Burying Life

by Viv Forbes

 

Of all the anti-carbon policies supposedly improving our climate, carbon capture and burial is probably the worst. 
 

No life can exist on earth without carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Unfortunately, nature has been capturing and burying this valuable plant food for millions of years. 

 

Image sourced [here]
 

 

 

 

Carbon dioxide is very soluble in water, especially cold water. So it is continually being captured from the atmosphere by rain, rivers and the oceans as well as in growing vegetation. Much of this captured carbon gets buried at sea as extensive deposits of hydrocarbons such as coal, shales, oil, and natural gas, as thick beds of carbonates such as chalk, limestone and dolomite, and in sea shells, bones and coral reefs.
 

This natural carbon capture and burial caused atmospheric carbon dioxide to reach a dangerous low of about 275 ppm by the end of the Little Ice Age about 200 years ago. At this level, plants suffer carbon starvation and growth slows. Like all cold eras, these times were grim.
 

Luckily the climate cycles changed, and earth started warming – some ice melted, oceans warmed and carbon dioxide was expelled from the warming oceans to provide more food for plants. Green vegetation started to invade the deserts and crop yields improved. 
 

Man’s industrial activities aided this natural green revolution over the last century by returning some naturally-buried carbon from coal and limestone to the biosphere. The pace of earth-greening has increased - even the giant redwoods are growing faster in this more-fertile atmosphere.  
 

This serendipitous greening of our world is now threatened by misguided efforts to rob the atmosphere of man-made carbon dioxide using a bizarre process called carbon capture and burial – truly a suicidal mission for life on earth. 

All life thrives when there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. 

 

Do the carbon haters also hate life?

Cartoonist Peter Ommundsen sourced [here]

Need for carbon caution confirmed.

by Mick Keogh

This article was first published at Ag Forum and cross posted under Australian Farm Institute copyright conditions 

 

 Henbury Station, site of RM Williams Agricultural Holdings controversial carbon project

Image sourced from Beef Central

Developments over the past week have confirmed the need for farmers to approach the carbon market with caution, and to ensure they have a full legal understanding of the implications of any contracts they enter into. This is particularly the case at the present time, when there is active discussion occurring on both sides of politics about potential future changes to carbon policy post-election.

Over the past few years, there has been quite a lot of commentary about the potential implications of carbon markets for Australian farmers. Initial Treasury modelling downplayed potential negative cost impacts for agriculture, although modelling by both ABARES and the Australian Farm Institute highlighted that, particularly in the short-term, negative impacts were likely to be quite significant for some sub-sectors of agriculture, especially given the absence of similar policies for competitor agricultural exporting nations.

The 'flip side' to the additional costs associated with carbon policy is the Carbon Farming Initiative, a legislative framework which provides the opportunity for farmers to adopt approved project methodologies and 'sell' the resulting carbon credits to major emitters. Some suggested this was going to provide a major opportunity for landholders, but the two main areas of risk - trading rules and carbon price - need to be carefully considered in any project.

Announcements over the past week that R M Williams Agricultural Holdings (RMWAH) - owners of the much-discussed Henbury Station carbon farming project - have gone into administration should serve as a caution to any landholders contemplating undertaking a carbon project, although reports have not yet clarified whether it was the carbon part of the operation that has caused the problems.

This blog has commented extensively on the Henbury project (see here, here, here and here), as the involvement of Australian Government funding (a reported $9 million), the inclusion of Henbury in the national conservation estate, and the absence of any obvious potential for the generation of carbon offsets that could be sold in the official carbon market made it very difficult to understand exactly how the project could generate revenue. There has been extensive reporting about the difficulties the business has encountered (see here, here and here), and no doubt the real reasons for the problems will emerge over time.

The fact that the Henbury project seems to have encountered difficulties should serve as a caution to landholders contemplating getting involved in a carbon project.

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Carbon Fleecing

The Inaugural Golden Fleece Award – for Flagrant Fleecing of Community Resources by Viv Forbes

 

 

 The Carbon Sense Coalition has awarded its Inaugural Golden Fleece Award to Kevin Rudd and coal industry leaders for “flagrant fleecing of community savings in futile ‘research’ on Carbon Capture & Sequestration – a costly and complex process designed to capture and bury carbon dioxide gas produced by burning carbon fuels such as coal, oil and gas”. 

It is obviously possible, in an engineering sense, to collect, separate, compress, pump and pipe gases, so new “research” is largely a waste of money. Engineers know how to do these things, and their likely costs. But only foolish green zealots would think of spending billions to bury a harmless, invisible, life-supporting gas in hopes of cooling the climate some time in the century ahead.

 

 

 

About 2.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide are produced for every tonne of coal burnt in a power station. To capture, compress and bury it could take at least 30% of the electricity produced, greatly increasing the cost of the limited amount of electricity left for sale - more coal used, increased electricity costs, for ZERO measurable benefits 

We have come to expect stupidity from politicians, but coal industry leaders who agreed to waste money on this should be sued by shareholders for negligence. Maybe they were just drooling at all the extra coal they would sell in order to produce the same electricity? 

Kevin Rudd wins this award for “a Flagrant Fleece of $400 million taken from tax payers to fund the fatuous Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute.” There is little to show for the millions already spent except a lot of receipts for high class salaries, consultants, travel, entertainment and “operational expenses”. 

Pumping gases underground is sensible if it brings real benefits such as using waste gases to drive oil recovery from declining oil fields.  

Normally, however, CCS will just produce more expensive electricity.  

This result is not needed as politicians have already invented dozens of ways of doing just that.