Asymmetrical Information

So...then let's do nothing.

Yes, Judson, let's do nothing. Not because "doing something" may not accomplish anything desirable, but because it certainly will kill people. That is, reducing CO2 emissions would require us to spend less on health care (both in terms of research and of treating the sick) and food production. The precautionary principle the scare mongers say requires us to "do something" (even if we don't know it will do any good) actually requires just the opposite: Don't do something we know will shorten lives unless or until we know our actions will save even more lives than our actions will cost.

Oh, sure, we can do something. How about starting with building fission reactors to replace the 80% of our grid capacity that's being provided by oil/gas/coal today? The environmental savings from the 100+ nuclear reactors we have supplying 20% of our electrical needs today is massive. Think about what going 100% nuke would do.

Somehow I doubt that's going to happen anytime soon, unfortunately. The greenies have a screaming me-me fit when someone tries to site a Condor Cuisinart farm, can you imagine the screaming if someone actually proposed siting a nuclear reactor much of anywhere?

Myria

On DenBeste's comments on energy, I'd say never let an electronic engineer do work that a chemical engineer should be doing.

His piece on bioethanol was hugely wrong; the major effort on bioethanol is focused on cellulases to break down cellulose into fermentable sugars. There is a similar flailing around with the waste-to-fuels issue; God forgive that the man would crack open a book and learn about Fischer-Tropsch and syngas.

Similarly, with your own commentary; estimates for capture/sequestration of CO2 from point sources (like power stations; about 35% of CO2 emissions in the US) are about $50/tonne CO2 for a natural-gas combined-cycle plant with amine scrubbing. Kvaerner are sequestering CO2 in the North Sea on an oil platform right now for less than the Norwegian $50/tonne tax. Costs might drop to maybe as low as $20/tonne if flow and other technical problems with CO2-hydrate processes can be overcome. Just FYI, a gallon of gas emits about 9.5 kg/CO2; so a $50/tonne CO2 fee on gasoline would be about 50 cents/gallon; the typical American car runs up 11,000 miles; at 25 mpg would have 440 gallons consumed; so a typical American consumer would pay $220/year for a 50 cent/gallon CO2 tax. You are very, very, far from reality in what you predict would be the cost.

We are doing something. We're peddaling like mad to figure out what's going on and inventing like mad to steal a march on competitors.

Tom, whaddya got? Let's see it.

Whooooaaaa!

Geraldo only a little problem?

It's a good to pollute less and to use energy more efficiently. There are any number of reasons to achieve these goals but "global warming" isn't one of them. The scientific basis of the scary "global warming" that Al Gore and his friends promote is weak to nonexistent. The best data comes from satellite measurements which show a trend of 0.08 C/decade. If that rate of increase is maintained the earth's temperature will be 0.8 C = 1.4 F warmer 100 years from now, about equivalent to moving 100 miles south of where you are now. There's very good evidence from oxygen isotope measurements that the earth was warmer than that during the Middle Ages and warmer yet during Roman times around the year 0 (plus some very cold spells in between). Somehow we made it here.

Let's do something --but first understand that some things cannot be done.

First and foremost we need to understand the primary reason for global warning is the position of the sun in the galaxy. The ice caps on Mars are also melting but there are only two SUVs on the entire planet. The extra-terrestrial environment is not stable. There is a reason Greenland was called Greenland when it was discovered. There is a reason the early Viking settlements eventually became untenable. Things will change – some for the better some for the worse. Fighting change is a waste of resources.

Second, absent a global dictatorship with draconian Zero Population Growth policies, the population will expand and the demand for resources will grow. In the short term we need to meet these demands while looking for the carrot in long term that slows the growth. Only prosperity seems to lead to slowed population growth. Only prosperity leads to environmental concern. Prosperity cannot be transplanted into a third world economy, it needs to be developed using the same steps it was developed in the first world countries. This is a long and slow process.

Third, manage resources – stop dictating emotional solutions Stop fighting technology, recognize that we are here and we have an impact. Genetically modified food helps conserve resources and maintain natural carbon sinks but the enviro’s fight it tooth and nail. Same for nuclear power. Look for alternate CO2 solutions like ocean planting (See http://www.techcentralstation.com/042804E.html) The threats also need to be rationally prioritized; the politics of mercury and arsenic clean up has overwhelmed the real risk analysis.

