Capturing Carbon Dioxide?

A second article in the May 30th issue of C&E News is by Rajendrani Mukhopadhyay and is entitled, "Capturing Carbon Dioxide".


He starts the article by saying "Researchers and lawmakers alike are looking always to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, because of its contribution to global climate change". Notice that he apparently embraces the hypothesis that CO2 in the atmosphere has such an effect on climate change, as to warrant control of CO2 emissions. I normally don't continue with such articles that start out with a writer's bias, which is either false or questionable.

I make an exception in this case to discuss two Congressional bills, which the Senate Energy & Natural Resource Committee is considering. Both bills involve carbon capture and sequestration, also known as CCS.

S.699 is an amendment to the Energy Policy of 2005 and would allow the Department Of Energy to provide technical and financial help to commercial scale projects on integrated CSS systems. In other words, citizen money would likely be spent to various emission sources, probably including coal-burning electrical utilities, to subsidize the capture of CO2. In other words, another indirect tax to the American public.

The second bill, S.757 drew less attention, but it seems to me equally dangerous. It provides incentives (public money) to encourage development and input implementation of technology to capture CO2 from dilute sources, such as air. A ridiculous notion, especially since there is no reason to reduce the concentration of CO2 in air, nor would it be justifiable to harvest the CO2 for use as a raw material.

Unfortunately, the Senators concentrated on the wrong aspects of the S.699. Instead of considering whether there was any justification for carbon dioxide capture and sequestration, they chose to discuss costs of storage, etc. Oil and gas industry executives were complaining of having difficulty in obtaining CO2 to use for enhanced oil recovery. This may have been instrumental in sidetracking the Senators, but the obvious answer to the oil and gas executives is that they should make their own arrangements with CO2 emitters. It's not government's responsibility to arrange marketing situations. One government executive explained that CCS is "prohibitively expensive". Is that a reason why it should be done public expense rather than by industry? The discussion broadened to consider various ways to capture and use the resulting captured CO2, with no consideration of the main point, which is, "Why do it?"

The only person who seemed to make a little sense in the discussion was a Senator Manchin. He asked whether carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) would affect the nation's competitiveness by increasing the price of energy. If it would, he this could give countries like India and China a competitive advantage with cheaper energy. He then asked, "why would we lose more jobs because of our high cost of manufacturing when we don't have the proven technology and why should we put money into research to develop the technology that will make the US less competitive? No one had a response