Shell's Massive Carbon Capture Plant Is Emitting More Than It's Capturing (vice.com) 207
A first-of-its-kind "green" Shell facility in Alberta is emitting more greenhouse gases than it's capturing, throwing into question whether taxpayers should be funding it, a new report has found. Motherboard reports: Shell's Quest carbon capture and storage facility in the Alberta tarsands captured 5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide at its hydrogen-producing plant in its Scotford complex between 2015 and 2019. But a new report from human rights organization Global Witness found the hydrogen plant emitted 7.5 million tons of greenhouse gases in the same timeframe -- including methane, which has 80 times the warming power of carbon during its first 20 years in the atmosphere, and accounts for about a quarter of man-made warming today. To put that in perspective, the "climate-forward" part of the Scotford plant alone has the same carbon footprint per year as 1.2 million fuel-powered cars, Global Witness said.
"We do think Shell is misleading the public in that sense and only giving us one side of the story," said Dominic Eagleton, who wrote the report. He said industry's been pushing for governments to subsidize the production of fossil hydrogen (hydrogen produced from natural gas) that's supplemented with carbon capture technology as a "climate-friendly" way forward, but the new report shows that's not the case. In an email, Shell said the facility was introduced to display the merits of carbon capture technology, but didn't directly respond to the allegation that its hydrogen component emitted 7.5 million tons of greenhouse gases.
"We do think Shell is misleading the public in that sense and only giving us one side of the story," said Dominic Eagleton, who wrote the report. He said industry's been pushing for governments to subsidize the production of fossil hydrogen (hydrogen produced from natural gas) that's supplemented with carbon capture technology as a "climate-friendly" way forward, but the new report shows that's not the case. In an email, Shell said the facility was introduced to display the merits of carbon capture technology, but didn't directly respond to the allegation that its hydrogen component emitted 7.5 million tons of greenhouse gases.
Worked as intended (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Worked as intended (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, this is why CCS is now finally being outed publicly as the nonsense it is. This is a large part the problem with Drax's proposals in the UK to be a green power plant, it burns wood chippings imported across a fucking ocean from the US where trees are obviously chopped down and some undoubtedly non-green carbon emitting process used to convert them into pellets. Drax then wants public money to produce CCS that will pump it half way across the width of the country into holes under the North Sea where there's no guarantee any of that will work.
It's like yeah, sure, or we could just build a new nuclear plant or wind farm or whatever...
Many experimental green energy schemes are good and worthy of research funding. CSS isn't one of them when we have a better option - just generate energy by not emitting fucking carbon in the first place. CSS is literally just a way for fossil fuel industries to use yet more public subsidy than the trillions they've already had over the years to keep producing power using what is, ultimately, largely just technology from the 1800s. We can do better than that, just like we have with technological process in pretty much every other area of human existence.
Re: Worked as intended (Score:3)
Wood burning is a value signalling band aid. Politicians are too chickenshit to break Paris agreement promises, don't want to destroy their economies over it either. So they decided to pretend wood burning is sustainable to value signal for the moment.
Re: Worked as intended (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole "destroy economies" thing is itself FUD.
What it really means is "uproot and replace entrenches industries." For example, in the US people make a big fuss about supporting coal workers, but the entire industry in this country employs only about 42,000 people in total. Meanwhile, wind power employs about 85,000 and the solar industry is 230,000 strong but nobody ever frets over those jobs.
All they're really scared of is pissing off a handful of multi-billion-dollar companies by eroding their profits. Quite frankly any economy that can be "destroyed" by climate policies should be destroyed, and replaced with something better.
=Smidge=
Re: Worked as intended (Score:2)
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But the effect will be brutal on local economies dependent upon coal mining. Young people will move away, leaving an aging and increasingly unemployed population.
The only human and sane response to the decline of of coal is diversify the economies of these places, but it won't happen.
Re: Worked as intended (Score:5, Interesting)
>The only human and sane response to the decline of of coal is diversify the economies of these places
Why? The towns often only exist in the first place because of the money coal brings to the region. If the coal runs out or becomes worthless, abandoning the town may be a far more sane response than trying to "diversify" a region that has little else to recommend it.
