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DOE dives into carbon sequestration
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced awards of more than $126.6 million to the West Coast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership (WESTCARB) and the Midwest Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership (MRCSP) for the Department’s fifth and sixth large-scale carbon sequestration projects. These industry partnerships, which are part of DOE’s Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership, will conduct large volume tests in California and Ohio to demonstrate the ability of a geologic formation to safely, permanently, and economically store more than one million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2). Subject to annual appropriations from Congress, this project including the partnership’s cost share is estimated to cost over $183 million. Advancing carbon sequestration is a key component of the Bush Administration’s comprehensive efforts to commercially advance clean coal technology to meet current and future energy needs and meet President Bush’s goal to stop greenhouse gas emissions growth by 2025.
“The formations to be tested during the third phase of the partnerships program are the most promising of the major geologic basins in the United States. Collectively, these formations have the potential to store more than 100 hundred years of CO2 emissions from all major point sources in North America,” Acting Deputy Secretary of Energy Jeffrey Kupfer said. “Tests like these will help provide the confidence and build the infrastructure necessary to commercialize these technologies, and will enable the U.S. to continue using its vast resources of coal while protecting the earth for future generations.”
The new projects will demonstrate the entire CO2 injection process — pre-injection characterization, injection process monitoring, and post-injection monitoring — for large scale injections of one million tons or more to test the ability of different geologic settings to permanently store CO2. DOE plans to invest $126.6 million in the two projects over the next 10 years, while the industry partners will provide $56.6 million in cost-shared funds to make these projects a success.
In the first stages of the projects, researchers will characterize the selected sites. Over the first 24 months, researchers and industry partners will complete the modeling, monitoring, and infrastructure improvements needed before CO2 can be injected. These efforts will establish a baseline for future monitoring after CO2 injection begins. Each project will then inject one million tons or more of CO2 into a regionally significant storage formation. After injection, investigators will monitor and model the fate of the CO2 to determine the effectiveness of the storage reservoir.
The latest projects to be awarded are outlined below:
Midwest Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership (MRCSP) — The MRCSP, led by Battelle Memorial Laboratories, will demonstrate CO2 storage in the Mount Simon Sandstone. This geologic formation stretches from Kentucky through Ohio and has the potential to store more than 100 years of CO2 emissions from major point sources in the region. The MRCSP will inject approximately one million tons of CO2 from an ethanol production facility. In this area of Ohio, the Mount Simon formation is approximately 3,000 feet deep. The CO2 will be injected on the facility site, and MRCSP will be responsible for development of the infrastructure, operations, closure, and monitoring of the injected CO2. The MRCSP covers Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, and Michigan.
Total Project Cost: $92,846,271
DOE Share: $61,096,271
Partner Share: $31,750,000
West Coast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership (WESTCARB) — The WESTCARB Partnership, led by the California Energy Commission, will conduct a geologic CO2 storage project in the San Joaquin Basin in Central California. The project will inject 1 million tons of CO2 over 4 years into deep (7,000+ feet) geologic formations below a 50-megawatt, zero-emission power plant in Kimberlina, CA. The Clean Energy Systems plant uses natural or synthesis gas in an oxyfuel system and produces a relatively pure stream of CO2. This CO2 will be compressed and injected into one of a number of potential storage formations below the surface of the plant. WESTCARB will develop, operate, and close the injection site as well as monitor the fate of the injected CO2. The WESTCARB Partnership includes California, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Hawaii, and British Columbia.
Total Project Cost: $90,594,099
DOE Share: $65,606,584
Partner Share: $24,987,515
DOE’s Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnerships are a ten-year initiative, launched in 2003, which form the centerpiece of national efforts to develop the infrastructure and the knowledge base needed to place carbon sequestration technologies on the path to commercialization. The seven regional partnerships include more than 350 state agencies, universities, and private companies within 41 states, two Indian nations, and four Canadian provinces.
During the first phase of the program, seven partnerships characterized the potential for CO2 storage in deep oil-, gas-, coal-, and saline-bearing formations. When Phase I ended in 2005, the partnerships had identified more than three trillion metric tons of potential storage capacity in promising sinks. This has the potential to represent more than 1,000 years of storage capacity from point sources in North America. In the program’s second phase, the partnerships implemented a portfolio of small-scale geologic and terrestrial sequestration projects. The purpose of these tests was to validate that different geologic formations have the injectivity, containment, and storage effectiveness needed for long-term sequestration. The third phase, large volume tests are designed to validate that the capture, transportation, injection, and long term storage of over one million tons of carbon dioxide can be done safely, permanently, and economically.
Today’s awards are the fifth and sixth of seven awards in the third phase of the Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnerships program. In October, DOE announced the first three large volume carbon sequestration projects that total $318 million for Plains Carbon Dioxide Reduction Partnership, Southeast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership, and Southwest Regional Partnership for Carbon Sequestration, and in December, DOE announced its fourth award to the Midwest Geological Sequestration Consortium.
Learn more about on DOE’s Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnerships and other investments by the Bush Administration in advanced clean coal projects at the Office of Fossil Energy's Carbon Sequestration program website.
