Oil Companies Granted Licences To Store Carbon Under the North Sea (theguardian.com) 39
Oil companies have been granted licences by the UK government that it hopes will enable them to store up to 10% of the UK's carbon emissions in old oil and gasfields beneath the seabed. From a report: The government awarded more than 20 North Sea licences covering an area the size of Yorkshire to 14 companies that plan to store carbon dioxide trapped from heavy industry in depleted oil and gasfields. The companies include the oil supermajor Shell, Italy's state-owned oil company ENI, and Harbour Energy, the largest independent oil and gas company operating in the UK's North Sea basin.
The industry's government-backed regulator, the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA), claims the companies could help store up to 30m tonnes of CO2 a year by 2030, or approximately 10% of UK annual emissions. The plan to develop old oil and gasfields into vast repositories of CO2 is part of the government's plan to develop a carbon capture and storage (CCS) industry to reduce emissions from heavy industry entering the atmosphere and contributing to global heating. Stuart Payne, the NSTA's chief executive, said: "Carbon storage will play a crucial role in the energy transition, storing carbon dioxide deep under the seabed and playing a key role in hydrogen production and energy hubs."
The industry's government-backed regulator, the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA), claims the companies could help store up to 30m tonnes of CO2 a year by 2030, or approximately 10% of UK annual emissions. The plan to develop old oil and gasfields into vast repositories of CO2 is part of the government's plan to develop a carbon capture and storage (CCS) industry to reduce emissions from heavy industry entering the atmosphere and contributing to global heating. Stuart Payne, the NSTA's chief executive, said: "Carbon storage will play a crucial role in the energy transition, storing carbon dioxide deep under the seabed and playing a key role in hydrogen production and energy hubs."
Burp! (Score:2, Funny)
'nuff said.
Probably a bad idea (Score:2)
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It comes straight back up obviously, some of it may diffuse in the water, but none of this is staying there any longer than a few days.
There are plenty of videos online showing that CO2 scrubbing and storage consumes more CO2 than it produces, otherwise, you'd have a perpetuum mobile. If you're really worried about putting CO2 'somewhere', industry has plenty of uses for it, fizzy drink production, the fabrication of metal, as a coolant, fire suppression, greenhouses, if it's more cost effective and 'cleane
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Because we drilled a hole in it and compressed in water to get the stuff out, often cracking rocks along the way to get more product out while many wells simply collapse under the changes/gravity. Beyond that, what we took out was viscous liquid which was at no pressure, we're pumping a product in that either has to have very high pressure to remain liquid or needs to be very cold to remain liquid, neither of which are options.
You put a gas in there, it's going to leak right back out.
Sure, use it... but for what? [Re:Probably a b...] (Score:3)
...If you're really worried about putting CO2 'somewhere', industry has plenty of uses for it, fizzy drink production, the fabrication of metal, as a coolant, fire suppression, greenhouses
It's hard to comprehend the sheer magnitude of fossil-fuel carbon dioxide production. 50,000,000,000 tons per year [ourworldindata.org] is such a large number, people tend to get lost on all the zeros.
Compared to that, the few tons that might go to fizzy drink production, the fabrication of metal, as a coolant, fire suppression, greenhouses, etc. isn't even a drop in the bucket (e.g., carbonated beverages add up to about 0.001 percent of carbon dioxide emissions).
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It comes straight back up obviously, some of it may diffuse in the water, but none of this is staying there any longer than a few days.
If there's proof of that then I'd expect approval for this carbon sequestration to disappear. Well, they could likely still go ahead with it because it is a means to get more oil and gas out of existing wells but they could not get approval to call this "carbon sequestration".
There are plenty of videos online showing that CO2 scrubbing and storage consumes more CO2 than it produces, otherwise, you'd have a perpetuum mobile. If you're really worried about putting CO2 'somewhere', industry has plenty of uses for it, fizzy drink production, the fabrication of metal, as a coolant, fire suppression, greenhouses, if it's more cost effective and 'cleaner' to take it out of the air, then let's do so and stop using the current form of CO2 production.
