Carbon Capture & Sequestration: A Core Competence for Sustainability

With Copenhagen around the corner, let’s begin with a statement for the deniers of global-warming: despite a few overzealous scientists who have fudged their data, the science does overwhelmingly point to the burning of carbon-containing fuels as being partially responsible for increasing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 - and causing global warming. 

Instead of getting caught in this silly, finger-pointing, pointless debate, let’s look for real solutions. 

Here are the sources of greenhouse gases by industry sector (via BBC):



And let’s look at the breakdown of greenhouse gases:




We know that we have to deal with the carbon dioxide problem, and to do so, let’s look at carbon capture & sequestration.

Wikipedia descibes carbon sequestration as a “geoengineering technique for the long-term storage of carbon dioxide or other forms of carbon, for the mitigation of global warming. Carbon dioxide is usually captured from the atmosphere through biological, chemical or physical processes.”
 
Across the globe, we are seeing the rise of “carbon storage” projects, often at unsustainable costs, and sometimes with an accompanying set of issues. 



In my view, for any process which accomplishes carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), to remain sustaining, it would also need to be financially rewarding. This reward might flow either through the markets or directly by politically-powered subsidies. And second, rural areas and agriculture use more fossil fuels and generate more CO2, both directly and indirectly, than do urban areas and services, CCS processes would, therefore, ideally be located in such rural areas.

But most importantly, we must treat carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) as a business process, as a core competence for sustainable industry.

Capturing carbon from CO2 and storing it for a century or longer (CCS) needs to be treated as a separate business process practiced all over the world. Developed areas will need to develop improvements on the schemes being proposed today, such as the CO2 absorption and deep earth injection that is being put forward as “clean coal.” The components of this technology are relatively mature, yet the process is still capital- and energy-intensive, which suggests that only massive scale can drive down the cost.  With a mature technology, we cannot expect that this economics will change with foreseeable experience gains. Therefore, the CCS business will not be profitable at carbon taxes of $20 to $50 per ton, the range usually projected. So far, all such projects are dependent on heavy government subsidies and we do not expect this to change in the near future. We conclude that a new approach, descending a new experience curve, is the only way that the CCS business will ever be viable. Therefore, a lot more work needs to be done in this area to address the questions being raised.

A possible and sustainable solution is Bio-CCS. Interestingly, there are islands of scientific enquiry suggesting that Mother Nature has already provided us with the elements for this new CCS approach.

For instance, there is a global cottage industry to enable production of “bio-char” (smallish particles of carbon produced from plant material by pyrolysis a process involving burning in an oxygen deficient environment). Refer to Dr. Johannes Lehmann’s work at Cornell University, Ithaca, for example:



This bio-char industry has studied the soil productivity effect of dispersed bio-char, emphasizing that since microbes do not decompose bio-char that the projected half life of this carbon in soil is probably in the centuries. Apparently, water and nutrients are absorbed into the carbon, dispersed in the soil, serving a similar function to plant matter (hummus). This makes bio-char a perfect form of fertilizer since nutrients are released over an extended period of time.

Fuel gas or liquid can be a co-product, useful for generating electricity or as a chemical feedstock. This bio-char is capable of upgrading secondary or distressed land to higher productivity, therefore, adding real value to the land. Thus, growing plant material by absorbing CO2 combines with pyrolysis to bio-char, creating a BioCCS process with side benefits.

In our next post, we examine this BioCCS process in detail, and address both environmental and business issues simultaneously. 

We must explore these alternatives with open minds. That much we owe to our children and grandchildren - whose future we have changed by our inconsiderate use of the Earth. 

And being distracted by ethical lapses in studies - that’s treating the symptoms while ignoring the disease!