Submitted by BJS on Thu, 2008-05-08 06:18.
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Re: CO2 and deminishing effects
Anonymous wrote:
Actually, if this were indeed true it would be evidence that we should worry about increasing concentrations of CO2. However, those ice cores that show a sufficiently sharp* rise in CO2 and temperature also show the temperature rise preceding the rise in CO2. Of course this makes perfect sense when one recognizes the nature of dissolved gases, like CO2, in the oceans.
Anonymous also wrote:
Have you ever actually worked with Hydrogen? I have. Have you ever actually worked with cryogenic liquids, at least liquid Nitrogen? I have.
It is true that Hydrogen at reasonably low pressures is no "more dangerous than combustibles we already use", like gasoline. The problem is that in order to get reasonable range in a vehicle powered by Hydrogen (except by fusion) requires us to go far beyond such (except in the form of hydrides).
If you spring a tiny leak in a high pressure Hydrogen tank, the leaking Hydrogen will spontaneously ignite and burn with an invisible flame that can sever a limb (or head). I don't mean a pale blue flame like natural gas. No, I mean invisible to the naked eye.
Of course this is to say nothing of the dangers of a liquid Hydrogen spill (which will nearly explosively evaporate, even before any combustion, but will practically instantly freeze anything it contacts [just think in terms of its temperature]).
Like I said, check into the nature of the various proposed storage and transport methods—including methanol, ethanol, and other hydrocarbons—and see what makes the most sense.
David
* If the rise or fall is not sufficiently sharp then one cannot determine which precedes which, due to the noisy nature of the transitions.
CO2 and deminishing effects
CO2 has a deminishing effect. Meaning you'd have to sequester a crap load of the stuff before you'd see in change in global climage. Not to mention, you'd have to produce a crapload of it, before you see any effect on global climate. I'm talking way more then we can produce in a century.
Want proof: Last century we dumped a ton of that stuff into the atmosphere and yet the beginning of the century was hotter then the latter. Seems pretty contrary to global warming theory.
Evidence points to the fact that CO2 actually precedes mean global temperature increase. So my question is why sequester it. It makes up one the smallest elements in our atmosphere. We should take that money and put it to better use, like trying to figure out how to put the US economy back on track.
I actually think that Hydrogen will be a feasible to use as fuel in the foreseeable future. It's not any more dangerous than combustibles we already use. That, and there is no harmful emissions when it does burn. That gets my vote.
Is CO2 carbon sequestration the "answer"?
Think about it. Is CO2 carbon sequestration the answer? Even if we can be assured that it will never leak out (it doesn't decay, like radioactive waste, though there is a slight possibility, depending on the mineral content of the formations, that there might be some chemical binding that may occur over geologic time scales), what of the fact that nearly 73% of CO2, by weight, is oxygen. So for every 100 tons of CO2 we sequester, we are sequestering nearly 73 tons of our oxygen.
Is this sustainable? Certainly not for too long (unless nature is spewing far more CO2 into the environment than is humanity, or at least than what we will be sequestering).
Certainly alternative energy sources need to be utilized. However, hydroelectric is about as developed as possible already (and has some issues with methane emissions). Solar has been five to ten years in the future for decades, though there is always some promise, and some small applications. Geothermal has been in a somewhat similar boat. (Have they finally solved the corrosion and crusting issues?) Wave power is even further behind, along with fusion (not that fusion, other than the mythical "cold fusion" kind, will ever be quite as benign as so many people seem to want to believe).
Wind power has certainly picked up steam, but they only work when the wind is not too strong or too weak, so we need many times the capacity, and significant advances in the power grid, in order to provide anything like a reliable source. Of course this is to say nothing of the potential to disrupt our weather, at least locally (though it is supposed that new low turbulence blades might at least mitigate this issue).
Biofuels, so far, appear to be at least as bad for the environment, and human health in particular, than many fossil fuels, at least so far (particularly ethanol from food stock burned in internal combustion engines). Of course this is not to say that ethanol and methanol from cellulose used as hydrogen storage and transport for fuel cells doesn't hold great promise. But, again, what's the time frame? However, I think that mandating that all new vehicles (hybrids included) should be flex fuel capable—where by this I, and others, mean that they be able to run any, and I mean any combination of methanol, ethanol, and gasoline (and some equivalent for diesel engines)—will likely go a long way toward making this work.
I think making the transition to electric drivetrain vehicles (full electric, hybrid, and fuel cell) also has great promise. However, the greatest fruit will require an infrastructure investment by the federal government (and I don't mean hydrogen or electric refueling stations—there's something better).
The "hydrogen economy" is a "crock". Hydrogen is simply an energy transport "fuel". It is highly dangerous at high pressures, that still don't provide much hydrogen density (either by weight or by volume); as well as its dangers as a cryogenic liquid, that still provides little increase in hydrogen density. Compare these forms of hydrogen to even the best hydrides (heavy) or hydrogen stuffed buckyballs, to the hydrogen storage density of methanol, ethanol, and other hydrocarbons; then tell me what makes the most sense.
Of course this is to say nothing of nuclear energy. (Of course this is not to say that there isn't much to be discussed in this regard. :-) )
David
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