Under Labour’s green energy plans, carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies are being relied on to strip up to 30m tonnes of CO2 from UK emissions each year by 2030 – and more than 100m tonnes by 2050.
If they cannot be made to work then the UK will have almost no hope of achieving its legally binding target of hitting net zero CO2 emissions by 2050.
So the legally binding plan is more of an aspiration then?
Not only did they point to the amount of investment at risk, but also stressed that the Government’s overarching goal to capture up to 30m tonnes of CO2 by 2030 is way off track.
Driving this underperformance is the fact that four key carbon capture projects are already years behind schedule, the NAO said, which is without recognising the untested technology and uncertain costs.
Crucially, it also warned that the £20bn of public money set aside to develop CO2 capture is unlikely to be enough – and far more may be needed.
Thing is there’s not actual guarantee that it can be made to work. “Work” here meaning physically work at something within shouting distance of economic cost. So running the whole national plan on something that may or may not work is, umm, it’s a bit of a risk, isn’t it?
Still, the National Planners know best, eh? Must be so, we’d not have a GOSPLAN if they didn’t now, would we?
If we had GOSPLAN it would be easier. We would just do what the Soviets did — lie.
Net Zero is easily achieved if no-one checks the figures!
“Net Zero is easily achieved if no-one checks the figures!”
Brilliant! Then all we have to do is to stop fiddling the temperature records and we can claim that it worked.
That’s probably exactly what we WILL do, Chester! Since we’ve just elected experts in it.
The target will have to be met in different ways.
Your carbon and nitrogen emissions are too high. Please report to your local termination centre for reprocessing.
I thought greenies were against CCS because
it meant that people could still enjoy doing stuff they enjoyed like driving outside 15 minute zones, flying to tourist destinations etcmumble mumble and so not proper decarbonising?The largest CCS plant in the world can remove 36,000 tonnes of carbon a year (at enormous cost)…. It is bullshit tech, useless at scale.
A bit like ‘green’ hydrogen. Manhattan Contrarian has some useful stuff on that this week. 10-20 times the cost of electricity from natural gas in the US.
“The Central Committee expresses its deep disappointment at this failure and declares that workers must redouble their efforts to ensure the target will be achieved and surpassed within the following Five Year Plan”.
How low must emissions go to be “net” zero?
I tried Google but there was no clear definition. One estimate was “45% of 1992” or something. And we are close to that sometimes.
Can anyone help me here?
TIA
“… the east coast cluster comprising Teesside and Humberside…”
That is almost Gosplan standard – Teesside and Humberside are “quite close” as they are only separated by Yorkshire …
Yorkshire was one Viking kingdom but prior to the Viking invasion it comprised TWO Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, Deira and Elmet.
“The Central Committee expresses its deep disappointment at this failure and declares that workers must redouble their efforts to ensure the target will be achieved and surpassed within the following Five Year Plan”.
You forgot the addendum: ‘Those responsible for this failure have been designated for re-education in Revolutionary ideals’.
@john77: did Elmet become an Anglo-Saxon kingdom? Insofar as anything about the Dark Ages can be known securely it’s usually described as a British kingdom i.e. a kingdom of the post-Roman Britons, not of the invading Krauts.
(It might cause needless confusion to refer to the Krauts of that period as “the Hun”.)
Some time before I retired I was invited to join a research group to work on carbon capture. I declined. I was asked why. “Because, as you know, it’s all bollocks; it’s just a wheeze to rob the taxpayer while advancing academic careers.”
“Oh no” came the reply “we all believe in it.”
“Then”, says I, “I am even wiser to steer clear.”
I would be very surprised if CC did work. Essentially, you’re trying to push entropy up hill. Combing oxygen with carbon produces energy + CO². There’s a measure of disorder being created there. You started with a heap of carbon (order). Now it’s loose in the atmosphere (disorder). That’s where the energy comes from.