It's a story that's been told countless times throughout human history - the resources that made a region desirable to live in run out, and so people move away to greener pastures.
And this could actually be a good time for it - just like the rest of the country, the local infrastructure was probably mostly build during the New Deal, and is now decaying and long overdue for replacement at great expense. So just... don't. If you want to be proactive, take all the money that would have been required for new infrastructure, and dedicate it to emigration assistance to help residents get established in other communities that still have some reason to exist.
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If you want to be proactive, take all the money that would have been required for new infrastructure, and dedicate it to emigration assistance to help residents get established in other communities that still have some reason to exist.
That sounds like... planning. Which is only one word away from central planning. We can't have that! That's communist!
Those poor retired ex-coal miner schlubs will just have to sit and starve in their jobless small town. We surely can't help them with the power of government. That'd be unAmerican!
Re: Worked as intended (Score:4, Insightful)
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But the effect will be brutal on local economies dependent upon coal mining.
So what? That's no reason not to stop coal mining. The health of the local economies is not more important than the health of the biosphere upon which all humans depend for survival, and the continuing damage of which is damaging and will continue to damage all economies.
Young people will move away, leaving an aging and increasingly unemployed population.
That's a great reason to continue to promote remote work. As people leave these places they get cheaper, so they become more attractive as places to live... if you can work there.
The only human and sane response to the decline of of coal is diversify the economies of these places, but it won't happen.
It's already happening! All we have to do is continue to prom
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Remote work is great if you're a software developer or financial analyst. It's not much of a solution for people who have worked all their lives in a coal mine.
With respect to this, at least, it's not about coal mining per se; the same problem occurred in "mill towns" when the jobs in those mills went overseas. Trade liberalization was good for Americans *on average*, but the price wasn't equally borne by everyone. Coal is dying because it's not economically competitive; that's a good thing both from an
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Remote work is great if you're a software developer or financial analyst. It's not much of a solution for people who have worked all their lives in a coal mine.
Those people may have to move somewhere else for work, if they can't or won't retrain. But other people will move in if the place is made attractive enough. Though to be fair, some of those places have been fucking ruined by coal mining and the fact that people don't want to live there is frankly completely acceptable and they should be either abandoned or remediated, preferably the latter. And we could have jobs in environmental remediation if only it weren't for the Republicans.
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"If the place is made attractive enough".... please elaborate. Do you mean attractive more higher income people? Because what attracts lower income people is jobs.
Retraining is the politician's answer for this, because on paper it's relatively cheap and doesn't require much imagination. The problem is it doesn't work if there's no jobs to train for. People will *have* to move, which is economically devastating to people who've spent decades building up equity in their now-worthless homes.
Re: Worked as intended (Score:2)
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"Human resources" would be a step up. Right now they're just "factors of production".
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Apparently HR agrees with you. The trendy thing to call it these days is "People Ops". It threw me for a big loop when people who I knew for a fact were not at all technical and definitely not responsible for any sort of production applications or infrastructure started saying they work in "operations".
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You know... there's something called: "moving to where the jobs are" that used to be a thing in this country. I've done it twice myself so far in my career. And my own state literally exists because people moved west to where the jobs (and gold deposits) were.
It's not like these people would even need to "learn to code" as that cliche went. Anyone who's just that enamored with burning dead dinosaurs for energy over all other possible sources could, instead of digging it out from the hils in West VA, pop
Re: Worked as intended (Score:2)
What it really means is "uproot and replace entrenches industries." For example, in the US people make a big fuss about supporting coal workers, but the entire industry in this country employs only about 42,000 people in total.
Horseshit. There are towns over 42k population that would dry up and vanish without the coal industry. 42k direct employees, maybe, and only if you ignore contract labor, but there's a hell of a lot more to the industry than just direct employees.
I'm not arguing for coal, let me be clear. But the primary danger of climate change is displacement of population. So when you tell a "coal town" that they are all going to be displaced, lose their homes, jobs, career, community, retirement, and entire way of life
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What about https://electrek.co/2021/12/21... [electrek.co]
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You know, the people who install solar panels and wind turbines... or, hell, the people who pump natrual gas out of the Dakotas... also buy groceries, and cars, and furniture, and TVs, and all the other secondary economy goods that coal workers do/did. They also hire and use plumbers, electricians, bankers, landscapers, insurance brokers, and all of the same secondary economy services that coal workers do/did. The companies involved also buy plenty of heavy equipment to support their operations; often fro
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...but the entire industry in this country employs only about 42,000 people in total.
