Anybody who isn’t completely brainwashed by the Climate Cult knows full well that ‘renewables’ just won’t cut the mustard when it comes to reliable, cheap, grid-level electricity. The supply of hydro power is extremely limited – and good luck trying to build any new dams, anyway. Rooftop solar is useful for homes, but homes only account for just 10 per cent of energy consumption.
So, there’s a massive, 90 per cent shortfall for industry and transport. Solar and wind are not, and never will, measure up for that.
The rest of the world is turning to nuclear, but the ideological numpties in Australia and New Zealand refuse to even countenance that. Even if they did, there’s still a gap of years to decade to build sufficient plants.
In the meantime, then, coal is still very much king. Which is why global consumption has soared to an all-time high of 8.8 billion tonnes per year.
Still, even leaving climate alarmism aside, it at least wouldn’t hurt to reduce atmospheric CO₂ emissions – which is where carbon capture and storage (CCS) comes in. While it’s still very much a developing technology, the luddites of the Climate Cult are dead wrong when they sneer that it will never work. In fact, around the world, hundreds of CCS projects are either up and running, or being built. Such as in Norway, which owes its wealth to North Sea oil, after all.
The project by Northern Lights, which is led by oil giants Equinor, Shell and TotalEnergies, involves transporting and burying CO2 captured at smokestacks across Europe. The aim is to prevent the emissions from being released into the atmosphere, and thereby help halt climate change.
After the CO2 is captured, it is liquified and transported by ship to the Oygarden terminal near Bergen on Norway’s western coast. It is then transferred into large tanks before being injected through a 68-mile pipeline into the seabed, at a depth of around 1.6 miles, for permanent storage.
The Northern Lights project is still a bubble of gas in the atmosphere, of course. Currently storing 1.7 million tons per year, and aiming to scale up to 5.5 million by the end of the decade, that’s roughly 1/8 of Norway’s current annual emissions.
But the technology is rapidly scaling up.
In 2022, firms have announced 61 new CCS projects, bringing the total number of commercial facilities in the pipeline to 196, including 30 currently in operation, 11 under construction, and 153 in development, a Global CCS Institute report found.
When completed, these projects will have the capacity to capture a combined 244 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. That figure is well short of the nearly 1,300 million metric tons of CO2 that need to be locked away annually by 2030 to put the world on a path to net-zero emissions, according to the International Energy Agency. But there’s good reason for optimism, as analysts expect that CCS will continue its rapid growth as countries ramp up investments in the technology.
Still, getting one-fifth of the way there in just a decade or so is pretty impressive.
So, how does CCS work?
One way to think of direct air capture is to imagine it like “space-efficient artificial trees.” Trees, after all, are the original carbon-capturing machines. But even if we were to cover Earth’s landmasses with natural trees, we still wouldn’t be able to suck up enough carbon to mitigate climate change in the future, explains Klaus Lackner, director of the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions at the University of Arizona.
Biological approaches, like planting trees, can offer a start to controlling carbon dioxide. But in the long-term, they may not be able to keep up with human activity.
Physicist Freeman Dyson champions genetically engineering ‘super-trees’ that could absorb massively more amounts of CO₂ than natural ones. In the meantime, though, the most viable technology is direct air capture, which if nothing else requires vastly less space – roughly 400 times less space than with old-school trees.
It works like this: Air, sucked in with a fan, is passed through a filter which absorbs the carbon dioxide. Once those filters are full of the gas, the units that house the fans are closed. The whole unit is then heated to between 80 and 100 degrees C, which kickstarts a process called desorption, releasing the gas.
From there, the carbon dioxide can be cooled down, combined with water, and pumped deep underground. Through a process of rapid underground mineralization, it is removed safely and permanently from the air.
The catch is, of course, that doing so requires energy.
Generating energy for direct air capture is a “vexing” problem, but there are ways to mitigate the issue. If a carbon capture plant gets energy solely from renewable sources about 10 tons of carbon dioxide are emitted for every 100 tons sequestered. That's a good trade off.
Another approach is that of Icelandic startup Carbfix, which captures and dissolves CO₂ in water. From there, it’s injected into the ground, where it turns into stone in less than two years.
“This is a technology that can be scaled – it’s cheap and economic and environmentally friendly,” Carbfix Chief Executive Officer Edda Sif Pind Aradottir said in an interview. “Basically we are just doing what nature has been doing for millions of years, so we are helping nature help itself.”
Meanwhile, Australia’s boofheaded luddites in charge can’t even get their heads around nuclear energy.
