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Umm, yes?

A carbon capture proposal for a central Louisiana power plant has been titled “Project Diamond Vault” by its owner, Louisiana utility Cleco. The utility says the project will have “precious value” to the company, customers and state.

Yet less than six months after announcing the project to capture carbon from the plant’s emissions and store them underground near the plant, Cleco revealed in a recent filing to its state regulator the $900m carbon capture retrofit could reduce electricity produced for its customers by about 30%.

It takes energy to capture carbon. Everyone knows this, surely?

18 thoughts on “Umm, yes?”

  1. Use glorious nukes to provide the electricity and the energy to capture the carbon from the atmosphere. Then use the CO2 and some H2 to make synfuels.

    I was entertained to note that there’s a project to produce green hydrogen in Zimbabwe, and ship it to Europe. It’d be transported as liquid hydrogen or, more sensibly, ammonia.

    Alas they need some generous white capitalist to provide the funds. Needless to say, I’ve no intention of wasting a penny on the nonsense.

  2. ‘The utility says the project will have “precious value” to the company, customers and state.’

    Did they miss out the word “little”?

  3. Harry Haddock's Ghost

    Hang on, *if* this capture system works, and that’s a big if, what’s the problem? You just dig 30% more coal don’t you? Coal being relatively cheap compared to renewable sources?

  4. Martin Near The M25

    The aim of carbon capture is to make fossil fuels look uneconomic. Like most ‘green’ nonsense it’s not designed to work or be a sensible solution. The extra costs are the whole point.

  5. Tech that could capture and store CO2 at scale and cheaply could be used for horrific evil.
    You could literally dial down the CO2 ppm levels and cause crop fails and starvation. Rich countries with grain stores and CO2 enhanced greenhouses would survive the apocalypse.
    The global south which has fewer of these things would be smashed.
    Someone should tell Oxfam.
    The lowest emitters will suffer most from climate change being solved. Or something.

  6. How long does the so called climate crisis have to keep not happening for people to wake up to the fact that the whole thing is just one massive scam? Presumably as long as there are natural disasters, and of course there always will be, the ignorant can be persuaded that each new one has been caused by climate change and the bandwagon can roll forever.

  7. there’s a project to produce green hydrogen in Zimbabwe

    I’m going to stick with the Nigerian gentleman who has some $50m in funds oh so very nearly ready to go.

  8. “Rich countries with grain stores and CO2 enhanced greenhouses would survive the apocalypse”

    Don’t be so sure – there’s been a dramatic increase in food production and storage sites being destroyed by fire over the last year, particularly in the US. A conspiracy theorist might wonder if this has all been planned by that nice Mr Schwab and his associates…

  9. Retrofitting kit to extract CO2 from the N2, CO2, H20, NOx &c mix coming out of an air breathing plant is always going to take an efficiency hit. I am (perhaps irrationally) optimistic about Allam cycle plants which burn natural gas with O2 in a stream of supercritical CO2. Yes, you need to fractionally distil the oxygen out of the air, but the increased efficiency from the high pressure operation pretty much cancels out this energy requirement, and separating the water and excess CO2 from the turbine outlet is relatively trivial.

  10. Charly, as volcanoes are the highest emitters of CO2 by far, much more than the sum of all human endeavors, how are you going to tax them and, if you can find a way, hos will that stop their emissions?

  11. Ed P, That’s natural CO2. That’s different CO2 than the stuff we Humans make. It says here on the tin…

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