In the last few weeks a number of serious errors have come to light in the Climate Change Committee’s (CCC) plan for Net Zero. The CCC plan was published mid-2019 in a document titled ‘Net Zero Technical Report’.
In summary, the CCCs plan for Net Zero is to shift transport and heating from using petrol, diesel and gas to using electricity and then to decarbonise the electricity grid.
To decarbonise the grid, it is assumed that electricity will be generated using nuclear and renewables. During periods when nuclear, wind and solar cannot meet demand, Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) will be deployed to remove CO2 emissions as the electricity must be generated using gas.
Carbon Capture and Storage is a new and untested technology that has never been deployed at scale anywhere on earth. However, it is clear from the CCC’s report that CCS plays a major roll in achieving Net Zero. As I reported in a previous article, regardless of this being an untested technology, the U.K. only plans to build a quarter of the required capacity to hit Net Zero by 2050 (the plan requires the U.K. to capture and store 176Mt of CO2 annually).
Nevertheless, our Government envisages significant CCS capacity at 50Mt annually. Carbon Capture and Storage involves filtering CO2 from the exhaust produced from gas turbines used to generate electricity, then piping the captured CO2 to plants that compress the gas into a liquid before it is then injected into underground storage areas around the U.K.
Compressed CO2 is currently being commercialised as a way to store energy for use in periods when nuclear and renewables are unavailable. The company Energy Dome has developed a working 4MWh system in Sardinia, Italy. The company says its technology has an energy storage density 10-20 times higher than other compressed air energy storage (CAES) solutions and two-thirds that of liquid air energy storage (LAES).
The CCC’s plan requires vast quantities of CO2 to be compressed and stored under the U.K. Given this potential energy could be released at any time should something go wrong, it seems sensible to consider the safety implications of Carbon Capture and Storage.
Energy Dome has recently raised $11m and is building a larger 100MWh system. Its 100MWh store requires about 2,000 tonnes of CO2. This means the company is expecting to store 0.05MWh of energy per tonne of compressed CO2. Using this energy density, the CCC’s plan to store 176Mt per year will mean 8.8TWh of potential energy is being trapped beneath the U.K. annually. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima exploded with an energy of about 15 kilotons of TNT or 0.0174TWh. Therefore the energy we will be storing under our feet is equivalent to 505 Hiroshima bombs every year or the energy released by 16 magnitude seven earthquakes per year.
Fracking is currently banned in the U.K. due to the risk of causing earth tremors. The planned Carbon Capture and Storage facilities are of an altogether different magnitude. Fracking can be stopped in an instant if a problem is detected. Obviously, if there is an issue with 505 Hiroshima bombs worth of energy under our feet, we cannot just release this vast amount of trapped energy.
No one knows what the effects may be of creating a whole series of high pressure areas in the earth beneath our feet, it has never been done at this scale.
There are other issues. CO2 is a colourless and odourless gas that is about 1.5 times heavier than air.
In addition to the asphyxiation hazard of CO2 displacing oxygen in the air, the inhalation of elevated concentrations of CO2 can increase the acidity of the blood, triggering adverse effects on the respiratory, cardiovascular and central nervous systems. A CO2 concentration of around 5% by volume in air may cause headaches, dizziness, increased blood pressure and difficulty breathing within a few minutes. If concentrations above 17% by volume in air are inhaled, this could cause loss of purposeful activity, unconsciousness, convulsions, coma and death within one minute.
The Lake Nyos disaster saw massive release of carbon dioxide from Lake Nyos in Cameroon on August 21st 1986.
The 1.6 million tonne cloud of magmatic gas was deadly, and a count of the fatalities indicated that 1,746 people, most from villages by the lake, had been asphyxiated by it, along with some 3,000 cattle and innumerable birds, insects and other animals. The bodies of the dead showed no signs of trauma or struggle; these people had simply died where they were.
The CCS plan means vast quantities of CO2 are going to be piped around the U.K. and ultimately injected into the ground. By 2050 we will be dealing with over 110 times the amount of CO2 released in the volcanic event that took place at Lake Nyos, every single year.
Of course to actually achieve Net Zero the CCC state we will need to store 176Mt of CO2 by 2050. That’s 3.5 times more than we have just been discussing.
As the years go by, the risks increase. The Carbon Capture and Storage plan means that every five years we will be pumping just shy of one billion tonnes of CO2 into the earth beneath our feet.
Does that sound like a smart move to you? What will your children and grandchildren think? They’re going to be stuck with this issue for ever.
As any commercial glass house grower will tell you, the plants on earth are currently pretty much starving. During daylight hours glass houses maintain CO2 levels that are double to three times more than our current historically low levels of atmospheric CO2. Plants have evolved for hundreds of millions of years; the fact they are adapted to thrive in an atmosphere with three times our current CO2 levels is a pretty good indicator that CO2 ain’t the problem.
CO2 is fundamental to all life on earth, but as we have seen with the Lake Nyos disaster, it is also capable of taking life if there is enough of it available in one place. Perhaps storing billions of tonnes of the stuff under our feet is just plain stupid, regardless of the reason?
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