Carbon capture pipeline nixed after widespread opposition
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Should nothing be done about climate change because we wish it wasn't happening?
Lean into EVs and renewables (including PV agrivoltaics when applicable). Lets leave this dumpster fire of ag energy policy handout to farmers behind.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37956610 (citations)
https://www.thoughtco.com/understanding-the-ethanol-subsidy-... ("Understanding the Ethanol Subsidy")
https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/laws/ETH?state=US ("Federal Ethanol Laws and Incentives")
https://www.taxpayer.net/energy-natural-resources/understand... ("Understanding U.S. Corn Ethanol and Other Corn-Based Biofuels Subsidies: Taxpayers have subsidized the mature corn ethanol industry for more than 40 years")
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218... ("Light-duty vehicle fleet electrification in the United States and its effects on global agricultural markets")
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/us-corn-based-e... ("U.S. corn-based ethanol worse for the climate than gasoline, study finds")
They had 95 RON / 91 AKI and 98 RON / 93 AKI for the longest time. They only started adding ethanol in the last 5 years.
[1] https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/ci/products/ga...
> A company backed by BlackRock has abandoned plans to build a 1,300-mile pipeline across the US Midwest to collect and store carbon emissions from the corn ethanol industry following opposition from landowners and some environmental campaigners.
A 1300 miles pipeline is not exactly a cheap/easy project. From what I know, carbon capture over a field is not exactly a solved problem.
So what does BlackRock know that allows them to think it's a worthwhile investment ?
Environmentalists don't like CCUS, but it is one of the thousand tools we are going to have to use if we are serious about decarbonizing heavy industry.
Doesn't appear to be capture-capture over a field. Instead:
> Navigator’s project would have laid pipelines across five US states—South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois—to collect CO₂ from ethanol and fertilizer plants and pipe the gas to an underground storage site in Illinois.
Sounds like they were planning on point-source capture, which is generally a good bit more efficient than open-air capture.
If it were carbon-capture over a field, then it'd probably be under the category of "open-air capture" -- which is technically easy to do (as capture in general is; we've had CO2-capture technology since the 1930's), just more costly (since it's less thermodynamically efficient to capture from a low-concentration source like the atmosphere, relative to capture from a high-concentration source like the flue-gas from a plant).
Capturing CO2 from point-sources (like the flue-gas from plants) tends to be relatively efficient, which seems to work out better both economically and environmentally.
They were going to bring in heavy diesel equipment and tear up ecosystems because they have some model that says it will be a net negative? No thanks.
["Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change"](https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-working-g... ) appears to be the most recent specifically on mitigating climate-change.
From [this PDF's page-117](https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6... ):
> Net zero CO2 industrial-sector emissions are possible but challenging (high confidence). Energy efficiency will continue to be important. Reduced materials demand, material efficiency, and circular economy solutions can reduce the need for primary production. Primary production options include switching to new processes that use low-to-zero GHG energy carriers and feedstocks (e.g., electricity, hydrogen, biofuels, and carbon dioxide capture and utilisation (CCU) to provide carbon feedstocks). Carbon capture and storage (CCS) will be required to mitigate remaining CO2 emissions {11.3}. These options require substantial scaling up of electricity, hydrogen, recycling, CO2, and other infrastructure, as well as phase-out or conversion of existing industrial plants. While improvements in the GHG intensities of major basic materials have nearly stagnated over the last 30 years, analysis of historical technology shifts and newly available technologies indicate these intensities can be significantly reduced by mid-century. {11.2, 11.3, 11.4}
From the relevant section, 11.3.5:
> Biofuel use may also be critical for producing negative emissions when combined with carbon capture and storage (i.e., bioenergy with carbon capture and storage – BECCS). Most production routes for biofuels, biochemicals and biogas generate large side streams of concentrated CO2 which is easily captured, and which could become a source of negative emissions (Sanchez et al. 2018) (Section 11.3.6).
When I hear "carbon capture" I think "direct air capture (DAC)" since that's kind of a novel concept, while point-source carbon capture seems to be more of an extension of circular-economy-style reasoning. I am skeptical of the former (i.e. massive fans with catalysts and filters) being useful to any significant degree because of the energy requirements. I think DAC advocates hide under the catch-all phrase "carbon capture" to avoid scrutiny.
DAC seems worthless compared to just growing more and more effective plants to do a similar job. But point-source capture of concentrated CO2 seems like an obvious step in the right direction. Even better if it can help to replace traditional fossil fuels in legacy ICE vehicles.