Really? Including support industries like making the mining gear and running trains? That is stunningly small.
Meanwhile, wind power employs about 85,000 and the solar industry is 230,000 strong but nobody ever frets over those jobs.
Well, I do because as far as a consumer is concerned, jobs are a cost to be avoided. We want energy sources which don't employ a lot of people. Requiring lots of labor is bad.
You do have an excellent point about the distinction between being pro-business and pro-market. I'm not a fan of propping up existing businesses. Let them keep their profits and let them crater if they can't make it.
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We also want people who know the difference between jobs required to keep energy production running and jobs required to install energy production. But since you couldn't give us that, I guess we're out of luck.
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Coal Workers are Unionized Unions in general are in bed with Democrats.
Coal Companies are in general the key economic drivers for communities in which the rest of the communities economy is based on the Coal company, restaurants, stores, hospitals... So many of the non-coal workers have invested interest in keeping that coal company. So the GOP often gets corporate support.
Even though we think of these areas to be a solid partisan, you will often see when you break down the solid states are more purple the
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Perhaps not disingenious, so much as optimistic with a longer horizon. Coal is on its way out, just not as quickly as needs to happen. And specialized uses will (and should!) persist long after general use ceases.
But it's definitely true that wind and solar need to increase. So does storage, i.e. grid scale batteries (though that includes things like pumping water uphill, not just electro-chemical batteries). Power politics has made me a bit skeptical of "intenational grid" solutions. They are great to
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Pumping water uphill has been used in California for over close to 50 years. If it was good enough to do this in the 60s and 70s for off-peak power production then it's going to work well for solar also. Maybe not so good for flat places like Kansas though, but there are other energy storage methods that aren't chemical batteries.
One promising means to store energy is thermal energy storage, especially energy stored in molten salts from the heat of nuclear fission. Since this energy storage happens before any conversion to electricity there's no conversion losses, only that energy lost to the environment as heat. And we have many simple and effective means to minimize heat loss.
We know how to make turbines that use the heat from molten salts that can produce electricity, and do so while following shifting demands as quickly as any
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Lets say a coal worker mines x tons of coal a year. That coal is probably used that very same year. When a solar panel is put up, it has a life of 20-30 years. Thos
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I don't see how this will destroy their economies. It will change them, and with any changes they are Winners and Losers. The Losers are right now have been the Winners, so they have a lot of money and intensive to make the public think that transitioning away from them will cause DOOM for all.
The real issue I see world wide, is a lack of Leadership. No one really wants to solve the problem, they just want to talk about it.
In the United States Elections are won, not from the Majority, but from sectors wh
Re: Worked as intended (Score:2)
People pretend open nutrient loops don't exist. These fast growing species harvested young will cause soil depletion in a couple generations. Nevermind the fragility of the monocrop ecosystems.
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People pretend open nutrient loops don't exist. These fast growing species harvested young will cause soil depletion in a couple generations. Nevermind the fragility of the monocrop ecosystems.
There's no reason why the nutrients from the ash of the burned trees should not be returned to help the next generations. Sure, you can do it wrong, but that doesn't mean other people can't do it right.
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Burning wood is one of the worst contributors to fine particulate pollution in cities today. And particulate pollution has the worst health effects on lungs and breathing of all air pollution, aside from maybe a poison gas attack. Cities and towns where a lot of people heat their homes with wood have higher particulate pollution. And if you didn't know, particulate pollution is what caused the "London Fog" that killed so many people. In that case from shitty quality coal, but it was still particulates in th
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It's not really exponential, more sigmoidal - as a plant approaches maturity the growth rate levels off again. I suppose it looks close enough to exponential if you harvest it while it's still in the middle of its growth spurt, but it's usually more optimal to wait until it's about to start slowing down.
