Dear Friend,One might question the Sierra Club's Catch-22 logic in invoking the untested nature of a technology as a reason to oppose its testing.
New Jersey's coastal waters are in serious danger from a proposed coal project. Right now a Massachusetts company wants to build a coal energy and fertilizer plant here in NJ and bury carbon dioxide pollution under the sea floor. Sounds pretty crazy to me, how about you?
The coal plant, called PurGen, is proposed for Linden, NJ, where it would use an experimental technology to compress carbon dioxide waste. The waste would be pumped through a 138-mile pipeline and forced down into the seabed off the coast of Atlantic City…forever.
This unproven technology called carbon capture and sequestration has not been tested for "forever" or even long-term. This experiment would take place in the most densely populated region of the country. An accident could have disastrous effects on marine life, or worse. . .
However, a more fundamental problem with the Sierra Club's stance can be found in the IEA's 2010 World Energy Outlook, which argues that coal power is going to expand in coming decades -- regardless of what happens in the US or even new energy and climate policies. The IEA further argues that CCS will have to be deployed to 75% of coal plants by 2035 if the world is going to be on target to reaching a 450 ppm stabilization target.
So if the Sierra Club is successful in slowing down CCS prototypes and experimentation, what will it get? Plenty of coal plants with no CCS! Some victory.
If the Sierra Club really wants to move beyond coal, than rather than campaigning to halt innovation in technologies that it objects to, it should be actively trying to accelerate innovation in technologies that it approves of, with the goal of developing energy supply options that can displace coal over the longer term. You can't beat something with nothing. BANANA logic leaves you with exactly what you'd guess it would.
8 comments:
Here in Kansas, the Sierra Club wants wind power but opposes the transmission lines needed to get it to market!
Opposing carbon sequestration doesn't make sense if your goal is to reduce atmospheric CO2. If you understand the underlying goal to be ending the use of fossil fuel, and the threat from CO2 as a means to that end, then the opposition makes perfect sense. If CCS works, then fossil fuel use can continue. Therefore it must not work. Never mind that even if containment fails completely you are no worse off than if you had simply released all the CO2 to the atmosphere in the first place.
In any case, industrial-scale CCS isn't all that "unproven". The LNG industry has been using it at large scales since the mid 1990's.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleipner_gas_field
No surprise. The 'Sierra Club' are another extreme 'green' group. The usual green modus operandi: target, demonize, scaremonger and exaggerate.
A potential accident with the 'highly toxic' gas CO2 and in close proximity to the deadly chemical H2O. We can all sleep safe in our beds thanks to the Green Banana Club :-)
The Siera Club and alike do not seem to understand that the primary drivers for increasing energy consumptions are not the right wing red necks in the Tea Party movement, but 1.5 billion people without electricity. Renewables and increased energy efficiency might work 2 billion people in the developed world, but will deny 4-5 billion people from civilized life. The green movement is becoming increasingly anti-human.
"The IEA further argues that CCS will have to be deployed to 75% of coal plants by 2035 if the world is going to be on target to reaching a 450 ppm stabilization target."
Page 5 - Key graphs
http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/docs/weo2010/key_graphs.pdf
Less then 25% of Global Coal Fired Electricity Generating Capacity is located in the OECD in 2035.
Not to despair, it would appear that China just accelerated it's nuclear power plant program substantially. From a projected 70 GW in 2020 to 112 GW in 2020.
http://business.financialpost.com/2010/11/09/cameco-upgraded-on-chinese-nuclear-plans/
IEA projection was a global increase in nuclear power of 360 GW by 2035. I doubt it took into account China's plans to increase nuclear power by 100 GW by 2020 in those projections.
Is it realistic to believe that if the Chinese go to all the trouble of building the industrial capacity to build 1 nuclear power plant per month for 10 years that they will stop on Jan 1st, 2021 or is it more realistic to believe they will continue the build rate indefinitely?
Liquid CO2 sequestration in deep ocean simply accelerates the rate at which CO2 comes to equilibrium with ocean water, a natural process. Why does the Sierra Club hate Nature?
:-)
"carbon dioxide pollution... Sounds pretty crazy to me, how about you?"
Undeniably crazy.
I didn't hear the term BANANA until March, 2010, but I googled and tracked the term back to 1991.
http://www.wordspy.com/words/banana.asp
It came up on EnergyFromThorium when someone described the opponents of nuclear power as NIMBYs and I said that most opposition is fly-ins and called them NIABYs (Not in Anybody's Back Yard) and somebody mentioned BANANA. I also used the phase NIMOs (Not In My Ocean)to describe the opposition to offshore wind turbines in Martha's Vineyard.
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