Comment by iamthemonster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iamthemonster | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I worked on the Front End Engineering Design for a blue hydrogen power station with carbon capture, and I can assure you it generated net electricity export after subtracting the power and heat requirements for the CO2 compression and amine units respectively. So the phrase "It still appears that the energy cost of collecting, piping and injecting all the CO2 from a fossil fuel combustion or hydrogen reformation process exceeds the total amoung of energy that the process generates" is definitely not true. And contrary to common opinion, there is no "unproven technology" in CO2 capture and storage, every unit operation has been around for decades.

However your other phrase was 100% correct I think: "Underground storage of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel combustion has been over-hyped for decades and never convincingly demonstrated." I'm not 100% sure why that is, but I think it is probably to do with the lack of economic incentive combined with relatively little industry experience. If every Operator knew without a shadow of a doubt their Scope 3 emissions would get taxed at $100US per tonne CO2 then a whole industry would spring up and CO2 capture would become commonplace. But you don't get there with a smattering of plants across the world, with various incentives.

A few years ago I tried to dive into the question of whether DOE-financed projects like FutureGen and other fossil-carbon-capture-and-sequestration efforts had any solid scientific basis, and I always ran up a against a brick wall of proprietary data in these 'public-private partnerships', when it came to figuring out the ratio of carbon going into the plant in the form of gas/oil/coal, and carbon coming out of the plant in the form of CO2, and the fraction of that CO2 that was actually being stored vs. the fraction being emitted to the atmosphere.

My conclusion such as it was (not having full data access) was that all these plants only captured a relatively small fraction of their CO2 emissions, and more often than not, were simply using that CO2 in enhanced oilfield recovery operations - and here again, it seemed that a good fraction of the injected CO2 was coming back out of the ground with the oil it was intended to extract, then being boiled off [to the atmosphere] in the distillation process.

All in all I think it's probable that a complete external investigation of this ~20 year saga of public-private 'carbon capture and sequestration' programs at the US DOE would not look good at all, and might reveal a fair amount of blatant fraud.

[one can sort of grasp the problem by imagining if a gasoline-powered vehicle driving down the road would ever be capable of capturing its CO2 emissions in some onboard storage tank, which could then be offloaded at a gas station when refueling for 'permanent underground storage'.]

The greenhouse gas emissions of blue hydrogen production exceed those of simply burning natural gas.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ese3.956

On your project, what ratio of generated energy was spent on CO2 capture and storage?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com