The Cake Continued

Hmm... that piece of cake tasted a little funny, let's try another piece.  Lol, sorry I must be hungry all this cake talk.....  In the book The Weather Makers, by Tim Flannery, a book about engineering solutions to global warming, another problem holding back CCS is presented.  Tim points outthe question, once the CO2 is captured, how much is it going to cost to put it into a reservoir?  Ideally, the location would be as close as possible, yet in many potential locations for CCS around the world, the reservoirs reside several miles away.  Large costs are then inherited to build expensive pipelines.

Flannery presents an example of some problems associated with building pipelines.  If we assume that some plants are built and the CO2 is captured, for every tonne of anthracite [coal] burned, 3.7 tonnes of CO2 is generated.  If this voluminous waste could be pumped back into the ground below the power station it would not matter as much, but the rocks that produce coal are not often useful for storing CO2, which means that the gas much be transported.  In the case of Australia's Hunter Valley coal mines, it needs to be conveyed over Australia's Great Dividing Range and hundreds of kilometres to the west. [pipelines cost about $1 million per mile, more when terrain is rough and uneven.]  There are also many risks involved with installing a pipeline and depositing the transported carbon.  Tomorrow's piece of the carbon cake will touch on these topics.

Often, private investments cannot cover the fees and expenses associated with building these pipelines.  In this light, several potential locations for CCS become unusable without government aid.  The government aid to back a project of this magnitude is also hard to come by.  Several cases have went up for review and several projects have been put on hold or not given the go ahead.  This will be examined in following posts.

Hopefully in the future after some of these problems are introduced, the solutions can be explored in this blog.  In some cases investigation of the solutions prove that some solutions contain big problems themselves, unfortunately. 

Stay tuned as we attempt to eat the whole cake... we are fat Americans afterall.