Is Carbon Capture and Storage more expensive than we thought?
A controversy about the Hammerfest LNG plant on the Norwegian island Melkøya raises questions about the affordability of post-combustion carbon capture and storage. Equinor wants to electrify its operations - and said CCS would be too expensive.
Yes. And this is from someone who lives in an area where it’s seen as cool to produce as much black exhaust as possible.
How else am I meant to tell people I definitely have a massive peen?
My wife and I call them tiny pee-pee trucks.
The guy driving the family minivan got nothing to prove, and you know his works.
CCS should only ever be used to draw down existing carbon, not to greenwash fossil fuels.
And that's ignoring the many problems of any CCS method that isn't burying biochar under a mountain.
Who is "we"? I've never ever ever seen a carbon capture and storage demonstration that was even within an order of magnitude of the cost of simply reducing emissions, or planting trees.
CCS is a pipe dream being pushed by fossil fuel companies to justify inaction.
We need to be acting as if it will never work. Keep funding research, because it could be a way to fast track climate recovery, but on all other roads assume it does absolutely nothing.
Remember it takes at least as much energy to pull the carbon back from the oxygen as how much was released when the carbon was burned and bonded with the oxygen. And because of reasons it's more like 3 to 4 times as much and because humans aren't that clever it's probably closer to 10 times as much.
This means we have to pay the bill to put back all of the carbon from fossil fuels we've been burning for the past 100 years. This is an amount of money we can't even begin to fathom. And because we are slow at it, we also get taxed on top of that as climate change leads to economic loss in a variety of interesting ways.
There are no shortcuts, there are no quick fixes. We need to stop burning fossil fuels right now and start fixing shit. Now we have had a pause in the growth of fossil fuel burning, but the rate is still insanely high and at peak levels. Even though the growth has stopped, it hasn't shrunk either. And it's very possible the dip was only due to the impact of covid and for 2024 onwards it will start growing again.
Carbon capture is a farce.