There's certainly other fuel crops that are far better than wood though - wood is a support structure that doesn't directly contribute anything to carbon capture, so the majority of a tree's biomass is just
Re: Worked as intended (Score:2)
The Paris accords are NOTHING BUT THEFT.
Not if you stop selling CO2-intensive resources. Let the Dschermans deal with their energy problems.
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I wish people would just scrap the idea of carbon credits. It leads to nonsense like this, encouraging companies to pollute as long as they can buy credits from some other shady outfit to offset it. Businesses have spent centuries coming up with clever accounting methods to fool others, and this is just the newest wrinkle.
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Yes, pretty much. The outlook gets worse and worse and these fuckers are still delaying and profiting from that. "Traitors to the human race" is the friendliest term I can think of for them.
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They do these things because governments incentivize it and because it's a way to greenwash their product.
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If this plant wasn't running, would they be emitting 12.5m tonnes of carbon?
In other words it is capturing 40% of the total, which isn't great, but better than nothing?
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... I have a feeling you might have missed your parent's point... Either that or I have.
Using H2 from gas as a fuel is a very bad idea (Score:5, Interesting)
1) It creates CO2 from the chemical reaction itself
2) It creates CO2 from creating the energy required to extract it
3) You get far less energy from the original gas that if you just burnt the gas an emitted LESS CO2 that from H2 extraction
4) H2 requires yet more energy to cool and compress it for transport and storage
Fuel cells would be a great idea if H2 was in our enviroment in its elemental state. It isn't, and so they're not, they're nothing more than greenwash.
Re: Using H2 from gas as a fuel is a very bad ide (Score:2)
Green hydrogen should be compared to other long term storage methods for cost, none of which exist in appreciable amount yet either. So pumped hydro outside of low hanging fruit locations or if you really want to get silly, batteries.
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Green hydrogen should be compared to other long term storage methods for cost, none of which exist in appreciable amount yet either.
There is no appreciable amount here, Shell is doing more harm than good period.
Re: Using H2 from gas as a fuel is a very bad ide (Score:5, Informative)
You missed that the grandparent said "green hydrogen" - in other words it was an irrelevant distraction from the real question and an attempt by a fossil fuel supporter to distract us from the con job the oil companies are doing here.
"Green hydrogen" - generated using electricity from renewable energy sources. This is a perfectly acceptable energy storage and transport solution, which just hasn't yet found an economic market.
"Grey hydrogen" - hydrogen generated from fossil fuels. This is really terrible. It exactly matches the start comment of this thread [slashdot.org] and produces both CO2 from the energy needed to drive the process and from the chemical process of producing hydrogen by splitting methane.
"Blue hydrogen" - this is a hypothetical hydrogen produced by a process of carbon capture whilst producing what would otherwise be grey hydrogen. In theory it should be much better than grey hydrogen. In real life this comment is showing that "blue hydrogen" is greenwashing. Methane leaks. Carbon dioxide is not fully captured. Extra energy is used.
The big problem with the hydrogen economy is that instead of starting with a clear commitment to green hydrogen and trying to optimise that process as much as problem, the oil companies are instead starting from the most dirty processes and pretending that they will clean up in future. If they can't clean up now, when it's a small scale process with low costs, what's the chance they will clean up later if it becomes a large chunk of our energy requirements. Hydrogen is seeming more and more like a total con.
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In real life this comment is showing that "blue hydrogen" is greenwashing. Methane leaks. Carbon dioxide is not fully captured. Extra energy is used.
Actually in real life it is nothing of the sort. This project is not emitting more than just running grey hydrogen, it just isn't capturing as much as promised. Even with its failure to deliver blue hydrogen is producing half the warming effect as the equivalent grey hydrogen. Why is this relevant? Because green hydrogen isn't relevant at scales that industry demands.
Green washing is actually a good term. Not the negative connotation of it, but rather the dictionary definition of each word in isolation. It'
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In real life this comment is showing that "blue hydrogen" is greenwashing. Methane leaks. Carbon dioxide is not fully captured. Extra energy is used.
Actually in real life it is nothing of the sort. This project is not emitting more than just running grey hydrogen, it just isn't capturing as much as promised. Even with its failure to deliver blue hydrogen is producing half the warming effect as the equivalent grey hydrogen. Why is this relevant? Because green hydrogen isn't relevant at scales that industry demands.
