12 Years Of "Carbon Capture", $1.1 Billion Spent, 8/11 Planned Projects Never Built, It Doesn't Work

[hatrack]

EDIT

Late last year, the Government Accountability Office published a report showing the $1.1 billion spent on CCS by the Department of Energy since 2009 was largely wasted. That money was for 11 projects, of which only three were built (the other eight were cancelled). And because managers at the DOE waived some cost controls, the government spent an additional and unnecessary $300 million on four of the unbuilt CCS projects. The single CCS project at a coal-fired plant that actually got built was the US’s only real CCS facility — and it shut down in May of 2020.

“Federal investments for CCS are greenwashing – they are simply fossil fuel subsidies by another name,” Grassroots Global Justice Alliance policy director Adrien Salazar told The Verge. Nevertheless, CCS still enjoys ample support from conservatives who want to pretend like they care about climate change, and Democratic coal barons like Joe Manchin (D-ALEC). In response to the GAO report detailing how the conservative-loved program is rife with government waste, the Carbon Capture Coalition tried to do some damage control, and apparently sent out a press release the conservative Washington Examiner ran with, about how they’re trying to “correct the record” and insist the technology is still worthwhile.

Over at the Daily Caller, though, Energy and Environment reporter Thomas Catenacci apparently hasn’t gotten the full memo on CCS being the climate policy conservatives pretend to support, and instead just covered last month’s GAO report just this week, with a frame of government waste for trying to reduce carbon emissions! Now to be fair, the government should be investing tons of money in viable climate solutions as well as risky ones the private sector won’t yet risk investment in (Hi, Solyndra, we haven’t forgotten you!) because government support for emerging technologies can yield massive benefits. But when things like CCS fail, as they have over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, that should be a sign to stop burning coal mine dump trucks full of money chasing them.

Those billions of dollars, instead of getting wasted on unbuilt CCS plants meant to keep coal hobbling along, could have paid for something like 50,000 home solar systems, which tend to be much more costly than utility-scale renewables. And on that, for example, Biden’s DOE in 2021 announced just $128 million in funding to cut the cost of solar by 60%. Think of what ten times that much money could accomplish! For another comparison, in 2020, a billion dollar deal got BP a 50% stake in two offshore wind projects big enough to power two million homes — a much better deal than getting a bunch of failed projects that (had they not failed) would have just continued to allow coal plants to pollute anyway.

EDIT

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/1/18/2075293/-Conservative-Media-Accidentally-Admits-Conservative-Climate-Solution-Is-Costly-Failure

[PoliticAverse]

1. Carbon capture is like those people that build boats to go out in the ocean and collect garbage....

There are people dumping garbage in the ocean from barges regularly - if you want to clean up the oceans you need to stop that.

[hunter]

2. The design goal wasn't to reduce carbon dioxide emissions...

... these plants were props in propaganda campaigns by the fossil fuel companies.

Many of them were nonviable from the first back-of-the-envelope calculations.

[hatrack]

4. You're correct - they're all designed for oil anyway . . ..

Exxon et. al. still think we're that fucking stupid, so they're "rebranding" EOR.

[NNadir]

3. Over at Daily Kos, they won't compare this to the amount we spent on so called "renewable energy."

Here's my standard remark, with a reference, relating to so called "renewable energy" expenditures:

Recently I updated the expenditure on so called "renewable energy" as we happily run along trashing huge stretches of wilderness, rendering them into industrial parks to serve the clearly failed rhetoric of anti-nukes.

Source: UNEP/Bloomberg: Global Trends in Renewable Energy.

I manually entered the figures in the bar graph in figure 8 to see how much money we've thrown at this destructive affectation since 2004 (up to 2019): It works out to 3.2633 trillion dollars, more than President Biden has wisely recommended for the improvement of all infrastructure in the entire United States.

I invite us to ask ourselves, this question, "Has climate change driven by the dangerous fossil fuel waste accelerated or decelerated since 2004 relative to data from before 2004?" I very much doubt that an honest answer relying on data will be forthcoming.

I have never supported waste dumps of any kind, including the absurd idea that we could contain 35 billion tons a year of dangerous fossil fuel waste, carbon dioxide, indefinitely.

Of course, over at Daily Kos when I was there, and among many people here, particularly in my earlier tenure, the driving goal for so called "renewable energy" was never to displace fossil fuels, but to displace nuclear energy. The theory was that nuclear energy was "too dangerous," and the corollary - subject to transparent denial - is that climate change is not "too dangerous."

This is the official policy - cheered loudly by many here and at Daily Kos - of Germany, in defiance of the policy of the majority of other major and minor EU members.

As of this morning, 8:50 EST (US) 01/22/22, the carbon intensity of German electricity is 419 g CO2/kwh, whereas the carbon intensity of the neighboring nation, France, which didn't buy into the "nuclear energy is too dangerous" expressions of contempt for reality, is 105 g CO2/kwh. This comes about 20 years after Germany announced it would rely on so called "renewable energy."

https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE

They aren't. They're relying on coal, which as of this moment is producing 21.7 GW of German electricity, compared to 10.8 GW of wind energy, and 4.53 GW of solar energy. The latter, of course, will disappear at sunset.

Climate change is not an issue that was unknown 20 years ago, when the Germans announced they were going "green" via so called "renewable energy." Which nation has a serious plan to deal with climate change, Germany or France?

Numbers don't lie, and the official policy at Daily Kos, which is solidly anti-nuclear, is that they do.

This annoyance over the (easily predictable) failure of carbon sequestration at officially anti-nuke Daily Kos, amounts to the intellectual coal soot at Daily Kos calling petroleum "black."