this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2023
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Carbon capture is absolutely not the future in Canada, much as our elected officials may wish it so. It is a waste of time and money, subsidized reputation laundering for a powerful industry.
I've never understood carbon capture and storage. I never went past high school and that was about 50 years ago. But I still remember the key principles behind why perpetual motion will never be a thing.
Unless there is an energy producing reaction that binds CO2 or separates the carbon from the oxygen without producing nasty byproducts, carbon capture and storage cannot work without pouring more energy into the project than what we gained from the release of the CO2.
Just imagine what anything else looks like. For every fossil fueled power plant that has ever existed, we need to build at least one larger non-carbon plant to power the capture and storage. There are several ways to reduce the fraction of our power that goes into capture and storage:
But no matter how you slice it, removing enough quickly enough will still require a large fraction of our power generation capacity.
The initiatives cannot be anything other than a shell game designed to hide the underlying perpetual motion machine.
You need to see it as removing the carbon generated by industries that can't be powered by clean energy, not removing carbon generated by polluting electric facilities.
Ship transportation will probably never be converted to battery power, so running wind farms just to remove the equivalent quantity of carbon released by ships from the atmosphere is a net positive.
Fair enough, but that strikes me as picking away at the edges of the problem. Maritime shipping represents about 3% of the total.. If research projects can offset that in ways that can be scaled up when we're ready, then that's great. But offsetting 3% here and 3% there doesn't accomplish much when net negative is where we need to be.
We need those projects and we need to describe their results in terms that garner and maintain support. That doesn't mean we should be diverting more than a few percent of our green energy to capture and storage at the expense of rolling out non-carbon energy production and eliminating carbon-based heating (and personal transportation?).
Trees are a lot slower at sequestration than most people think. They are also don't provide long-term sequestration, because they burn or rot somewhere along the line. Given that most existing forests are on land otherwise unsuitable for agriculture, every extra tree we plant takes cropland out of circulation. Without a way to take biomass out of the carbon cycle, it will never be more than carbon neutral.
The goal with trees is to grow them and not wait for them to rot, but instead use them as building material where the carbon they captured can be "frozen in place" for potentially hundreds of years and replant new trees in their place.
Places that produce electricity via polluting means shouldn't be investing in carbon capture but instead trying to make that production green to begin with, but places like Quebec where all electricity comes from renewables should invest in it to cancel the use of non renewables in other fields.
Okay, those tactics seem sound.
On the subject of wood specifically, I've read a few articles in the last decade or so about techniques for treating and using wood in ways that have the potential to dramatically reduce our use of concrete. Given the carbon footprint of cement, that seems like a positive development.