Obviously, carbon capturing should produce "less" CO2 than just doing the process without carbon capture. You may have noticed, though, that I didn't introduce the discussion of green hydrogen, I was following up to an industry shill comment that mentioned "green" hydrogen.
Green washing is actually a good term. Not the negative connotation of it, but rather the dictionary definition of each word in isolation. It's a dirty process cleaned to be greener. It's a shame it hasn't been able to capture what was promised, but it hardly the evil result the summary and half the comments here make it out to be.
This is exactly the slippery industry hydrogen propaganda. First start talking about green hydrogen and how it's CO2 free. Then if people point out that you aren't using green hydrogen, say that blue is almost the same. Then, when it'
Re: Using H2 from gas as a fuel is a very bad ide (Score:2)
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It is great in J/kg if you exclude the container. J/l is rubbish though, and when you include the kg of the container, it isn't actually that much better than a lithium battery.
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Thinking of H2 as a battery in this context is perfectly acceptable jackass. Energy is put into making it and energy is derived from it when it is burned.
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Efficiency is irrelevant to what I'm saying here but nice try. I'm not making any sort of point here beyond what I have clearly stated.
Furthermore, I never said it was a literal battery, i specifically said "Thinking of H2 as a battery in this context is perfectly acceptable jackass" which clearly implies metaphor over the literal and metaphorically referring to H2 in this context as a "battery" holds up perfectly as I later illustrated in the very next sentence.
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Efficiency is irrelevant to what I'm saying here
It's the core of what I was saying, so go spew your bullshit someplace else instead of as an irrelevant reply to my comment.
Furthermore, I never said it was a literal battery
Irrelevant again.
i specifically said "Thinking of H2 as a battery in this context is perfectly acceptable jackass"
Which was fucking stupid because it is fundamentally different from a battery, you cannot use it as a battery, and those fundamental differences prevent it from ever being as efficient as a battery. And efficiency is what matters, period, because if it is not improved then everything goes to shit.
You want to talk about irrelevant bullshit, I want to talk about things t
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Hahaha, just because you say the word "irrelevant" doesnt actually make something irrelevant. I'm done with this conversation though. Talking to grown children is tiresome.
Re: Using H2 from gas as a fuel is a very bad ide (Score:2)
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It depends on the circumstance.
Certainly for stationary situations and land-based passenger vehicle, the logistics and efficiency of just charging now or near-future batteries seems to be the winner. The increased weight isn't great, but livable and you don't need *massive* amounts of energy (enough energy to roll a passenger vehicle about 500 km is enough, with amble ability to casually stop and recharge as needed).
For large transport, and water and air based transport though, the hydrogen may be worth i
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I'm curious as to what those numbers include. The weight of batteries include what is in essence the tank and the energy. Of course for batteries all the w
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I'm unsure of that and also unsure how vaguely realistic 1kwh/kg is for lithium batteries, but as a rough order magnitude it's on track. It's a PITA to get and contain H2, but may be the only potentially practical carbon-free option for a lot of boats and airplanes.
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> Green hydrogen should be compared to other long term storage methods for cost
Well first let's acknowledge that Electricity -> Green H2 -> Electricity is about 40% efficient on the best of days, so the fact that you're taking more than half of your (presumably renewable) surplus energy and wasting it should be considered in the cost since you'll need that much more renewable energy to meet your energy storage needs.
According to this report [nrel.gov] we'd be better off using compressed air storage, and H2 is
Re: Using H2 from gas as a fuel is a very bad ide (Score:2)
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> Where were you when they announced bioengineered algae or that molecular-alloy catalyst that separated hydrogen in water using pure sunlight?
Where were you when these technologies were demonstrated at commercial scale?
That's right; Nowhere. If they ever make it that far we can revisit this conversation. Until then, for all intent and purpose they don't exist.
=Smidge=
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I think people advocating for H2 as the end-all be all for all scenarios are mistaken, however aircraft and seacraft may be impractical with batteries and we may have to choose between hydrocarbons and hydrogen in those applications.
Re: Using H2 from gas as a fuel is a very bad ide (Score:2)
PV keeps getting cheaper and it won't stop getting cheaper for the foreseeable future, that can change a lot of the cost assumptions for hydrogen.
