Dutch protest carbon-trapping demo project - April 21, 2009
The outlook for Shell's carbon sequestration plans is not rosy in the town of Barendrecht in the Netherlands. The town's council recently said that it had "numerous reservations" about the demo project, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
Shell hopes to compress 400,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year and inject it into aging natural gas beds a kilometre and a half below Barendrecht. Because Dutch gas beds are running out of natural gas, there could be room for storing up to 30 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year by 2020, according to the Journal. But last month, 1,300 residents protested the proposal, which was commissioned by the Dutch government.
A town council spokesperson said, "A large part of the carbon-storage technology is unproved. And we're saying if it's an experiment, you shouldn't be doing it in an urban environment." Barendrecht residents cite fears that the carbon may leak or cause an explosion. "CO2 is not poisonous and can't explode," a Shell spokesperson told the Journal, "A lot of the complaints are based on emotions."
Small carbon-sequestration projects are already in place in numerous sites, including the North Sea, and in the US there are plans to build an offshore carbon sequestration facility near New Jersey, according to the New York Times, but offshore projects are costlier.
In Alberta, residents of the drilling town of Weyburn, host to a pioneering carbon sequestration project, see things differently. The town's mayor told the Toronto Star this month, "We are blessed." The Star also reported that the injections meant the town expected to extract an additional 130 million barrels of oil from its fading reserves.
No reports address the effect of carbon sequestration on tulips--yet.
Comments
compress 400,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year
Compress CO2 to its liquid-solid boundary at 20 C, below its critical temperature, for subsequent deep transpott and sequestration. That requires about 3200 atmospheres. PV is energy, 101.325 joules/liter-atm. 4x10^5 tonnes of CO2 occupy 2.22x10^11 liters at 1 atm and 298.15 K. We're talking 7.2x10^16 joules overall to do the pretty. That is 20 billion kW-hrs or $(USD)2 billion at the socket (base rate. High usage penalties may apply).
But it costs much more! CO2 is produced by making the energy needed to bury the CO2 - and that must be buried, too. The difference between racism and social advocacy is that racism finances snit out of its own wallet. Social advocacy plunders your wallet through jackbooted State compassion - the Carbon Tax on Everything.
Posted by: Uncle Al | April 21, 2009 09:52 PM