Stockholm Exergi Lands World's Largest Permanent Carbon Removal Deal With Microsoft (carbonherald.com) 39
Swedish energy company Stockholm Exergi and Microsoft have announced a 10-year deal that will provide the tech giant with more than 3.3 million tons of carbon removal certificates through bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. While the value of the deal was not disclosed, it stands as the largest of its kind globally. Carbon Herald reports: Scheduled to commence in 2028 and span a decade, the agreement underscores a pivotal moment in combatting climate change. Anders Egelrud, CEO of Stockholm Exergi, lauded the deal as a "huge step" for the company and its BECCS project, emphasizing its profound implications for climate action. "I believe the agreement will inspire corporations with ambitious climate objectives, and we target to announce more deals with other pioneering companies over the coming months," he said. Recognizing the imperative of permanent carbon removals in limiting global warming to 1.5C or below, the deal aligns with Microsoft's ambitious goal of becoming carbon negative by 2030.
"Leveraging existing biomass power plants is a crucial first step to building worldwide carbon removal capacity," Brian Marrs, Microsoft's Senior Director of Energy & Carbon Removal, said, highlighting the importance of sustainable biomass sourcing for BECCS projects, as is the case with Stockholm Exergi. The partners will adhere to stringent quality standards, ensuring transparent reporting and adherence to sustainability criteria. The BECCS facility, once operational, will remove up to 800,000 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually, contributing significantly to atmospheric carbon reduction. With environmental permits secured and construction set to commence in 2025, Stockholm Exergi plans to reach the final investment decision by the end of the year.
"Leveraging existing biomass power plants is a crucial first step to building worldwide carbon removal capacity," Brian Marrs, Microsoft's Senior Director of Energy & Carbon Removal, said, highlighting the importance of sustainable biomass sourcing for BECCS projects, as is the case with Stockholm Exergi. The partners will adhere to stringent quality standards, ensuring transparent reporting and adherence to sustainability criteria. The BECCS facility, once operational, will remove up to 800,000 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually, contributing significantly to atmospheric carbon reduction. With environmental permits secured and construction set to commence in 2025, Stockholm Exergi plans to reach the final investment decision by the end of the year.
See other article on carbon credits. (Score:2)
Scam 20 years and these credits are all fake (Score:3, Insightful)
Odd how each round of carbon credits, carbon regulation, plant a tree movements/regulations always get exposed as never ever living up to the promise.
Regulators love these deals because they get a whole new field of regulations to write, and a jobs program when they get out of the regulatory agency.
Re:Scam 20 years and these credits are all fake (Score:5, Insightful)
never ever living up to the promise.
There never were any promises, and it was obvious upfront that these were and are PR schemes.
The current scheme in TFA is clearly not an effective means of addressing climate change. The money could be far better spent on wind turbines, solar panels, or efficiency improvements. The problem is that those aren't newsworthy.
Microsoft is just paying some money for the right to pat themselves on the back and talk about how much they care.
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Lack of political will to enforce carbon taxes which is the (or would have been) the obvious, capitalist solution. You're spot on that the credits system is a mess.
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enforce = enact*
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From TFA
"The contract represents a milestone for climate change mitigation. While emissions reductions remain an over-all priority, there is today consensus that global warming cannot be limited to 1.5 C or well-below 2 C without permanent carbon removals.>/b>"
The old let's state "what we are doing" and a statement of a "general conclusion" where what we are doing does not have any meaningful or direct proof that it leads to the "general conclusion"
Everyone is in favor of a cleaner environment, we nee
Carbon taxes (Score:1)
I'm in favor of carbon taxes if they are applied to the countries which have less than enforced environmental laws or a lack of environmental laws get those carbon taxes applied first.
Increasing the costs to poor people in the USA, EU, Japan, Australia, NZ via a carbon tax only makes imports cheaper from countries with little enforced pollution laws and increase pollution in those countries.
Shifting production from functional countries to ones with high/unregulated pollution is allowed does not help. the n
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A carbon tax's outcome doesn't necessarily have to be for pollution reduction, in fact today I would say it's better goal would be to fund mitigation efforts for the fact that we have missed most targets. A tax is just a revenue stream, what we do with it is the second part and the most important. A carbon tax has had a pretty large approval from economics for decades, there's a lot of thought and proposals into the drawbacks, downsides and mitigation measures to those.