Re: Using H2 from gas as a fuel is a very bad ide (Score:4, Informative)
Batteries are a LOT more efficient that creating H2 using surplus energy then burning it / fuel cell to get that energy back again.
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Efficiency is one thing; scalability is another. To increase the energy storage using batteries you need...more batteries. To increase the energy storage using H2 you only need bigger tanks (or geologic formations, metallic sponges, or whatever).
In reality what we need is a lot of both. The scale of the problem is plenty large enough for all of that and more. Let's not
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> To increase the energy storage using H2 you only need bigger tanks (or geologic formations, metallic sponges, or whatever).
You also need a lot more renewable power to fill that storage, because you're losing roughly twice as much of the available surplus power to inefficiencies, you need more surplus power, which means you need more solar panels/wind turbines or whatever to have that additional surplus. For every megawatt of surplus power you need to charge your batteries, you need twice as much for th
Re: Using H2 from gas as a fuel is a very bad ide (Score:2)
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If power per unit mass is more important than efficiency then burning a fuel will probably always be better than using a battery, so yes, for an aircraft batteries are and probably always will be (unless some completely new technology is discovered) a non starter.
Re: Using H2 from gas as a fuel is a very bad ide (Score:2)
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I'd look in the mirror pal. Burning hydrogen produces water. End of. The CO2 comes from reacting water with CH4 to produce H2 + CO2.
I'd suggest you buy a ticket on the clue train first before posting next time.
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He's saying that currently the most likely way to get H2 is to extract from hydrocarbons, and that that extraction and processing demands energy and he further presumes that energy would come from fossil fuel power plants.
Sure, for example, if you had eliminated all fossil fuel energy production and only extracted hydrogen from water with no additional reactants, then H2 would be carbon free. However in the real world, for now, at scale H2 usage is ill-advised as a replacement for hydrocarbon energy. I loo
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Fuel cells are a great idea. They just aren't generators. Think of them as batteries. They're a means of distributing energy over time and space, not a means of generation.
P.S.: If H2 were in our environment as an uncombined gas, then you'd want to burn O2 for power. Thermodynamics rules.
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H2 from fossil fuels is NOT Green H2. H2 is available from water, Electric generating turbines are being built in the oceans. 80% of the world's population does not have anything resembling a modern electric power grid. Natural disasters which will be more frequent destroy electric transmission infrastructure far more easily than fuel production facilities which can be hardened because they are not spread across the country. Watch areas of the world with shitty electric infrastructure starve to death after
A bit more complex... (Score:5, Informative)
While I don't disagree that there are some boondoggle aspects to the project, it *is* a bit more complex than TFA presents.
If you follow the links to the actual report, the problem isn't so much that the plant is *producing* green house gasses, but rather that it isn't capturing as much as promised: "Just 48% of the plant’s carbon emissions are captured, we found, falling woefully short of the 90% carbon capture rate promised". They count what is not captured as "emissions" from the carbon-capture, which is just dumb. But otherwise, they wouldn't have much of a complaint to make.
That said, the energy and effort put into building this plant, and then processing the CO2, liquifying it, and pumping it underground seems pretty exaggerated - where does all *that* energy come from? They hope that the CO2 chemically binds with the rock formation, but there is no way for them to measure how much may be seeping out before that happens. Carbon capture is (imho) one of the dumber ideas used to placate the environmentalists.
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Carbon capture is (imho) one of the dumber ideas used to placate the environmentalists.
I don't think that many environmentalists are happy with carbon capture. It is more like environment theater to shut them up.
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I don't think that many environmentalists are happy with carbon capture. It is more like environment theater to shut them up.
Greens make handwavey references to carbon capture as yet another way of avoiding use of the N-word.
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Which Greens? None that I pay attention to.
I accept that some do so, but I don't know of any. And some Greens are happy with nuclear, though I'm not one of them. My issues with nuclear have more to do with management issues than anything else, but they are real. Solar and wind don't seem to have that kind of issue. Possibly molten-salt reactors wouldn't either. I want the bloody things to be designed to fail-safe. And valid plans to recycle waste. (Again, molten salt reactors have promissed this. M
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I don't think that many environmentalists are happy with carbon capture. It is more like environment theater to shut them up.
