0.05 kWh(e) would be for the pulverization of the mineral. Another 0.05 kWh(e) might be necessary to strew it widely. More here.

One also has the option of understanding that a handful of large olivine puffers can retroactively make thousands of coal-fired plants that were spewing CO2 in the 80s and 90s carbon-neutral. No-one is going to make special new C-neutral individual coal-burners, because however easy this might be, retrofitting many of them with a single remote CO2 trap is easier.

How the car gets decarbonized

In the ocean?

http://royalsociety.org/document.asp?id=3249

Enough pulverized olivine dispersed over the southern ocean over a decade or two to make a 1-mm layer if it arrived all at once would, by acting directly on 100 gigatonnes of legacy CO2, discontinue both its IR blocking and its ocean acidification.

How shall the car gain nuclear cachet?

Capture methane (that would otherwise be released from manure, garbage, and biomass waste)and use it for energy.  That's the capture technology that works, and pays.

Farmers are getting checks from the power company for this energy source right now.  With exponential growth it could save our climate, along with other renewables, conservation, and the organic fertilizer biodigestion produces, green powering a huge organic farming revolution.

Pay farmers for energy, instead of oil, nuclear, and coal companies.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

Who got the acronyms first?

How shall driving gain nuclear cachet?

However, I do have a pretty clear picture that if our only "solution" to greenhouse gas emissions is the desperate hope that we can convince 6.6 billion people on the planet (growing daily) to voluntarily reduce their carbon footprints, we are probably all screwed.

Yeah, I know: we're not asking for "voluntary" change, we can let the market work its magic through carbon taxes, yadda yadda yadda.  But basically carbon taxes and corresponding political leadership on this issue will only be feasible if people are willing to adapt to a somewhat lower material 'standard of living' (what a phrase!).  In other words, it will require voluntarily change.  Otherwise the leaders won't get elected (or re-elected), and the carbon taxes won't get implemented (or will get rolled back once the economic going gets tough).

Just look at how U.S. consumers currently have their underwear tied in knots over an 18-cent-a-gallon federal gas tax.  Eighteen cents!   This in one of the richest nations in the world!

So while Greenpeace may well be correct -- and I have no reason to believe they aren't -- I sincerely hope they are wrong.  Because I am not optimistic that the booming middle classes in China and in India are ready to join hands with GreenPeace in a bid to, in effect, raise the cost of the fossil energy that is currently fueling their economic success.

We certainly can't pin all our hopes on technology to save us.  But without technology as part of the solution, things ain't looking promising ...

With respect to your concern about the politics, I wonder whether it would be possible to formulate a financial incentive on the supply side that would make coal companies (both mining and power generation) lobby for renewables rather than CCS?

On the one hand, there is a need for investment and a trained workforce to drive the growth of renewable energy. On the other hand, the coal industry stands to lose both investment dollars and skilled people. Rather than a general tax incentive for the renewable energy sector that would benefit all investors, would it not be more powerful to give the coal industry an exclusive incentive to shift their focus to renewables? A coal company would then have a portfolio to manage: a carbon-based subsidiary that is in decline, and a renewable energy subsidiary that is rapidly growing. The organization as a whole would grow and profit, but would transform itself over time. People could be retrained and reallocated within the organization rather than laid off. It is more complicated than carbon taxes and carbon trading, but it would address the political issue and complement those strategies.

Another possibility that would alleviate the demand for coal power is the construction of a global electricity network (see www.geni.org). [If you have a PC, there is a visual simulation available for download that illustrates the concept well.]

Essentially, a global grid would allow virtually every nation on earth to purchase and sell excess clean electricity to/from suppliers and customers in another timezone and/or hemisphere. (Excess capacity might typically exist at night or in winter; excess demand might typically exist during the day or in summer.)

With respect to India and China--which are reported to be building on average one new coal plant every week over the next 20 years--a global grid would permit that demand growth to be supplied by excess solar, wind, geothermal, and nuclear capacity in Europe, North America, etc., rather than the construction of new coal fired plants. As these nations build their own clean energy production capacity, we would purchase their excess capacity as required.

I don't have exact figures, but if we assume that demand for electricity decreases by 50-75% at night, this strategy might eliminate the need for more coal power. And the technology required to link international grids--HVDC transmission--already exists.

Well, those numbers are pretty arbitrary, but what it means is that the sooner CCS is deployed in a meaningful way the better.

* Coal-fired plant capacity is expanding so rapidly that as much as 70 percent of carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation in 2050 may not be technically suited for carbon capture and storage.

Well, again, we should commercialize CCS as quickly as possible, and thereby avoid this pessimistic scenarios. Having CCS available would make it a lot easier to avoid building old-style coal plants.

* Carbon capture and storage has not been tested at a scale needed for full-sized power plants, and designers of newly proposed plants have failed to integrate the "capture" equipment needed.

Same statement yet a third time. Yes. So we'd better speed this up, not delay it.

* The technology uses between 10 percent and 40 percent of the power plant's energy capacity, meaning that wide-scale adoption would wipe out the efficiency gains of the past 50 years and increase resource consumption by one-third.

It would indeed make a unit of coal produce less output energy, but it would remove essentially all the greenhouse impact of that coal. Energy prices are going up regardless.