So in the context of TFA it seems that the pipeline was at least not a bad idea, though we haven't seen an audit on when all that construction and operation would be carbon-neutral after everything's said and done. That timeline could be longer than the service life of the pipeline which would make it worse than pointless.
(subsidized) fossil fuels --> chemical fertilizers --> (subsidized) monocropped corn --> (subsidized) ethanol production --> (subsidized) carbon capture, of only a portion of emissions at the ethanol and fertilizer production stages
It is greenwashing in the sense that ethanol biofuel is an inefficient and dirty process that was never a viable alternative at any reasonable scale, and this program is pumping tax dollars earmarked for climate crisis mitigation into industries that have never been motivated to do anything meaningful for climate or ecology disasters.
https://logtrees.com/blog/the-simple-math-behind-planting-tr...
Merely replanting trees goes part of the way but it can’t address the whole issue.
The calculations you showed seem to be about blunting annual emissions. But we still have all the excess we previously emitted which has warmed the atmosphere. We need to deal with that eventually.
What number of which trees is the bough to capture excess co2 from ground and surface sources?
Where could we put all this trees?
https://www.american.edu/sis/centers/carbon-removal/fact-she...
Anyone who says that they have one thing that will solve climate change is either uninformed or lying.
There are no practical limits for how much CO2 you can store underground!
CO2 stored underground in the form of plants dying and rotting for the benefit and use of other plants is also "carbon capture".
With the full potential unlocked, we'd be able to plant so many trees that they'd capture 2x or more of the total CO2 emissions (total emissions, not just the airborne excess) which means we'd start capturing the past excess emissions as well.
Since land is finite and the number of new years is not, that can only be true for a finite number of years.
Also, we need to capture more CO2 than is emitted to get down to natural levels.
Energy cost is the practical limit.
Second, it is rather hard to find a solid source for that CO2 number. https://onetreeplanted.org/blogs/stories/how-much-co2-does-t... supported a figure that is half that one.
Third, CO2 in trees does not necessarily REMAIN in trees. Need I remind you of last summer's wildfire problems? To fix the wildfire problem, we need to remove large amounts of dangerous overgrowth that a century of fire prevention has encouraged.
Fourth, the current trend is towards losing forests, not gaining them. It is easy to point to land and say, "Add forest there." But people living there who want to plant soybeans and raise cattle have different ideas. That's why rainforest is disappearing. What do you wish done with those inconvenient people?
Yeah, planting trees sounds great. But it is not likely to be a workable solution in the real world. Though it has promise as one of many pieces of a workable solution.
2. I got my number for CO2 capture per tree from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Arbor Day Foundation, and the European Environment Agency.
3. I don't think the wildfires materially impact the calculus.
4. There is a lot of land available for reforesting. This is not the same as saying that we should take back land that is used for farming. I would say that agriculture is going to innovate too, with vertical farms and more efficient usage of land where land is still necessary. We can start with land that is already available for reforesting rather than starting with squabbling over land that is now already used as farmland. Making farmland more efficient and innovating with vertical farms will let markets take care of inefficient and unnecessary land usage.
5. Planting trees for CO2 capture is a temporary solution. Eventually machines will sequester CO2 far more efficiently. Planting trees in general is nice for many other benefits too, not just the carbon capture. But yes, planting more trees is not the only thing we need to do.
Your CO2 capture figure is widely quoted, including in those places. But can you find a scientific paper that it goes back to? I'm a little wary of figures that I can't find a real reference for.
Not sure if this particular project was viable, but at long as we continue to ignore investing in carbon capture, the planet will continue to heat up uncontrollably.
if it ever ruptured that would be funny in a macabre way.
natgas only burns you know.. this thing will spread and choke you and you won't even notice it.
I'm not sure I'd call it "funny". Similar accidents have already occurred, and have left some of the victims with permanent neurological injuries.
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/21/1172679786/carbon-capture-car...
Sure you might notice it if you know how that feels. But by then it will be too late.
They turned the landowners against them with the survey methods they used. They ripped up crops and had law enforcement come in to prevent landowners from interfering.
Some of those owners are right wing nut jobs so the situation escalated quickly.
In the end public pressure killed these deals.
The money comes from federal tax credits, it’s not profitable to pump carbon that far on its own.
It would be better overall if we just shut down ethanol but that’s how you buy the votes of every Midwest congress person.
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/us-carbon-pipel...
It was for a single industry, that ideally goes away anyway. My understanding is that ethanol really doesn't save that much in the end and that land might have better uses than growing corn for internal combustion engines