I would be happy with actual carbon capture that worked, and I think other environmentalists would be as well. This isn't that, which is why it doesn't make me happy.
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Thermodynamics says that carbon capture is always going to be a lot more expensive than not setting that carbon free in the first place.
Re:A bit more complex... (Score:5, Informative)
the problem isn't so much that the plant is *producing* green house gasses, but rather that it isn't capturing as much as promised:
The problem is that the plant both produces hydrogen and captures some of the CO2, and the whole idea of capturing the CO2 was that it makes it OK to get hydrogen from natgas. But it doesn't, and the plant is *producing* green house gasses just like you say it isn't.
Re: A bit more complex... (Score:2)
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Did the article say it released those gasses or just produced them?
Did you try reading the fine article?
When i read it, it sounded like wordplay.
The title is Shellâ(TM)s Massive Carbon Capture Plant Is Emitting More Than Itâ(TM)s Capturing. "Emitting" is, in this case, a direct synonym for "releasing". Then it says this:
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I'm immediately skeptical of anyone claiming to be a human rights group, especially if they're issuing r
Re:A bit more complex... (Score:5, Informative)
In each case, you are fighting against thermodynamics. Separating CO2 from a mixed gas stream reduces entropy (i.e., creates a more orderly system), and that requires energy input. Compressing and liquifying it obviously requires energy (integral of dPdV and all that). Squeezing it into cracks deep underground likewise requires energy.
My information is dated, but one calculation I saw what that, solely from the standpoint of thermodynamics, CCS requires as much energy as about 1/4 of a coal plant's electrical output. With real-world efficiencies taken into account, it's about 1/3. There are plenty of places to find more thorough estimates [google.com].
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Separating CO2 from a mixed gas stream reduces entropy (i.e., creates a more orderly system), and that requires energy input. Compressing and liquifying it obviously requires energy (integral of dPdV and all that). Squeezing it into cracks deep underground likewise requires energy.
Huh. If only there were some source of energy [energy.gov] that didn't release carbon.
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Sure, but the more important comparison that everyone is missing is that cost vs the cost of renewables and grid storage.
Factor that in, and now we're comparing apples to apples.
I suspect if you do that fossil fuel energy still comes out even at best, but you can't just say "it takes 1/3 of the electricity to CCS" and expect that to mean anything. We're subsidizing that 1/3 of the energy by just emitting the carbon right now. Including the CCS cost is at least fair accounting when trying to understand how r
Double counting the methane conversion (Score:2)
They also try double counting the methane conversion factor.
The article and report both try very hard to double count the 80x conversion factor for supply-chain methane emissions. The summary says "7.5 million tons of greenhouse gases in the same timeframe -- including methane, which has 80 times the warming power of carbon". The report also has the 80-times conversion factor, right next to a table that says the supply chain fossil gas (methane) emissions contribution to the 7.5mt total is "1,580,000 tons o
Max Shreck approves. (Score:2)
Art imitates real life.
Honest Ad (Score:2)
Lunch (Score:2)
Free lunches just keep getting harder to find.
And this is where carbon taxes may be better (Score:2)
This is a classic example of central planning missing the mark. If what we want is less greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, that's what we should measure and tax. And to be effective, we should just tax all emissions: no grandfathering in existing industries.
Problem is, it's hard to implement and it would be very disruptive. But it would work better than trying to measure something indirect and opening the opportunity to game the system.
Not clear on overall effectiveness... (Score:2)
Just 48% of the plant’s carbon emissions are captured, we found, falling woefully short of the 90% carbon capture rate promised by industry for fossil hydrogen projects.
having captured 5 million tonnes of carbon across a five-year period, it has emitted a further 7.5 million tonnes of climate polluting gases
So would this hydrogen plant have emitted 12.5 mtons without the carbon capture system (which is good, but not great)? Or is the carbon capture system creating an additional 2.5 mtons (7.5-5)? The writing on this article is terrible.
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder why they didn't think of the operating emissions
They were too busy thinking about profit.
Us not putting them out of business by any means necessary is going to mean the extinction of the species.