True CC would take you back to having a heap of carbon again. And ignoring inefficiencies, would take the same energy as was produced in the burning. Capturing the CO² isn’t the same level of increase of order, but it’s still considerable. So will take a considerable amount of energy. That energy will be tied up in the liquefied CO². Add inefficiencies & you’re headed back where you started from. The lost energy is coming out as heat extracted from the CO² in the liquefying process & the energy to power the mechanical process. Etc, etc, etc.
It’s hard to see why you’d want to do it when you already have a free & very efficient process uses sunlight as the energy input. Photosynthesis.
legally binding target
Our rulers have the most primitive of superstitions: they believe (their) words are magic. King Cnut knew better, but not these modern cunts.
“Laws” are just words, written on paper, by fuckwits. If they diverge from physical reality, it’s not physical reality that’s wrong.
Yeah but that’s politicians, innit Steve? “We can stop people using drugs we disapprove of by passing laws making them illegal. Simples” says the politician. “No second order effects at all.”
BiS – Yarp.
Doesn’t help that politics has been colonised by lawyers.
Shakespeare was right.
No one in government has a clue as to how this “legally binding” commitment can be achieved.
So they provide development grants. Of about 7 billion, I believe.
Naturally this has created a whole subsector of consultants eager to advise crackpots and charlatans on how to get hold of the money.
According to Forestry England, an oak tree will absorb over 10,000 Kg of carbon over its lifetime so all we need to do is plant 3 million of them. Not difficult, now where’s my £20 billion?
@nbc
I suspect any vegetation growing on that area will sequester the same amount of carbon over that period. So you’d get the same effect by doing nothing.
“According to Forestry England, an oak tree will absorb over 10,000 Kg of carbon over its lifetime so all we need to do is plant 3 million of them. Not difficult, now where’s my £20 billion?”
Um, that would be 3m of them PER YEAR, rising to 10m per year by 2050, and continued every year forever. As CC is aimed to remove 30m tonnes per year by 2030, and 100m tonnes per year by 2050.
And anyway, when you plant 1000 oak trees they don’t all survive to maturity, you have to plant loads to cover natural losses, and make sure enough survive to be a viable timber crop. In fact forestry plantations are usually thinned out on a regular basis to allow the remainder the space and light to continue to grow. So in order to get 1000 mature oaks you might have to plant anywhere from 4-10 times as many saplings.
Nothing wrong with saplings, Jim. Young trees sequester more carbon than mature trees. They grow faster.
Going to coppicing and pollarding would help a bit, if one was really bothered about CO2.
When I look at the white cliffs of Dover I see carbon capture and storage. Admittedly, it happened a while ago, but it’s still going on.
Animalcules in the sea have carbonate shells. Those that aren’t eaten fall to the bottom. This “marine snow” accumulates at the rate of about 1 mm per year. Not a lot, until you remember that there is 193 million square miles of it.
Of all the ludicrous ideas to come out of Nut Zero, hydrogen as a fuel has to be the ludicrousest. Artificially manufacturing petroleum may need 2 or 3 times the energy, but there’s a worldwide distribution network already in existence, and it’s far more energy dense – nobody is ever going to fly a plane (not one bigger than a 2-person puddle-jumper, anyway) powered by hydrogen (still less an electric one powered by batteries) – it also doesn’t have a nasty tendency to create an explosive mixture with air when stored for a few weeks.
” Young trees sequester more carbon than mature trees. They grow faster.”
Yes but in order to get mature trees you have to give them more space, by thinning the plantation out progressively over the years. So its no good saying ‘A mature oak sequesters 10 tonnes of CO2 over its lifetime, so we need to plant Xm trees to sequester our target’ because of the Xm you plant only a fraction will ever sequester that 10 tonnes of CO2. Most won’t make it beyond a decade or two, at which point they are either dead or thinnings, both of which are going to end up back in the atmosphere, as rotten wood, or firewood.
The alternative is to plant trees at mature spacings which uses vastly more land and requires every tree to be maintained and replaced if it dies, which is a lot more maintenance, ie cost.
Actually it is exactly what Government should be doing. New technologies like solar, wind, electric cars etc lack the scale and experience to be economic. Hence the Government must subsidise them until like solar and wind they are.
