- There's something else though - the CAPTURE part of the equation.. Archived Message
Posted by David Macilwain
on October 6, 2019, 2:39 am, in reply to "Old, wrong argument. And it says nothing about the sheep. [Sheep? Yes really!] -"
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Because the schemes for capturing CO2 from smokestacks are quite unfeasible, at least if you want to capture more than 10% and separate it from the nitrogen before storage. How trees excel is not in the storage, which is only temporary, but in the capture. It would be impossible to design a more efficient device for scavenging CO2 from the atmosphere than a tree, which uses solar energy to effectively suck CO2 into its leaves, and then more solar energy to turn it into carbohydrate. Plants with the C4 pathway like maize and sugar beet are even better scavengers, but only at ground level. CCS is of course one of the most egregious deceptions of the coal industry, as they know quite well that the energy required to do it would mean burning as much more coal as the CO2 captured represents, so gaining nothing. The only successful projects to do this are where CO2 contained in Natural Gas that has to be removed when the gas is liquified is pumped into an exhausted reservoir. In WA there is a huge gas field which was exploited on the condition that this CO2 was "sequestered" in a nearby exhausted field. The latest news on that was that the LNG part was going full steam ahead while the CO2 was simply released to the atmosphere because the pipeline and pumping and storage part wasn't finished....and who cares! |