Most of those uses you listed would also let the CO2 back out into the air after a very short time. They are as much of "carbon sequestration" as pumping under the sea and allowing it to bubble back up. They would also take consider
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The cost of sequestration and any of these 'inventions' follows the cost of oil, so the pipedream that making oil more expensive would lower the cost of these systems is just that, because after all, all these systems need fossil fuel energy to run in the end.
If you need to burn $3 of diesel and $3 in process to sequester CO2 back into 1L of a widget which sells for $3, you have a 50% loss. Cranking the cost of diesel up to $10 makes it so that your sequestration process now costs $13 and the widget still s
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I think the more critical question at this point is just how much energy is it going to take to pump it under the North Sea, where that energy will come from, and if we have that much energy to sequester carbon, why would we both pulling that much oil out of the ground to begin with?
Carbon capture is a scam.
Re:Probably a bad idea (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the more critical question at this point is just how much energy is it going to take to pump it under the North Sea, where that energy will come from, and if we have that much energy to sequester carbon, why would we both pulling that much oil out of the ground to begin with?
If they could get carbon capture running efficiently, it will require only a little more nuclear than if they had just replaced the oil-fired generation with nuclear to begin with.
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If they could get carbon capture running efficiently, it will require only a little more nuclear than if they had just replaced the oil-fired generation with nuclear to begin with.
I'm sure someone will claim we can do this without nuclear power. For that to be true renewable energy would have to built at a rate sufficient to replace fossil fuels, replace nuclear, replace old renewable energy that is reaching end of operational life, and still keep up with growing demand. That is at least theoretically possible but there's another condition that must be met, to do so at a lower cost than nuclear fission would cost.
We will need renewable energy going forward, which I mention because
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If the IPCC is wrong on nuclear power then what else have they got wrong?
They have underestimated the magnitude of global warming and how soon it may hit. They also keep talking about how climate is not weather but forget to tell people that as the climate changes, weather that would previously be impossible is going to become a regular occurrence.
If you remember the maxim that "every accusation is a confession" and remember that the fossil fuel lobby keeps accusing the environmentalists of manipulating the IPCC then you will realize that the the entirety of climate science has
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If they could get carbon capture running efficiently, it will require only a little more nuclear than if they had just replaced the oil-fired generation with nuclear to begin with.
No one here is talking about carbon capture / sequestration for oil fired generation. The reason you see oil companies names up there is because they are are the technology licensors and plant operators of the facilities. None of what they are proposing in the north sea has anything to do with oil, or power generation, and none of it could be fixed with nuclear.
Most pro-nuclear arguments here are often short-sighted, but in this case yours borders on absurdity. You've really gotten to the point of switching
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Only a little more? The number 400kJ per mole of CO2 would be required for direct air capture. Yeah, it's going to require A LOT of nuclear power, which raises the question again, if you have that much nuclear power, why would you waste it on carbon capture? Stop emitting that carbon, and you can plug those nuclear power plants into the grid.
I'll repeat. Carbon capture is a scam; it's a 21st century perpetual motion machine meant to greenwash high emitters by make believing that anyone could ever make an ec
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I think the more critical question at this point is just how much energy is it going to take to pump it under the North Sea
Very little. Carbon Capture is a largely chemical process. Carbon sequestration only requires a relatively small compressor. The energy requirements here are a small fraction of the energy used to get the stuff out of the ground in the first place, to say nothing of customers setting the product on fire.
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"if we have that much energy to sequester carbon, why would we both pulling that much oil out of the ground to begin with?"
Oil has good portability so it is useful for mobile power generation. It's also easy to turn on and off to supply peak demand.
Since the carbon sequestration involves fixed infrastructure and average rates, it can use power generation that also involves fixed infrastructure or whose generation rate is harder to control. Like using a windmill to pump water from a well, you only need the a
Re:Probably a bad idea (Score:5, Insightful)
So how certain do you think they REALLY are that it's never coming back up?