* Carbon capture and storage technology could double the operating cost of power plants and lead to electricity price hikes of between 21 percent and 91 percent.

Yup. Energy prices are going up regardless. If you have something that competes with cheap coal, by all means deploy it.

=

So I see only two points being made, one which makes no sense, three times (we shouldn't do this it all because the need is so urgent and it's been going so slowly) and the other, which is conceded by anyone serious about the numbers, twice (energy prices will go up).

Giving the coal people some return on their inventory is a very practical move. Otherwise any sane move will continue to meet immovable opposition to even acknowledging a climate problem. I've had about enough of that. You?

mt

So I see only two points being made, one which makes no sense, three times (we shouldn't do this it all because the need is so urgent and it's been going so slowly) and the other, which is conceded by anyone serious about the numbers, twice (energy prices will go up).

Giving the coal people some return on their inventory is a very practical move. Otherwise any sane move will continue to meet immovable opposition to even acknowledging a climate problem. I've had about enough of that. You?

The way I read that you advocate deploying an untested technology on a wide and expanding scale to capture carbon and store it in an unknown fashion for an unknown period of time at an unknown cost in order to produce energy of which the majority will be wasted as CCS mechanisms or waste heat.

All of which we would do to avoid the political complications of overcoming the bribes which coal interests pay to political interests.

If we're going to go plumb loco why don't we just install a thorium-fueled, fast-breeder reactor at the end of every cul-de-sac and loop in suburbia and be done with it. Our houses wouldn't even need walls then because we could leave the patio heaters on all winter. We could get two more crops out of every field by using subsurface heating to protect plants from frost. The result would be the same; radioactive waste everywhere and a totally trashed ecosystem. Oh, and mangoes in your backyard.

Why don't we just declare that elm leaves are dollar bills, maples a fiver and gingko's are a twenty? It would be so much easier than wasting all of that energy in futile cycling to please King Coal. We should have no doubt that one more round of  Ponzi-schemes to follow the real estate fiasco and our economic system is sunk and we should all hand-copy our own private edition of "World Made by Hand."

The human race gets out of the ecological crisis by treating every little kilocalorie captured for our use as precious and deserving of full use not by scraping every last trainload of coal out of the ground and using it to heat and cool glass-walled Mcmansions.

Burning coal isn't cost free even if every bit of CO2 could be magically disappeared. Building windmills has a cost, building solar has a cost. We don't have any extra planet to waste.


Put the Carbon Back

As I understand it, dirty coal is so cheap that double cost coal is still competitive.

And yes, dammit, this is a very fine use of public funds, especially compared to some others I see going on these days.

As I understand it, the world is overpopulated. Avoiding a crash and eliminating poverty will require huge amounts of energy. Wind and solar apparently can't be scaled up to meet the demand, much as people here would like to believe otherwise.

Finally, without some mechanism for very large scale sequestration, you have a carbon ratchet. If we ever find we have exceeded tolerable CO2 levels we will be in desperate need of a mechanism to reduce it. This means burying carbon in one form or another.

This planet is already on life support. Reducing a human population gradually to a sustainable level will take centuries. Reducing the population abruptly will do even more damage than the growth phase.

I'm not optimistic overall, but the potential for CCS is one of the most hopeful features of our present circumstances. On the other hand, compulsive greenie opposition to it is among the most dismaying.

mt

If we ever find we have exceeded tolerable CO2 levels we will be in desperate need of a mechanism to reduce it. This means burying carbon in one form or another...

This planet is already on life support. Reducing a human population gradually to a sustainable level will take centuries. Reducing the population abruptly will do even more damage than the growth phase.

I'm not optimistic overall, but the potential for CCS is one of the most hopeful features of our present circumstances. On the other hand, compulsive greenie opposition to it is among the most dismaying.

They hate everything except natural gas plus token non-carbon power.

Please note that the CO2 that dispersed olivine sequesters does not have to be buried. As above said, it can lie around in a layer that in principle would be millimetres to centimetres thick.

Up to ~1996 I was hydrogen car fan, but I learned better

I personally favor biochar because I'm a gardener but if it takes gigatons of powdered olivine, massive shellfish farms all over the world or the deliberate seeding of coral reefs in northern waters I'm ok with it. If anybody knows how to make a peat bog speak right up because that would work too.

Soon enough we are going to get zebra mussels in my local waterways and they can compete with the strange invasive algaes for mineral rights to the local streams. For all we know the spread of invasive zebra mussels and freshwater clams is simply natures way of turning CO2 back into rock.

My guess is that we will wait until the damage of global warming is really hurting and then engage in massive global terraforming efforts doing everything at once. I can see people trying to figure out how to turn all of Canada and Siberia into one massive coppice with standards threaded by canals that are simply excuses to house freshwater shellfish.

Somebody will go ahead with every crazy idea in the book from fertilizing oceans to building giant towers to pump hot surface air into the upper atmosphere.  Somehow I think the idea of burning coal is going to be increasingly repugnant as time goes on. As to the population problem; I don't think that a society that forces it's own citizens to sleep in the streets while there is a glut of empty houses will give a damn if somebody across the sea starves to death. Or 2 billion somebodies.

One way or another a balance will return. "The meek will inherit the earth; in 2' by 6' plots." (para. Heinlein)

Put the Carbon Back