built would demonstrate a "third-tier" approach to carbon capture that is unlikely to gain mass market traction. Nevertheless, he is optimistic about the future of carbon capture and storage technology. "I see a series of projects breaking ground or going into operation that for the first time actually capture CO2 from these power sources and once that happens I think the world changes," he said. The caveats, noted Davis, concern the high price tag for energy generated with the technology as well as the new infrastructure required to do it. For example, his rough calculations suggest that to capture and store just 10 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions would require the same amount of pipelines and pumping infrastructure that already exist for the oil industry." It is not technologically impossible," he said, "but some people might hear that and say there is no way we are going to do it." -- 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 geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com<mailto:unsubscr...@googlegroups.com><mailto:geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com<mailto:unsubscr...@googlegroups.com>>. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com<mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com><mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com<mailto:geoengineering@googlegroups.com>>. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering. 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