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.