One approach, contemplated by the De
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Sorry, meant to post the source for that
https://www.energypolicy.colum... [columbia.edu]
Lot of interesting info in there, it goes over some of the ways to handle imports and other externalities. .
Carbon certificates (Score:3, Insightful)
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Is the CO2 stuck in limbo?
Permanenet carbon removal deal? (Score:2)
Or permanent issue of certificates deal? Because the headline strongly suggests the second, and not the first.
Upon checking it out... Nothing in the portfolio of this "Exergi" that suggest "carbon removal", it is a garbage incinerator with bright plans for the future, https://www.stockholmexergi.se... [stockholmexergi.se]
PR crap again.
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Or permanent issue of certificates deal? Because the headline strongly suggests the second, and not the first.
Upon checking it out... Nothing in the portfolio of this "Exergi" that suggest "carbon removal", it is a garbage incinerator with bright plans for the future, https://www.stockholmexergi.se... [stockholmexergi.se]
PR crap again.
Per you link they are clearly removing CO2 ""Bio-CCS involves the separation and storage of carbon dioxide formed during the combustion of biofuel."
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No, per the link they're "working on it", by "testing and developing two different technologies."
So, they'll begin pretty soon, when the bright future arrives, perhaps 5 years before or after fusion power.
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Selling indulgences to emit CO2 is a fool's errand if there isn't a low CO2, and reliable, energy source to replace fossil fuels. We have such an energy source with nuclear fission. Opposition to nuclear fission will result in failure to lower CO2 emissions. There's three options, and only three options. it is fossil fuels, nuclear fission, or energy shortages. I expect people will not tolerate energy shortages for long so it comes down to fossil fuels or nuclear fission. Maybe we get a fourth option i
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>Selling indulgences to emit CO2 is a fool's errand ...
> We have such an energy source with nuclear fission.
The nuclear power industry demands indulgences too! The cost of radioactive waste management and reactor decommissioning after its useful lifetime is usually underestimated. But the biggest indulgence is the demand for government indemnification of nuclear accident cleanup costs.
For example, quoting https://world-nuclear.org/info... [world-nuclear.org]
On the other hand it was realized that nuclear power makes a valuable contribution to meeting the world’s energy demands and that in order for it to continue doing so, individual operator liability had to be curtailed and beyond a certain level, risk had to be socialized. The state needs to accept responsibility as insurer of last resort, as with everything else in industrial societies, though attempts have been made to represent this as a specifically nuclear subsidy.
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Did you bother to read your own quote?
The state needs to accept responsibility as insurer of last resort, as with everything else in industrial societies, though attempts have been made to represent this as a specifically nuclear subsidy.
This is not unique to nuclear power. If a bearing failure on a windmill causes a wildfire then we can expect the costs of extinguishing the fire and compensating victims to be borne by the state. Such costs are not specific to the nuclear power industry and yet people will try to portray this as such to create opposition to energy from nuclear fission. The reality is that such needs to rely on the state to make up for damages from energy production are rare, and exce
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> > "though attempts have been made to represent this as a specifically nuclear subsidy"
> Did you bother to read your own quote?
Reading this statement and appraising it lead to different outcomes.
> If a bearing failure on a windmill causes a wildfire then we can expect the costs of extinguishing the fire and compensating victims to be borne by the state..
Wow -- I'm surprised by your assertion: that wildfires caused by private wind farms are indemnified by (practically) all the governments of the
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In the meantime, nuclear plants slowly get built. And ever so slowly, not-so-insignificant tracts of the earth are rendered permanently uninhabitable after nuclear accidents.
As opposed to the not-so-insignificant tracts of Earth left permanently unusable for cropland, residences, and other uses from normal operation.
https://ourworldindata.org/lan... [ourworldindata.org]
Removing land from use to grow crops by utility scale solar is no accident, that's done on purpose. Putting solar on rooftops will significantly reduce land use but then that increases the costs significantly. The area around windmills might still be open for many uses but their use is limited for many reasons. As an example large
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Renewables have issues. I'm no fan of windmills - birdkillers that generate harmful infrasound; and how do you recycle turbine blades anyway? But there's been promise shown recently with vertical windmill designs and wood-based construction techniques. Solar panels were net-energy-negative until a decade or so ago (if you factor in the cost of mining and smelting the panels). Now you still have the cost of batteries.