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Any means necessary eh? What exactly do you intend to do about it?
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So, nothing. Probably for the best, given the inflammatory rhetoric. And here I was hoping you'd say something even more stupid that would get the police on your tail.
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stepping outside of yourself [...] the universe exists because humanity is possible
Uh, that's not stepping outside of yourself, that's literally seeing yourself as the center of the universe. That's hiding inside yourself.
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I have faith in humanity, and Mother Gaia.
I have faith in humanity to act like a bunch of humans, and history tells us that most of the time that's a total shit show and that humans typically exhaust their available resources and then die. Mother Gaia is something you are imagining, the Earth doesn't care about us because it doesn't have feelings. It's just a ball of mass orbiting a ball of gas.
And when we say we are "destroying" the world
Who's we? You're just talking because you want to talk, this has nothing to do with my comment.
the universe could care less - it's just a blow in the wind in the grand scheme of things.
Yeah, that's what I was getting at. But that part of your com
Re:They knew (Score:5, Insightful)
Carbon capture will never "work properly". It's a fraud, a 21st century version of the perpetual motion machine. Not only does scrubbing large amounts of carbon reduce efficiency of any combustion process significantly, then you have to actually precipitate the CO2 in some way and do something with it; whether pumping it into the ground or making something out of it, which takes even more energy. To do that almost inevitably means having to use some sort of alternative energy (wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, nuclear), which inevitably leads to the question, if you can bring that much alternative energy production to bear, why burn the fossil fuels at all?
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which inevitably leads to the question, if you can bring that much alternative energy production to bear, why burn the fossil fuels at all?
In the case of H2 production, that may be the wrong question. Industry uses a lot of H2 in chemical processes, rather than for energy production. For that application it would obviously be ideal to get completely "green" H2, say by splitting water using renewable energy. But that has a number of problems, and the current way to produce industrial H2 is by breaking down natural gas -- which tends to release a lot of CO2. Assuming you can't switch to a completely green H2 generation method, capturing some of
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On the contrary, it's probably quite easy.
Re:Government mandated they build this facility (Score:5, Insightful)
Shell was forced by the government to build this facility... It was a government project. We all know full goddamn well that government projects don't work. Ever.
Apollo? ARPAnet? The interstate highway system? GPS?
This facility doesn't work, because it's a flawed concept, a band-aid on a dirty process and a way of kicking the can.
The money would probably be better spent on researching and implementing modern, cleaner nuclear reactors, the kind that don't melt easily and don't produce lethal isotopes with half-lives measured in centuries or millennia. The rest of the renewables industry seems to be doing OK on its own (and don't start about subsidies unless you want to address all of them, including petroleum and coal ones). Nuclear needs government involvement because of the inherent danger if it goes wrong, and the tendency of American industry these days to maximize profit at the expense of quality.
But government projects, the really big ones, work pretty well. They're expensive and ponderous, but they get the job done. Even Medicare, people bitch about it, but when anything else is proposed, the get-off-my-lawn crowd starts in with "keep your filthy socialist hands off my Medicare!" because it WORKS. Granted, in the USA, government projects tend to work BETTER when they start off as tools of war or tools for moving war materiel around. Maybe what's needed is research on how to make a bomb out of captured carbon.
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Government projects may work (some of them), but it is incumbent on you to show that private enterprise would not have worked better.
The internet was never a thing until it was prised out of the hands of ARPA.
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I don't think anybody believed that carbon capture would be efficient, and I don't think that anybody not connected with the fossil fuel industries claimed that it would work. And I think that the number of such people who now claim so and are also well-informed is vanishingly small. And that most of them are either liars, or extremely weasle-worded in what they say. (There are several in that latter class. You generally need to read their claims quite carefully to properly understand them.)
That said, i
Re: (Score:2)
When a chemical reaction is at a critical point, a very small change can result in a very large change in result.
Well, the planetary system has lots of buffering, but we've been wearing away at that buffering ever since we started rice farming. The degree of wearing has jumped alarmingly since the start of the industrial revolution, and multiple systems are showing multple signs that the buffers are nearing or have reached to point of exhaustion. In some areas the Amazon rain-forest has become a carbon em