Help and solutions are out there, but first we must be adults, understand the constraints, and address the real problems.

"The best data comes from satellite measurements which show a trend of 0.08 C/decade. If that rate of increase is maintained the earth's temperature will be 0.8 C = 1.4 F warmer 100 years from now, about equivalent to moving 100 miles south of where you are now."

Err, see the recent Fu paper in Nature (and not just Christy & Spencer's whine about it in TCS). Problem with interpreting satellite data separating out the tropospheric warming from the stratospheric cooling.

"There's very good evidence from oxygen isotope measurements that the earth was warmer than that during the Middle Ages and warmer yet during Roman times around the year 0 (plus some very cold spells in between)."

Err, no. There was a localized minor warming in the Northern hemisphere, but proxy data from corals in the tropical Pacific show a "Medieval Cool Period" and "Little Warm Age". The trends you are talking about were not experienced worldwide.

Problem with oxygen isotopic measurements in icecores is that wind blow can skew the oxygen ratios measured.

"Somehow we made it here."

Klug wrote:

"Tom, whaddya got? Let's see it."

Try Bolland: http://www.tev.ntnu.no/Olav.Bolland/ghgt5/Cairns_pres_b.pdf

Quote a cost of CO2 capture & sequestration of $25-60/tonne CO2.

Drastic reductions in energy consumption is a bit of a straw man. It is likely that the marginal harm from global warming increases with the amount of warming and that the marginal cost of reducing the amount of warming increases with the amount of the reduction. So the optimal thing to do is likely to be to reduce but not totally eliminate global warming. I expect substantial reductions could be achieved at a cost of a lot less than 1/2 to 2/3 of pretax income. For example completely ending immigration into the United States would over time substantially reduce US emissions without costing current citizens much.

I think any realistic greenhouse gas program must require the administration of Beano to all cows. That methane is a killer.

I guess it comes down to "who do you believe?".

There are a large set of scientists who have documented temperatures for years. If you look at the 100 year graphs..... no matter what city you are looking at, there doesn't seem to be a real trend. There are multiple degree differences for each city every year. If you take one city like Sacramento, there will be multiple degree differences from year to year and for that matter for day to day. If you average and consolidate and average again you don't really come up with a trend.

Those scientists have allowed for the fact that there is a .1 degree Fareheit difference (warmer) over the last 100 years. But 15,000 of the scientists have said NO to the Kyoto Treaty and do not agree with the alarmist crisis rhetoric made by a few.

Nor do they accept that the "computer models" that show a trend of 9 degrees warmer over the next decade are accurate. A big reason is that when the computer models started a decade or two have passed and proven the computer models INACCURATE.

I think we can ALL AGREE that we'd like to use less energy or be more efficient or not pollute. 99.9% of us "feel" that way.

When it comes to "thinking", we have to figure out solutions that are workable, doable, practicle, etc. etc.

Tom:

Could you please supply some links? My understanding of carbon sequestration is that it is a temporary solution to a long-term problem, costs more than you're citing after you factor in government subsidies and tax breaks, doesn't scale well, and is most adapted to natural gas plants, which are already our least-carbon-emitting source. Correct me also, if I am wrong, but my understanding of the physical store of natural gas is that it would not be physically, much less economically, feasible to convert the entire world to running on it. (We'll leave out the political implications of shutting down the coal industry.) I'm happy to be proven wrong; just send me the data. But none of the energy analysts I've spoken to seem to have heard anything about cheap carbon elimination. I'm extremely sceptical, given that we're already subsidising wind, solar and so on to three to ten times the tune of what you claim we can totally eliminate gasoline emissions.

I'm curious about bioethanol -- as far as I understand it, his primary argument is that there is not enough landmass in the United States to produce the same amount of energy we currently consume even if we turned the entire place into one big bioethanol farm. Do you disagree with this? From what I remember about plant energy conversion efficiency (not much), this seems merely logical. Plus doesn't burning the bioethanol release carbon? It might be a fine way to deal with waste products, but it seems to me that Mr Den Beste's central point, that biodiesel et al can never make more than a trivial contribution to energy consumption, is correct.

"There is a reason Greenland was called Greenland when it was discovered."

Yes - Erik the Red had the heart of a realtor. Presumably that's why the Icelanders kicked him out.

"There is a reason the early Viking settlements eventually became untenable."

