A critical part of the Luxon government's plan for cutting greenhouse gas emissions over the next five years has gone belly up.
Todd Energy's proposed Kapuni project to capture & store CO2 is not viable and doesn't stack up commercially. It ain't gonna happen.
While the govt has quietly removed Kapuni from its climate calculations, it was originally expected to account for one third of the carbon savings needed to meet NZ's legal obligations to cut emissions from 2025-2030.
This is what happens when a government which doesn't understand science tries to balance the books using unicorn technologies which are unaffordable at scale.
Spotted some nonsense about #CarbonCapture on Facebook earlier. I composed a reply but decided it was a waste of time posting it there. Decided to dump it here instead
Gas extraction companies have been doing carbon capture for decades to remove CO2 from extracted gas.
They already know its limitations and likely that it will never be a successful solution, but they are happy to wave it about as a useful distraction.
Efficiency of capture can be low with current systems...
The Orca CCS project in Iceland uses a carbon free power supply and can only remove 36,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the air each year. Would need a LOT of these to have even minimal impact.
As Greg Jackson (Octopus Energy) points out, carbon capture technology has 'been a gift to the oil & gas industry to carry on what they’re doing, and carry on the fiction that somehow enormous amounts of public money should enable them to keep doing it' - yes, carbon capture is just the latest form of corporate welfare.
And, as a new study suggested this week, the capacity for storing carbon is much less than posited by those supporting the technology!
To the surprise of no one a new investigation shows that carbon air capture company Climeworks is unable to offset even its own operations, let alone their clients.
And mind you that this is in Iceland, where these plants run on 100% renewable electricity.
'Researchers have developed a reactor that pulls carbon dioxide directly from the air and converts it into sustainable fuel, using sunlight as the power source. ... Unlike most carbon capture technologies, the reactor developed by the Cambridge researchers does not require fossil-fuel-based power, or the transport and storage of carbon dioxide, but instead converts atmospheric CO2 into something useful using sunlight."
"I was one of several leading climate scientists who recently signed a letter to the energy security and net zero secretary, Ed Miliband, in which we pointed out the many issues with the current [Carbon Capture] plans.
Even if the technology worked perfectly, it still locks the UK into a reliance on natural gas (which is basically methane, a potent greenhouse gas) for generations to come"
Prof Mark Maslin, UCL
Looks like it's time for another hurricane thread. Today we woke up to hurricane models realizing a storm they had been realizing when Helene hit us last week, but then in the beginning of this week the storm gradually disappeared from dynamic models. So, we weren't really paying attention anymore as it seemed to be becoming a rain maker but not a wind and surge event.
Now we are paying attention. The trend reversed and all of the models seem to be realizing a tropical cyclone ranging from Tropical Storm strength to Category 4 hurricane. Tracks are converging on central Florida's west coast. If it realizes full strength and hits slightly north of Tampa Bay, it will be an absolute disaster. It will kill many people and collapse Florida's weak, feeble insurance market (Thanks for that, Rick Scott and Republican kleptocrats!)
So I postponed my train to Alexandria, VA, that I was supposed to be on in an hour. I was going to lead a session at the Restore America's Estuaries Coastal and Estuarine Summit about mangroves as carbon sinks. Ironic. Mangroves may pull CO2 from the air and bury it, providing ecosystem services, but they can't do.it fast or efficiently enough to save us from our energy consumption sins.
“the capacity to capture up to 500,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year for clients”
“a small fraction of the 15.357 million metric tons of carbon dioxide #emissions#Microsoft reported in its last fiscal year”
“its data centers will keep generating #greenhousegasemissions as long as the power grids they plug into still run on #fossilfuels” 🤷♂️
This story is a couple weeks old now, but I want to share it because it sits on the nexus of two very important climate crisis issues I've written about a little bit in the past. First, everything about carbon capture technology is a fantasyland scam cooked up by capitalists to give you the impression something is being done about climate crisis and instead change nothing while actively enriching themselves. Secondly, the insistence of Pig Empire governments on including the very same oil companies boiling our planet alive as stake-holding partners in finding a solution for fossil fuel driven climate crisis, is rather a lot like inviting a cancerous tumor to sit on a medical screening board trying to cure cancer.
Oil companies sold the public on a fake climate solution — and swindled taxpayers out of billions
"Climate scientists say CCS connected to fossil fuel use or production delivers little benefit when it comes to tackling climate change, period.
“It doesn’t make sense to use CCS to prolong our use of fossil fuels, especially to produce electricity,” said David Ho, professor at University of Hawaii and senior researcher at Columbia University. “The argument in favor of enhanced oil recovery is often that if they weren’t using this captured CO2, they’d be using some other CO2, but I don’t think you can call anything where you’re getting more oil out of the ground to burn a climate solution.”
Yet, so far, major oil companies have struggled to deploy CCS technology in any other capacity. “When we talk about the failure of CCS, we generally talk about capturing, not storage, but when you look at capacity and how much has actually been sequestered, it’s very little,” Ho said."
While the primary thrust of this long article is about the hard evidence that climate observers and activists have been right all along: carbon capture technology is a complete fucking joke that won't solve any of our problems, and if it has any benefit at all, it's for oil companies looking to pump even more fossil fuels (that we can't burn without killing the planet) our of the ground. But don't sleep on the secondary argument this piece is making about Pig Empire governments being all in on funding this nonsensical fake solution because it gives the appearance of addressing the problem without requiring politicians in the pocket of these very same fossil fuel companies to challenge the power of oil majors in any meaningful way. On some basic level, this means that your government is essentially forcing you to pay for your own extermination on a boiling planet.
Folks, I dunno how many times I have to say this before people understand it's real, but there is literally no solution to climate catastrophe that doesn't involve ending fossil fuel production and consumption, and with it capitalism itself. And given that governments all over the Pig Empire are actively working for oil companies and the capitalist order even as the planet burns, it seems highly unlikely to me that any of our leaders are ever going to accept what needs to be done and enact policies that will stop the carnage. Which leaves it to us, the victims of climate catastrophe to decide whether or not we're prepared to literal die so oil companies can keep turning a profit for rich people and investors.
In Canada, a new law makes dishonest greenwashing illegal.
Suddenly every claim about Carbon Capture and Storage has been scrubbed much more thoroughly than smokestack exhaust.
Greenwashers "we're taking down our lies, not because they became more accurate, but because the law made us."
Is the attempt to spin it a hilarious fail, or a painful reminder that they're intact and still trying to spread BS?
"After the passage of Bill C-59, the Pathways Alliance immediately scrubbed its entire website. “This is a direct consequence of the new legislation and is not related to our belief in the truth and accuracy of our environmental communications,” it explained."
500+ Lobbyists for 'False Promise of Carbon Capture' Accessed COP30 ( www.commondreams.org )
https://www.commondreams.org/media-library/a-female-protester-holds-a-placard-saying-don-t-cop-out.jpg?id=62202043&width=1200&height=400&coordinates=0%2C1487%2C0%2C174 ...