The CO2 Removal Scam

Here is a recent hopeful report about how CO2 removal is going to save the planet:

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/4/12/can-carbon-dioxideremovalsavetheplanet.html

Before you let that "Obama ad-Dajjal thrill going up your leg" get the better of you, here's a few things you should consider:

(1) Underground sequestration of CO2 on the scale needed to support fossil fuel power plants is going to be damn near impossible. A while back I attended an EPA presentation on the subject. "Successful" sequestration is defined as keeping the CO2 underground for 40 years. As you may know, the WIPP was supposed to keep radioactive solids underground for thousands of years, but they have already leaked out. Injecting CO2 gas into previously stable underground formations causes them to crack, causes the overlying strata to crack, and ultimately allows the gas to leak out. This is NOT a good solution.

(2) Turning the CO2 into salable products may work for a while, but the market will soon be glutted with those products and no one will buy them. Two good examples of this phenomenon are what happened to the glycerin byproduct from biodiesel production and to the sulfur byproduct from the refining of petroleum, especially from tar sands. At first there was a market for the glycerin and sulfur, but the global market for these materials can no longer absorb the huge amount of them which is being produced. Just like the byproduct sulfur stored in the giant stacks pictured below, the salable byproducts from CO2 capture also will be eventually be made in such huge quantities that no one will want them:

(3) One of the few companies currently building a CO2 capture facility is Skyonics. I attended their initial meeting with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality when they applied for a permit-by-rule air pollution authorization for their first pilot plant. It will have been over eight years from that meeting until the plant at Capitol Cement goes into production:

http://skyonic.com/skymine/

Cement plants produce so much CO2 that under current and anticipated pollution rules they must capture it or pay huge emissions fees which would make them unprofitable, so building the Skyonics facility at Capitol Cement seems to make economic sense. But, keep in mind that its construction is being funded by a grant, and if the project depends on the sale of its byproducts to be profitable AND if the market for those byproducts experiences a glut, then we're looking at another Solyndra.

These projects MUST be profitable in their own right and not dependent on subsidies (or the avoidance of government fines) if they are to be successful, and so far that has not happened. Considering the fact that global production capacity for just about everything far exceeds demand, these projects may NEVER be profitable.

(4) And why are we generating all this CO2 in the first place? It is used mainly for centralized industries that turn human beings into useless eaters and for comfort HVAC for said useless eaters. It seems to me that the best solution would be to relocate the human population to temperate zones, to disperse global production on a human-powered cottage industry basis, and to shutdown the petrochemical plants and refineries which are destroying this planet.

Or we can just keep making more CO2 until the cost of dealing with it overwhelms the world's economy. Then we can all be poor, hungry, and hot.