Yep, and if you read the Vinland sagas, reasons include:

1) Internecine feuding
2) Attacks from Skraelings (Inuit). (Although one formidable Nordic woman frightens them away by baring her breasts).
3) Dependence of the Nordic settlers on pastoral farming, without the fishing/seal hunting that the Inuit did. Bad winter = screwed Vikings.

Everyone should read these sagas, and the other Icelandic sagas. Murder, lawsuits, some boring geneology, more murder, more lawsuits, more boring geneology you can skip over, then even more murder, followed by more lawsuits, followed by yet even more murder.

My personal favorite is the Saga of Haldor Staff-Struck. Peaceable guy gets hit on the head, and his bed-ridden father nags him incessantly until Haldor finally gives in and kills the entire family of the guy who hit him, including the first cousins. Great stuff.

Friday, June 04, 2004
Day after tomorrow? There are plenty of days after tomorrow when global warming doesn't exist!

Giblets has finally seen The Day After Tomorrow, and he has to say, boy, am I relieved! Giblets was worried that this "global warming" thing might be real for a while there but clearly it is some sensationalistic crazy Hollywood thing, like UFOs, Bigfoot, and the Holocaust.

Polar ice caps melting? New York City slowly falling under an interminably rising tide? Giblets does not think so! Not when the CG effects on those giant tornados are so obvious. Giblets does not believe in the future extinction of thousands of plants and animal species, any more than he believes that Dennis Quaid can walk a glacier in a blizzard for two days and live!

So out with the coal and greenhouse gases! Giblets has fossil fuels to burn and internal combustion engines to run in a consequence-free environment! Two percent of climatologists can't be wrong!
¶ posted by Giblets at 5:37 PM Comments (2)

"Could you please supply some links?"

Cf. Bolland, above. Also see the IPCC's TAR Mitigation report.

"My understanding of carbon sequestration is that it is a temporary solution to a long-term problem,"

Some refer to 'sequestration' as soil sequestration - non-till agriculture and suchlike; I'm talking about subsurface disposal, in either depleted oil & gas fields or saline aquifers. Oil & gas fields have shown they can contain fluids over geological time; in saline aquifers the CO2 is converted (over time - 1000 years) to carbonates.

It's 'temporary' in the sense that we would still be using fossil fuels, and is only specific to point sources; but depending on whose estimates of fossil fuel reserves you take, that could still be a long time.

" costs more than you're citing after you factor in government subsidies and tax breaks, doesn't scale well, and is most adapted to natural gas plants,"

Well, that's not strictly true; you can use similar capture technology in the next-generation coal plants (known as IGCC). In fact, as IGCC requires a purified oxygen source, you can expand your oxygen purification plant, use the additional O2 for the gas turbine, and produce a reasonably pure stream of CO2 suitable for sequestration.
What your analysts might be thinking is that the technology is difficult to implement by retrofit; if the CO2-capture system and the power plant are not well heat-integrated, the efficiency of power generation (and hence capital efficiency) takes a nosedive - a 15-25% hit rather than a more modest 5-8% hit.

"which are already our least-carbon-emitting source."

The figure above I quoted is a straight cost; the reason Kvaerner are sequestering carbon because of the Norwegian energy tax of $50/tonne; no other reason.

I've read estimates (from Herzog of MIT: http://web.mit.edu/energylab/www/hjherzog/publications.html#TOP) that charges for carbon emissions would have to get to $190/tonne CO2 for CO2 for CO2-capture technologies to be preferred over other easier, least-regrets options (like switching to natural-gas from older coal-based plants).

" But none of the energy analysts I've spoken to seem to have heard anything about cheap carbon elimination. "

Then you're talking to the wrong energy analysts; they maybe aren't current with the state of the technology, or are thinking in terms of retrofits only, rather than the use of the technology in newly-built capacity. (Power demand worldwide is projected to increase by about two-thirds by 2025 by the US DoE; so what kind of capacity is built does matter hugely).

I don't blame them; I was pretty surprised when I found out the CO2 sequestration was much cheaper than I thought.

"I'm curious about bioethanol -- as far as I understand it, his primary argument is that there is not enough landmass in the United States to produce the same amount of energy we currently consume even if we turned the entire place into one big bioethanol farm."

I recall that switching to starch-based bioethanol would consume roughly all of the US exports of grain.