Very sure. These gas fields held methane for millions of years, and methane is much more geologically mobile than CO2.
The CO2 is compressed to a liquid before it is injected. Liquid CO2 is dense, so it displaces hydrocarbons upward, making them easier to pump out.
So the UK sequesters CO2 while recovering more oil and gas, and relying less on imports.
That's a big win for everyone except Russia and Saudi Arabia.
Enhanced oil recovery [wikipedia.org]
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OMG the world is ending. Not because of CO2 but because ShanghaiBill said something completely correct, in context, and which made perfect sense. We're doomed!
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The UK's oil and has is sold on the international market at international prices - we don't get any discount because it was under our territory. It's a relatively small amount too, on a global scale, so has little effect on pricing.
We could have kept it for ourselves, or copied Norway's sovereign wealth fund, but instead all the profit went to BP shareholders.
That's one of the reasons why the Scots want independence. They have excellent wind resources, but the UK government will make sure Tory Party cronies
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If it fizzes hard enough, it will sink anything that was floating on the surface.
That has happened before when methane pockets have broken.
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So how certain do you think they REALLY are that it's never coming back up?
Do you realise how much effort an energy it takes to get carbon out of the ground in the first place? Why do you think it will suddenly just come up on its own now? They are literally simply putting the carbon back where they found it, and if it comes up, you're literally no worse off than if you never sequestered it in the first place. The only issue is a clearance around the area. Dense phase CO2 is dangerous to your health until it dissipates. Good thing they are putting this in the ocean.
Also, I do wonder how much energy they're using to haul and pump the CO2 and where that energy is sourced.
Not much. You h
Oil Companies Saving the Environment (Score:2)
Go big or go home!
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Unverifiable? (Score:1)
Is there any way to verify this whole system isnâ(TM)t just leaking it all away? A hard to observe system is ideal for fraud.
IPCC reports nuclear fission needed to lower CO2 (Score:2)
This effort to sequester CO2 into oil and gas wells sounds a lot like a method used to extract oil from petroleum wells that are running dry. Pump a hot inert gas, like CO2, into the well and it will loosen up some petroleum crude and natural gas. Maybe instead they pump in CO2 dissolved in water, like some huge fizzy drink, to break up some of the bedrock. The CO2 injected into the wells will react with minerals in the rock to lock it in so the threat of this leaking out of the wells later does appear t
Armchair Scientists (Score:3)
I love how all the armchair scientists come out when stuff like this is mentioned. "What's going to keep it from just floating back out?", "It's probably going to use more energy and create more CO2 than it's going to store"... as if no one has ever had that thought yet... and the UK government just made.
There are _thousands_ of scientists all over the world studying every aspect of this (and every other scientifically informed climate change action) for MANY years. The published results from those scientists are used in policy making. That policy making takes _years_ and is hotly debated on all sides before something like this makes its way through.
On CO2 sequestration, it's been studied and re-studied and re-analyzed for over 20 years now. There is a huge body of published research on every aspect (including the "net" energy use and CO2 net balance) this is a good overview that cites tons of other papers you can go read on it: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.co... [wiley.com]
PLEASE don't assume that you can "use your intuition" on these extremely complex issues.
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Whoops, hit post to soon: the "The UK government just made this up out of thin air" or something...
Re: Armchair Scientists (Score:2)
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Whoops, hit post to soon: the "The UK government just made this up out of thin air" or something...
Actually they haven't. The UK is very much currently executing several carbon capture projects which are already well into engineering stage. The only thing new here is they've sanctioned and licensed the pipelines and existing wells to store the material.
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An interesting link that I may have to devote more time in reading fully. I skimmed over it and saw that it starts with a cite of what the IPCC has reported. The IPCC reports on global warming point out that without nuclear fission as an energy source that targets for lowered CO2 emissions will be missed. The efforts to sequester CO2 into the ground will take energy, a lot of energy, and nuclear power is a very good source of that energy. I agree that the "armchair scientist" should be looking to work f