this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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With the current provincial government in Alberta, I can't help but read this request as, "Guaranteed oil lobbyists on proposed sustainable jobs partnership council."
Alberta's emission reduction plan is absolutely bonkers. Carbon capture is 100% bullshit, and the other plank is reducing emissions by increasing natural gas sales. Pure crankery.
How does export of LNG ever lead to carbon neutrality, anyway?
Also, isn't the primary sales pitch for CCUS that it can help capture emissions from coal/gas power plants at the source of emissions? China's megaton-scale plants are all used to capture emissions from existing industrial processes, not to filter from the atmosphere.
The efficiency of CC is higher when you're doing what you're saying and capturing at the source but it's still incredibly inefficient and the costs are just astronomical to get it anywhere near a level that would actually make a dent in the emissions. With the current costs today, it would actually be cheaper to tear down a coal power plant and build TWO wind farms that supplied the same amount of energy each than it would be to build CC to capture a fraction of the emissions generated by the coal plant.
And before anyone says that the costs of CC will come down in the future... So will wind farm costs and solar costs, so in the end why build something to reduce emissions when you could build something to completely eliminate them for CHEAPER instead?
Because fossil fuels are flexible to daily variations, easy to scale, geographically-independent, and generally accessible?
It's useless to overproduce on sunny days if people need electricity in the rain because storage is so obscenely expensive. It's also challenging to move electricity from areas with high wind (e.g. Xinjiang province in China) to areas with high demand (e.g. Beijing).
So sounds like instead of spending time and money researching carbon capture we should spend it on energy storage which is an already proven technology that, again, aides a 0 carbon energy source instead of making a fossil fuel source less bad
Where are you going to get this time and money? China has rolling blackouts happening today. They can't afford to wait 5-10 years for a useful energy storage technique.
Money is a moot point because either way you're investing in something, either CC or EC. As far as time goes, when it comes to climate change I don't think time is on our side either, so we don't have time to wait to develop actually effective CC. We need to be making a transition to renewables now, and smooth out the jagged edges along the way, we don't have time to wait and hope for a magic technology to eventually make our fossil fuels less dirty
With what capital? Renewables are capital-intensive but lifecycle-cheap. That only makes sense if you have an infinite supply of money.
Could the same not be said for carbon capture? The point I'm trying to make is that the costs of carbon capture technology and renewables are very similar but the payout is not. It doesn't make sense to invest in something that's going to be less effective than something with a similar cost.
Aren't CCUS retrofits targeting 85%-100% reduction in emissions? Solar is only 10x more efficient than gas in terms of emissions, so its not that big of a difference anyway.
The problem you have to optimize for is maximum electricity generation today to sustain your economic growth. That's the problem that every non-first-world country is solving. The operational costs and retrofitting cost of fossil fuels is negligible because the economic stimulus provided by increased electricity supply more than offsets it.
Plus, countries like China are already maxing out on their renewables manufacturing capability. China owns something like 75% of the solar panel market and a similar amount of the battery market. It's simply not enough manufactured capacity without large players like the US, Europe, and India also stepping in. Scaling isn't infinite and the economics of photovoltaic manufacturing in China are already breaking down because of a lack of competition.
That's why China simultaneously has the largest solar farm, largest wind farm, largest hydroelectric dam, and largest nuclear reactor backlog in the world.
People sit in their nice cushy chairs in an air-conditioned room and drive their air-conditioned cars to their air-conditioned workplace on well-paved roads, eat food grown halfway around the world, then complain about how the people living in rural China and India should live with rolling blackouts and no HVAC systems because of sustainability. These governments would rather pay $100 million today to build the plant and $100 million 5-10 years down the road to retrofit it than to pay $200 million for an equivalent solar/wind installation and $100 million for the storage.
If people really cared about climate change, they would lobby the US government to give China access to natural gas through oil. Natural gas is the single most cost-effective reducer of carbon emissions on the planet because you can, for basically no capital, retrofit an existing coal power plant to take natural gas and cut your emissions in half. This can be done at-scale across an entire country as long as the natural gas transportation infrastructure exists.