Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumCan Carbon Capture Clean Up Canada’s Oil Sands?
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514221/can-carbon-capture-clean-up-canadas-oil-sands/[font size=4]Alberta will serve as a test bed for large-scale carbon capture and sequestration.[/font]
By Mike Orcutt on May 9, 2013
[font size=3]Canada is betting that carbon capture and storage (CCS), a technology that is fairly well understood but unproven at the scale needed to significantly decrease greenhouse gas emissions, can reduce the environmental footprint associated with making fuel from oil sandsits fastest-growing source of greenhouse-gas emissions. (See Alberta's Oil Sands Heat Up.)
If things go as planned, the countrys CCS effort will not only result in emissions cuts, which would start out small in 2015 and then grow into much larger ones over the coming decadesit will also be a first test of the type of large network of pipelines, capture facilities, and storage reservoirs that will be required for CCS to play a significant role in reducing emissions. That knowledge gained, say proponents in industry and government, will be valuable not just to Canada, and could help the CCS industry finally get off the ground.
Deployment of carbon capture technology has been held back by high costs, uncertainty about risk, and the lack of incentives for large emitters around the world to invest in the technology. CCS has not yet been deployed at a commercial-scale power plant, much less at the scale required to play any kind of significant role in a country or regions long-term emissions strategy. The International Energy Agency has said that the construction of large CCS facilities is far behind schedule if the technology is to play a substantial role in helping the world meet important reduction goals over the next several decades (see The Carbon Capture Conundrum).
Alberta, which contains the vast Athabasca oil sands deposits, has committed over $1.2 billion to two world-class CCS projects meant to capture, transport, and store carbon dioxide usually emitted during the oil sands production process. One project will be at a large processing facility run by Shell, and another will connect multiple capture sites to operations that will use the captured carbon dioxide to recover hard-to-reach oil, a process called enhanced oil recovery.
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pscot
(21,024 posts)for unproven technology.
bloomington-lib
(946 posts)PDJane
(10,103 posts)The truth of the matter is that they destroyed a huge area of old-growth forest for the business of taking that stuff out of the ground. It was destructive beyond belief. Moreover, the damage to the water table cannot and will not be repaired.
wtmusic
(39,166 posts)and meaningless PR won't clean up Keystone XL's image.
Nihil
(13,508 posts)> (CCS), a technology that is fairly well understood but unproven at the scale needed
> CCS has not yet been deployed at a commercial-scale power plant,
> much less at the scale required to play any kind of significant role
> in a country or regions long-term emissions strategy.
They show the truth in (parts of) the article yet still put a bullshit title like that on it.
> and another will connect multiple capture sites to operations that will use the
> captured carbon dioxide to recover hard-to-reach oil, a process called enhanced
> oil recovery.
i.e., there is no net reduction in atmospheric carbon as they are using the
fraction of "captured" CO2 to extract even more carbon - carbon that is
currently being stored securely! - for the sole purpose of combustion and
thus release back to the atmosphere.
"CCS" is a scam and that article hides the truth in plain sight.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)Instead of viewing tar sands, shale oil, fracked natural gas and deep water drilling as signs of desperation Hail Mary passes in the last minute of play perhaps we should see them instead as signs of success.
Our monomaniacal lust to drill out and burn up these last, marginal stores of ancient carbon even as the world disintegrates around us is a sure sign that we are very close to discharging our thermodynamic obligation to the universe. We came into being, along with our brains the size of planets and our consciences the size of mustard seeds, in order to dissipate all the energy gradients we could; to fling the universe headlong toward its final date with equilibrium
I, for one, am enormously proud of my species for doing such an exemplary job in just a few thousand short years. After all, the rest of the biosphere didn't accomplish a tenth as much in over three billion years! Humans are the most successful species the planet has ever seen, so why all the long faces?