Letters to the Editor
-
Buy *burying* carbon dioxide?
My comment strays a bit from your point, but burying C02 is a little like burying plutonium in Yucca Mountain --- someone's just prolonging the inevitable for future generations to deal with (assuming those future generations actually come to fruition).
Surface dwelling plants naturally absorb C02, but unless there are organism on the ocean floor or below that I'm not aware of, those C02 deposits will reach a maximum storage/saturation level at some point... and drilling more holes is not a sustainable solution.
Maybe I'm wrong, but Norway's effort seems short-sighted, even if they're development plan for this project already projects decades or centuries into the future.
-
Re: "Buy" burying carbon dioxide
Sorry, my header is an obvious typo... please ignore. ;)
-
maybe maintaining the world's largest...
munitions industry is not the best use of america's resources. but of course, you can't change. as rome ran on slaves, america runs on guns.
schools, hospitals, roads and rail are all second best, or fourth, or third world. recent immigrants prop up your universities, wetbacks pick your crops, rich and poor despise the nation. there may be a few middles still proud of america, but they are deluded. see "in the valley of elah", "rendition", "taxi to the dark side", and tell me there is something to be proud of.
so the the blonds are leading in responsible use of resources? no surprise. self respect and respect for others are necessary to leadership like this. arrogance and chauvinism are not substitutes, and that's all that's left in american society.
-
Interesting...
..but the problem with carbon sequestration is not so much the sequestration as what happens if/when all that carbon de-sequesters itself at some point in the near or distanct future. Carbon in the atmosphere sucks, and a carbonated ocean also sucks.
Don't get me wrong, this is indeed a laudable development. I just hope we don't get sidetracked into thinking we can sequester our way out of making the (quite likely painful) choices necessary to stop the profligate spewing of CO2 into the only biosphere we have...
-
not as scary
At first, I thought they were doing "deep ocean" sequestration. Luckily, they are shoving it a kilometer under the sea bed.
The deep sea plan, where deep ocean waters absorb the CO2 really worries me. The reason isn't that we get carbonated sea water. It's that we get acid.
My own back of the envelope calculations show that the best carbon sequestration scheme is to leave it in the ground. Taking it out and putting it back in another form is a loser. The only time putting it back really makes sense for anyone is when CO2 injection increases the yield of nearby oil/gas wells.
If I were a policy maker, I'd defund exploring sequestration and put it into renewables. It is much smarter to leave as much carbon (oil, coal, and gas) underground as possible. We can worry about sequestering past decades' excess after we quit disturbing the stuff that was stored millions of years ago.
-
But their oil industry is state owned,
So they're taxing themselves?
-
"all those nations have managed to survive."
Well sure. Norway is a nation of 4 million with the gas reserves of the entire Gulf of Mexico. Not hard to survive on that. BTW ask all the heroin addicts in Oslo how great a country Norway is.
-
fossil fuel use isn't all going to cease immediately and if the sequestered CO2 gradually leaks out into the ocean
many thousands of years after we have ceased using fossil fuels that situation will be a very big improvement over putting it into the air now. So the quicker that effective sequestration can be widely used to deal with whatever fossil fuel use is inevitable, the better.
-
@Chillydogg
BTW ask all the heroin addicts in Oslo how great a country Norway is.
Good thing nobody's addicted to heroin in this country, eh? (rolling eyes)
I'm not a big fan of any carbon sequestering schemes, but it is curious what forward-thinking governments can do, and when they can do it, which I think is part of the thrust of Mr. Leonard's piece. I doubt you could say "carbon sequestration" and most Americans would even know what the hell you're talking about, let alone building any kind of forward-thinking policy on it.
-
It's separated from natural gas and pumped back into the crust under pressure
If the substrate is strong enough to keep natural gas from spontaneously erupting to the surface then it's strong enough to contain CO2 pumped into adjacent zones.
Today though the $50/ton tax covers only half the cost of pumping the CO2 back. One can imagine some chemical engineering process that breaks the carbon and oxygen apart and uses them individually for hydrocarbon chemistry to create new products from that waste.
-
Wow..
Gotta love those scandahoovian socialist types.
Like, really...responsible and..adult, even.
-
Got my MS studying deep-ocean CO2 sequestration...
... at least until Greenpeace kept shutting down our field experiments (first in Hawaii, then in Norway). I then bailed from academia (for that and other reasons).
Putting CO2 in the deep ocean (not what Statoil is doing) itself is not a hot idea, but it's arguably less worse than emitting to the atmosphere (from whence the excess goes into the oceans' surface waters, lowering the pH- at least in the deep ocean the CO2 is more likely to interact with mineral carbonate, nature's antacid).
Putting CO2 under the seabed like Statoil is doing is probably pretty safe. Certain geological structures have proven to be very effective at trapping stuff like, you know, oil and gas for long periods of time.
Sequestration doesn't feel like an elegant solution, and it's not. But given that the magic solar pixie isn't going to give us $1/W solar at industrial volumes any time really soon, we need to keep all options on the table. I personally like biochar-based organic sequestration (biomass to terra preta), but that's not exactly ready for prime time at any scale just yet.
-
A Billion Angry Bees
Although StatoilHydro major shareholder is the Norweigian goverment its shares trade on the Oslo and NYSE so there are plenty of institutional and private shareholders.
-
Not read for prime time, but it's clearly a cable series
Unperfected? That seems fair. But carbon sequestration as a technology is clearly on a fast track. About 20 projects underway at power utilities nationwide as part of the US Department of Energy's Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnerships. The initiative's goal is to develop infrastructure and a knowledge base needed to place carbon sequestration technologies on the path to commercialization. I also remember Tony Blair saying several years ago that Britain needed to look hard at undersea C02 sequestration, and fast.