But you're too kind to those who espouse your own viewpoint. The ourworldindata article in p
This is an amazing sleight of hand (Score:3, Informative)
This is an amazing sleight of hand as they are capturing the carbon dioxide they themselves are producing and somehow selling that benefit. From https://carbonherald.com/stock... [carbonherald.com] this is what they are building:
“The permit includes constructing and operating facilities for the separation of carbon dioxide from flue gases from a biofuel-fired power plant as well as compressing, liquefying and temporarily storing the separated carbon dioxide,” wrote the Land and Environmental Court in an announcement.
It doesn't even say where the "separated carbon dioxide" will be permanently sequestered.
What a racket
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It doesn't even say where the "separated carbon dioxide" will be permanently sequestered.
The full press release [prnewswire.com] says the CO2 will go into "intermediate storage" and (eventually) into geologic storage somewhere in the Nordic region.
In other words, they skipped the hardest part with a promise to figure it out later.
What a racket
Indeed.
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It doesn't even say where the "separated carbon dioxide" will be permanently sequestered.
The full press release [prnewswire.com] says the CO2 will go into "intermediate storage" and (eventually) into geologic storage somewhere in the Nordic region.
Are they going to pay a refund if any of those stored CO2 was "accidentally" leaked? Anyone wanna place bets on how much would be leaked before being moved to anywhere more permanent (where more leakage would happen as no one will be watching)?
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In other words, they skipped the hardest part with a promise to figure it out later.
Look on the bright side - at least they didn't invoke magical blockchains.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
That article state that there are three forms of BECCS:
1. Oxy-combustion
2. Pre-combustion
3. Post-combustion
I think this is a form of post-combustion.
But you can read more about it on their site. Of most interest is certainly "How BECCS works": https://beccs.se/cdr-carbon-di... [beccs.se]
After the capture process, the biogenic CO2 will be purified and then liquefied. The purpose of the liquefication is to make the transportation more efficient, since liquified CO2 requires much less volume than CO2 in gas form.
...
The carbon dioxide will be stored in sub-water sedimentary bedrock (saline aquifer) at depths greater than 800 meters, which is the requirement to ensure that the carbon dioxide is liquid or in a so-called super critical phase
And according to the two-minute video on that page, the storage is deep beneath the North Sea floor.
Pretty interesting, actually.
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To be fair, bio fuelled power is generally considered to be carbon neutral (in so far as burning the fuel goes, not transporting it etc) because the CO2 in it was removed from the atmosphere by the plants in the first place. So sequestering it is removing it from the atmosphere.
Of course this is all with huge caveats, such as the emissions of the whole process, where they sequester it, how much is removed etc. But in principle it can be a net benefit.
So buying up African farmland or some other scam (Score:2)
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We burn things to release heat. From this we generate power and release carbon.
To sequester carbon, you need to reverse this process. This means it takes energy to do it.
Neither process is 100% efficient.
Unless you have an excess of 'green' energy, sequestration will necessarily cause a net release of carbon. It isn't just pointless, it is actually counterproductive.
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Ok. So if Sweden uses their excess green power for sequestration instead of export... The export market will use power from other sources instead, releasing more CO2 than Sweden sequesters.
Only if there was no export option would it make sense (on a local scale). You can't beat thermodynamics...
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As a tech demo, great. But we're not ready for implementation yet. Every joule of energy used by this venture could have been directed elsewhere and prevented the release of more CO2 than it sequestered.
It is literally, inarguably, adding to the problem not reducing it.
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I've tried explaining this to you, you don't seem to be getting it. Since it isn't that complicated, I have to assume it's you and I'm going to stop trying.
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Disasterous (Score:2)
These idiots and thier bullshit climate engineering schemes.
Put them all on a rocket to Mars and let them fuck with the atmosphere there.
Swedes (Score:2)
Swedes are mastering the art of climate grift.
My bum is on the Swedish (Score:2)
Swedish
Swedish
Swedish
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]