The New York Times reports:
The number of large-scale projects to capture and bury carbon dioxide has fallen to 65 from 75 over the past year, a worldwide survey has found, despite a consensus among scientists and engineers that the so-called carbon capture and sequestration, known as C.C.S., will be essential to meet international goals for slowing the buildup of climate-changing gases.
There is — say it with me now, children — no environmental benefit to capturing carbon dioxide because human production of carbon dioxide is safe. If anything, it is almost certainly a benefit — no identifiable harm and known benefit to plant development.
If there’s a market for the recovered (better term) carbon dioxide to do something useful at a lower cost than alternatives, then the market will drive the innovation to make a profit from recovering CO2. Otherwise, CCS is actually an environmentally harmful procedure because the energy used will have real pollution associated with it and real resources turned to futility.
Human production of energy does cause real pollution — ash, carbon monoxide, ozone, sulfides, soot and other things we’d like to minimize. If we’re going to have some pollution, and we are, let’s have some benefit in the form of clothing, TV sets and food. Not some feels-good-to-watermelons foolishness like this. “A weird trick using all-natural, clinically proven supplements that Big Business hates!”
In Texas they are building a carbon capture plant that turns CO2 into baking soda. It has to cost more. Usually they use limestone for the carbonate.
There is a thermodynamic cost to transforming a diffuse warm gas into a solid or liquid (possible under great pressure). So an extra 30% or more fossil fuels would have to be burned to cover the cost. You can’t borrow the work from China. CCS makes no sense.
With proper public funding, and no expectation of results, I’d be happy to start few more projects.