Another duty of Government is to ensure that 3rd party costs are minimise, the polluter should pay. Obviously industry only pays pollution cost when required to by force majeur.
So CCS is sensible. I know that you are wont to argue that adaption to climate change is cheaper than reducing it but the consensus is against you.
So CCS is sensible. I know that you are wont to argue that adaption to climate change is cheaper than reducing it but the consensus is against you..
Doesn’t mean they’re right or that the consensus won’t change its mind and if you’re arguing we should follow the consensus don’t change your argument when the consensus doesn’t suit you.
@ Person in Pictland
I wasn’t around 1500 years ago (or if I was I have forgotten) so I’ve assumed the historians were right, but Elmet is not critical to my argument, just illustrative of the nonsense that Teesside and Humberside comprise a cluster.
So CCS is sensible. I know that you are wont to argue that adaption to climate change is cheaper than reducing it but the consensus is against you.
CO2 isn’t a pollutant and the only people who want to spend billions burying a beneficial trace gas are either charlatans or retards.
There’s sound reason for thinking that CO2 atmos below 250ppm is risky and below 200ppm is downright dangerous JB. And you are endorsing subsidies, spectacular ones well above the social cost, to come up with a machine that can reduce atmospheric CO2 by a meaningful amount, for what is the point of net zero if the goal is not meaningful. And a lot of net zero is offshored – fertiliser and steel manufactures, shipping fuel doesn’t count, biofuels from palm oil, CO2 offsets for forests on the edge of Sahara. It’s inevitable that CCS will be offshored, or the tech will, and once you’ve got one machine that can do it an enemy can make 100 of them and hold the world to ransom. Give me reparations, give me the Falklands or Diego Garcia, or else plant growth gets it. Are you on the side of the enemy JB?
What happens and to whom if the “legally binding commitment is not met?
The key word in “Net Zero” is “Net”. Some activities produce emissions which are added to the total, some produce effects which are deemed to reduce the total, and some are counted as neutral. By tinkering with the definitions to move some activities to a different category, politicians can make the overall total go up or down according to their current political needs. It’s all a huge accounting trick, and even the greens will realise that eventually.
What happens and to whom if the “legally binding commitment is not met?
Ed Miliband’s friends make slightly less money from looting what’s left of England.
What happens and to whom if the “legally binding commitment is not met?
Collective responsibility means that the PM and his cabinet will be charged with breaking the law and face long jail sentences.
Only kidding, they’ll all carry on as if nothing has happened and eventually end up in the HoL with any number of green industry sinecures.
Young trees sequester more carbon than mature trees. They grow faster.
I doubt that. The rate at which a plant creates plant material will be function of what sunshine it intercepts. So the bigger it is, the more sunlight etc.
The question is do trees create more plant material per m²/time than other plants? It’s not obvious why they should. All tend to intercept the same sunlight per m².
Maybe Jim would know what mass of hay crop say a hectare might produce in year? Or maybe cabbages?
“but the consensus is against you.”
How often do we read those weasel words? The consensus is irrelevant. Science or engineering aren’t democracies. The only valid answer is the correct one.
“Maybe Jim would know what mass of hay crop say a hectare might produce in year?”
About 2.5-5 tonnes per Ha, with no fertiliser, and varying with rainfall and temperatures. But that would presume that the crop is removed each year. If you just let the grass grow up and then die down without cutting or grazing it then you would get far less as the bottom part of the sward is just dead material, and new growth is heavily impacted. Grass grows more the more you cut it, or graze it. But of course that growth does not sequester much carbon, it either goes into livestock and thus re-emits the carbon or if you don’t cut it just rots down slowly over time. I suppose you could spend your time filling old coal mines with dead grass, its no more mad than trying to extra CO2 from the atmosphere and inject it deep into the earth’s crust.
“until like solar and wind they are”: don’t be absurd.
Frankly Jim, it sounds cheaper, easier and more sensible than building some elaborate machine to extract the CO2 from the atmosphere by brute force.
Though I naturally prefer to just lean back and loaf while good old Mother Nature takes care of things.
