Legalectric

Time to trot out the “Carbon Capture & Storage” red herring again(and check those teeth, how bizarre!).  Yet another study out that shows that Carbon Capture ain’t happenin’ and we’d best be dealing with the problem and not pretending like CCS will save us.

Long-term Effectiveness and Consequences of Carbon Dioxide Sequestration – Shaffer

Bottom line:

The carbon sequestration pathway presented here posits great human effort in the next two hundred years but subsequent human inaction in the spirit of `out of sight, out of mind’. Alternatively, long-term leakage from the ocean or geological reservoirs could be actively countered by resequestration to stabilize climate at some desired level. However, there are serious concerns connected withthis. First, it would be difficult to gauge the global leakage rate that would have to be matched by the resequestration rate. Long-term monitoring of atmospheric CO2 concentrations would probably be the best way to address this but natural carbon-cycle fluctuations would complicate this approach. Second, resequestration would have to be carried out over many thousands of years, a burden for future society not unlike that of long-term management of nuclear waste. By greatly limiting carbon emissions in our time, we could reduce the need for massive CO2 sequestration and thus reduce unwanted consequences and burdens over many future generations from the leakage of sequestered CO2.

This came from a Yahoo News article:

Yahoo News June 27, 2010

Carbon storage faces leak dilemma — study

By Agence France Presse

PARIS (AFP) — Dreams of braking global warming by storing carbon emissions from power plants could be undermined by the risk of leakage, according to a study published on Sunday. [The study itself is available here: http://goo.gl/wygb

Rich countries have earmarked tens of billions of dollars of investment in carbon capture and storage (CCS), a technology that is still only at an experimental stage.
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