Carbon Capture and Storage: Economic Costs Revisited

Even as these projects get off the ground, there are two large drawbacks:

* The process is quite energy intensive, and thus will use up coal supplies faster.
* Because of the additional energy cost the process will remain quite expensive, it is not certain that costs can be reduced sufficiently

In this post, I will talk about the second item, the high economic cost. In my previous post, I quantified the impact the extra energy cost might be expected to have on coal depletion.

Again, another detailed post, more after the jump to The Oil Drum at http://su.pr/2VBnAK .

plant trees, bamboo, hemp, veggies..
All plants soak up carbon..it takes a tad longer than some gigawatt eating electric pump set up.

I have planted a giant sequoia and some incense cedars. Long lived get huge soak up much co2. Sequoias take lots of water, but our water table is only about 40 ft down so its tap root should be able to reach as it. Bamboo is fast growing and soaks up a lot of co2 as well. I have planted clumping kinds that will stay relatively contained with mowing the yard, runners are invasive.
No fuel to power it other than the Sun. Minimal cost to plant and it takes me about 5 minutes a day to give it 3 gallons which will increase for a few years yet.

We should plant thousands of acres of forrest for lots of reasons but fossil fuels contain so much carbon it is often hard for people to quantify.

A single mature tree on average sinks about 50 pounds of carbon a year. So if you planted 40 trees on your property and they all matured they would sink about 1 ton of carbon annually.

The problem is that coal produces about 1 ton of carbon per MWh.
We produce about 1.8 billion MWh of electricity from coal that's 1.8 billion tons of CO2 annually.

It would require 72 billion new mature trees to sink that much carbon.

So while reforestation can be part of the solution the sheer scale of the problem means it isn't the whole solution.

a project than for coal? If we consider natural gas a medium term transition energy (until we get enough solar, wind and hydrogen, mainly to dispense with most natural gas usage), wouldn't natural gas w/sequestration go a long way to eliminating GHGs?

The infrastructure is there already and all that needs be done for the most part is adding the gasifier. It would help to buy time to get a safer and saner method of producing our power