@ Jim
That’s one of the reasons why *they* want trees – because the wood can be used to make furniture or build old-fashioned houses and the CO2 remains sequestered until it all rots.
I have been given to understand that peat bogs are the best “carbon sinks”in the British Isles but they aren’t the best places for you and your friends to grow crops.
“(It might cause needless confusion to refer to the Krauts of that period as “the Hun”.)”
Ever read McKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions & Madness of Crowds? He uses the word Krauts early on, and it’s a bit confusing, in that he actually means the Dutch. Obvs. written in 1840 or whenever it was.
@Jim About 2.5-5 tonnes per Ha Interesting. Thanks for that, Jim.
From this: https://www.fao.org/4/x5339e/x5339e06.htm I got
One hectare of forest land in good condition can produce annually 10 m³ of timber, or, in terms of seasoned wood, 5,000 kg. of material suitable for lands use.
Curiously alike those 2 figures, aren’t they? Like I was guessing, the amount any plant photosynthesises CO²+sunshine Into plant material are similar. It certainly implies turning cropland into forest doesn’t remove any more CO² from the atmosphere. Without actually felling & using the timber, it looks like rewilding’s a non starter. You get a short period of carbon sequestration in tree wood, then you’re back where you started. So Monbiot can STFU for a start.
I suspect if you delve deeper you’d find the best thing for the environment is to carry on what we’ve been doing for the past few thousand years.
Jim & BiS
You’re both right I suppose.
But hay only makes cow food, while trees make firewood, furniture, BBQs, climbing frames…
There’s also a Laffer curve in trees. A seedling sequesters nearly no CO2, a sapling a lot more. A maturing tree more again. Then a 400 year oak is absorbing nearly net zero CO2 apart from maybe a few extra leaves.
We already have a perfect CO2 scrubber in our climate belt. It’s called “the siberian taiga”.
Eats everything we produce in excess in winter in the space of two weeks once Spring arrives **.
And a little bit of warming only makes it grow faster and eat more CO2, so we have our control loop right there for the next couple of centuries.
All we have to do is pay the Russkies not to mess with it too much… oh, wait…
** Courtesy of NASA monitoring. Of course all the Ecologists and Worbal Gloaming experts point at the elevation in winter, and never at the Russian Spring.. Because that would be Inconvenient to the Narrative..
Interesting, Grikath
Prevailing winds blow west to east due to the planet’s rotation. USA is the only major country where CO2 concentrations are lower on leaving USA than they are arriving.
Russia suffered a catastrophic decline in CO2 emissions from 1990 to date due mainly to western capitalist carpet baggers perestroiking their horrible industry.
Not wishing to sound like the proverbial “sorry Squire, i’ve scratched the record”, CO2 is not a problem, and the sooner more people start saying it out loud (thanks Steve) instead of contriving ever more elaborate and expensive plans to cure it, the better.
Solar and wind are now economic, you say? Excellent, we can stop subsidising them then.
Fitting CO2 capture to CCGT is insanely expensive. However bleeding CO2 off from Allam Cycle plants is trivial. My understanding is there is an experimental Allam Cycle plant being planned for Teesside, but I haven’t heard any progress reports on it recently.
“One hectare of forest land in good condition can produce annually 10 m³ of timber, or, in terms of seasoned wood, 5,000 kg. of material suitable for lands use.”
I suspect that figure is for usable timber, not all the wood a tree produces (ie they are counting the main trunk suitable for milling only, not all the side branches, crown timber etc etc), plus all the other undergrowth etc that exists in a forest. So the overall biomass production would be higher than 5 tonnes/Ha.
Yeah Jim. But it’s like with your hay crop you don’t count the stubble or the roots.
What I’m trying to establish is the vegetable matter produced/m² insolation. Do different plants remove different quantities of CO² from the atmosphere?
If the answer’s what I suspect it to be, foresting is not a long term sequestration strategy. All you achieve is a relatively short period whilst what you plant achieves maximum mass. From then on it’s neutral. So you’d have to combine it with a timber industry & utilise the product. And from experience of doing it, half of the input ends up as waste in the manufacturing process. And, of course, there’s a limit to how many bedroom suites IKEA can flog.
