Category: Carbon Capture and Storage

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Australia Carbon Capture and Storage Coal

May 22, 2007 – “Clean coal” power station by 2014, honest…

On this day, May 22nd 2007, the Canberra Times reported on an announcement by two big coal miners that they were going to build a “carbon capture and storage” plant by 2014. Oh yes.

Dobbin, M. 2007. BP, Rio in clean coal power bid; Project based on Canberra research. Canberra Times, 22 May.

BP and Rio Tinto announced joint plans yesterday for a $2billion coal- fired power station at Kwinana in Western Australia that would be the first in Australia to capture and store its greenhouse gas emissions deep underground. The so-called clean coal station which could be completed within seven years would produce enough power to supply 500,000 houses.

Why this matters

When we hear the latest promises, we should

a) remember the old ones

b) think about hype cycles

What happened next

It. didn’t. happen. Because the taxpayer wasn’t willing to stump up….

Anon. 2007. CO2 trading no solution. Canberra Times, 27 May. L AST week’s announcement that BP and Rio Tinto have teamed up to look at building a ”clean” coal power station in Western Australia is great news. There’s only one catch. The project won’t go ahead if it depends on the key proposal to encourage clean energy contained in a report due to be handed to the Prime Minister on Thursday. This need not pose an insuperable barrier. But it suggests the Government will have to do more than simply rely on setting up a market for trading greenhouse gas emissions, which the report, from a joint business/public service task group, is expected to recommend. The idea is to issue a limited number of permits to release greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide (CO2), which the Government says contributes to global warming. These permits will then be traded in a government-run market designed to create a price which is supposed to increase the cost of emitting high levels of greenhouse gases when products such as electricity are made. According to a spokesman for Rio Tinto, Ian Head, ”An emissions-trading scheme alone will not be enough to encourage the clean coal project in Western Australia to go ahead”

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Carbon Capture and Storage Technophilia United Kingdom

May 2, 2012 – CCS is gonna save us all. Oh yes.

On this day (May 2nd) in 2012 the UK government announced a “Carbon Capture andStorage” Cost Reduction Taskforce which would

“to advise the government and industry on the steps needed to reduce the cost of CCS, so that it could compete with other low carbon technologies in the 2020s.” (see also this press release).

CCS has long been the get-out-of-jail-free card for industry (esp oil and gas) and a lot of time and money has been spent on it. But it still ain’t here. Maybe this time will be different…

Why this matters

We need to remember that these salvationary technologies have fallen over repeatedly, and ask ourselves “gee, maybe we could focus on, you know, just using hella lot less energy?”

What happened next

CCS fell over, got picked up and dusted off, and is again flavour of the month.

Categories
Australia Carbon Capture and Storage

Feb 25, 2007 – “Clean Coal Initiative” as move in game of one-dimensional electoral chess #auspol

On 25th of February 2007, with the Australian –  yes back to Australia – federal election, a matter of months away. newly-minted opposition leader Kevin Rudd and his shadow Environment Minister Peter Garrett of Midnight Oil are out there spruiking “A National Clean Coal Initiative.”

This the ALP needed because otherwise they couldn’t win Queensland, a major coal exporter. Clean coal had been a persistent theme or trend or meme – or bullshit, to use the Anglo-Saxon terminology – for 10 years. Nine years minus a day earlier, a clean coal CRC had been set up. 

“Anon. 1998. Tests for green coal. Daily Telegraph, 26 February.

RESEARCH laboratories where scientists will work to make Australian coal the “cleanest” in the world, will be opened by Premier Bob Carr today. The Ian Stewart Wing of the chemical engineering laboratories at Newcastle University form part of the co-operative research centre for black coal utilisation. The centre, partially government funded, was established in 1995 to carry out world class research to maximise the value and performance of Australian black coal resources.”

The unions were in favour of clean coal, certain elite business, environmental NGOs like WWF were at least making the right noises. Because otherwise you can’t make the numbers add up. Apparently, you can’t unless you radically reduce emissions in the first place which is going to cause economic pain and dislocation and interrupt the “we can have our cake and eat it story” that politicians need to tell. 

What happened next

Well, Rudd got elected. Garrett was a minister in his government before having to take the blame for pink bats. Garrett wrote a very good book about his time blue sky something and then returned to being the lead singer of Midnight Oil. I won’t repeat what Kevin Rudd got up to.

Categories
Carbon Capture and Storage Energy Europe Industry Associations Technophilia

Jan 19 (2015) -Four utilities pull out of an EU CCS programme…

On this day, Jan 19, in 2015 “four of Europe’s biggest power utilities, represented in Brussels by Eurelectric, have decided to leave the European Commission’s CCS Technology Platform ZEP.“

The four were Germany’s RWE AG, France’s Electricite de France, Sweden’s Vattenfall AB and Spain’s Gas Natural Fenosa.

The ZEP had been set up in the mid-2000s as “a coalition of companies, scientists and environmental groups seeking ways to capture and bury heat-trapping carbon emissions mainly from the exhausts of coal, oil and gas-fired power plants.”

[On the EU’s “Zero Emissions Power Plant Programme”. See also 2011 article in Nature about Europe and CCS.]

Why? Well, money at stake. As a Bellona press release titled “Utilities feign interest in CCS to get public bail out” said

“Of the move, Bellona Europa Director Jonas Helseth said: – In their poorly concealed attempts to attain capacity payments, Europe’s utilities have misused the trust of the European Commission and Europe’s CCS community. It’s shameless how Eurelectric proudly announces the formation of a new CCS taskforce and ‘calls on policymakers to push ahead’, while simultaneously pulling out of Europe’s largest and widest coalition working on CCS.”

What happened next

Is there any CCS? 

Why this matters.

We keep assuming we can deploy these technologies at massive scale, rapidly, despite all evidence to the contrary. It’s one of the ways we avoid looking at how much some of us are emitting.  There is trouble ahead.