Further than that, any CC strategy is illogical. Particularly CCS.
You’re talking about avoiding dumping the stuff into the atmosphere where it apparently causes a problem. So you need to treat the atmosphere as a whole. CCS is a very expensive & largely irrelevant point solution. Foresting the UK isn’t much better. You’d get far better return on your buck irrigating & greening the Sahara. . You’d be sequestrating gigatonnes of carbon in newly created soil. And that would be entirely doable with current tech. Build your wind & solar farms down the African Atlantic coast, desalinate & pump. And get your project a couple hundred miles inland & the evaporation/precipitation cycle starts taking over the need to desalinate. The project can even start paying for itself in agricultural output etc You’d end up with a net profit.
The Saraha is actually good growing land given water. I know. I’ve been there & watched it done. It always was. It’s actually a fairly recent phenomenon little older than humanity. Result of changes in global wind patterns & possibly the the flooding of the Mediterranean basin.
It’s worth understanding that the most important sequestrator of carbon on land is the production of soil. The peat bogs John77 mentions are just an extreme example. Today’s soils are the future’s coal. In the UK, the biggest creator of soil is managed agriculture.
Go look at a Victorian park. Those paths you walk on were originally laid 3-6 inches proud for drainage. Despite being repeatedly re-tarmaced they’re now generally a foot below the average plane of the ground. That’ll be better than a third of a tonne/m² of 50-70% carbon. You could virtually burn the stuff. All of it has come from a bit over a century of repeated mowing of lawns & some captured wind blown dust. Might even have been more if they’d grazed cattle on it.
Forests do not create soil. Dig in any long established forest & you’ll hit the substrate in inches. Try it in Epping Forest if you’re near London. Beneath the leaf fall it’s hoggin. Clay & gravel deposited in the last Ice Age. The only places you’ll find any actual soil is where it was once cleared & farmed or grazed for a while.
One of the things thats doing farmers heads in at the moment is the fact that permanent pasture appears to sequester the most carbon, yet all the green subsidies are directed to arable land. If carbon sequestration is your goal you should be encouraging permanent pasture, with livestock kept on it, as a carbon sink. But they are actively trying to get rid of livestock and to turn the grassland over to trees, which will destroy the currently sequestered carbon in it and prevent it soaking up any more. The whole thing is mad, even within its own parameters.
turn the grassland over to trees, which will destroy the currently sequestered carbon in it and prevent it soaking up any more.
Interesting statement that, Jim. I would presume the mechanism would be the shading of the trees reduces ground cover & then leaves the soil open to erosion?
It’s fascinating that if actually look at & understand the land, what’s being demanded is almost the complete opposite to what would be the best solution.
The worst case is Monbiot’s rewilding. Where you get a relatively short period of sequestration against a background of carbon re-emission that’ll fairly quickly cancel it out The optimum would seem to be to do what we’ve always done but without the distortion of recent regulation. There should be a campaign to increase meat consumption rather than reduce it & more forest clearance..
This seems to be true with the Brasilian rainforest. Virgin forest stands on basically sterile silt. The carbon recycling in the forest is 100%. Where you get soil & actual carbon sequestration is on the stretches of terra preta which were created by & still being by created by the Indios. That’s the stuff they’re being actively prevented from doing.
Only if you define “best solution” as “what would achieve the stated aim.” If the real intention is to destroy food production to bring on a neo-Malthusian population collapse, then it all makes perfect sense.
If the real intention is to destroy food production to bring on a neo-Malthusian population collapse, then it all makes perfect sense.
Fortunately I don’t see it like that. Like most similar things, it’s just individuals seeking to maximise what they perceive as their own personal advantage in the short term & that so many of these interests currently align. I don’t believe there’s a plan. It’s more a case of “it’s not my problem if life gets worse for other people as long as it gets better for me.” They will sell your children into slavery to get likes on Twatter.
I think it’s slightly more nuanced than that. For the average public sector parasite, you’re probably right. But there will be some directing the drones that are actively trying to do us harm.