That's why there is a lot of work on making bioethanol from cellulose. There are considerable problems with this; so the US gubmint contracted with Genencor and Novozymes to research better enzymes to break down cellulose, with some success. There's still considerable technical obstacles to this; ungumming the cellulose from the other plant material being the principal problem.

Another alternative is to use the biomass to make syngas (hydrogen and carbon monoxide) which can then be used to make organic chemicals like methanol or ethanol or synthetic gasoline. The synfuel could also be used to make hydrogen (hydrogen is currently made from natural gas via syngas). Problems with this are that plant material, unlike e.g. coal, contains a lot of sodium, potassium; this gums up the fluidized beds that are used to convert the biomass to syngas. But this problem conceivably could be overcome.

"Do you disagree with this? From what I remember about plant energy conversion efficiency (not much), this seems merely logical. Plus doesn't burning the bioethanol release carbon?"

Yes, but by using bioethanol you are not using a fossil source as your original source of energy. If you can capture the CO2 from the biomass source, so much the better.

"biodiesel et al can never make more than a trivial contribution to energy consumption"

Biodiesel does consume energy. It takes more energy to make it than it yields when burned. Worse, plowing up land to grow crops releases huge amounts of co2 and methane. With biofuels the hurrier you go the behinder you get.

"Biodiesel does consume energy. It takes more energy to make it than it yields when burned."

Estimates I've seen for biodiesel give a 3.4 energy out/energy in ratio.

Tom, what the heck were you trying to say in your post about the Greenland Vikings? That they were rather too inclined to solve problems by slaughtering their neighbors is probably true (after all, their founder discovered Greenland because he'd been exiled from two countries for murdering his neighbors), but irrelevant to why communities that survived OK for a few centuries and then faded away. Those old farms are buried under yards of snow now, even in mid-summer. No plants edible to humans or sheep will grow in frozen, snow-covered soil. I very much doubt that old Norse technology included shoveling deep snow off of acres of fields, melting the permafrost with blowtorches, or raising vegetables, sheep, and sheep fodder in greenhouses.

The error advocates of biofuels make is not accounting for the energy consumed in producing it. Agriculture is an energy consumer not an energy producer. Even using nothing but muscle power, people and draft animals, it takes the production of other land to subsidize cultivated fields. All industrial agriculture does is substitute fossil fuel for biomass imported from adjacent areas. The energy needed to cultivate, fertilize, cultivate again during growth and/or use of herbicides/pesticides, harvest, transport, store and process; as well as the energy to produce the machines that do the work and all of the infrastructure, exceeds production by a wide margin. And when you add in the fossil carbon released from agricultural lands by cultivation it is not only a net energy consumer it is a net carbon producer both from energy consumption and soil degradation. Then there is erosion, biodiversity loss, water consumption, chemical pollution etc. etc. etc. to consider. We can't afford biofuel. We can't afford to burn food. It's an environmentally, economically and ethically bad idea.

Thanks, markm. You beat me to it.

I wonder if "Haldor Staff-Struck" also has something to do with the Mars polar cap melting?

For background on the effect of the "galactic environment" on global warming see:
http://www.fiz.huji.ac.il/~shaviv/Ice-ages/ice-main.html

Or just google "global warming galactic arm"

"Tom, what the heck were you trying to say in your post about the Greenland Vikings?"

That I think the end-of so-called Medieval Warm Period for the end for (some) of the Greenland settlements is not accurate.

Iceland was going through an economic collapse in the late 1300s and 1400s because of inter-family feuds; so less trading with Greenland settlements. You can see this by the extremely long time between trade voyages to the northern Greenland settlements. Less trade, the less able the Nordic Greenlanders were to survive adverse shocks.

ftp://holocene.evsc.virginia.edu/pub/mann/JonesMannROG04.pdf

See figure 4, page 13, North Atlantic, for Greenland temperature estimates from icecore data. Compare the mildly warmer periods in the 800s and 1000s to the radical changes in the 20th century in N.American and European temperatures.

Further on the Norse settlement:

"L.K. Barlow et al.:
Interdisciplinary investigations of the end of the Norse western
settlement in Greenland. HOLOCENE, 1997, Vol.7, No.4, pp.489-499

The loss of the Norse Western Settlement in Greenland around the mid fourteenth century has long been taken as a prime example of the impact of changing climate on human populations...Historical climate records, mainly from Iceland, contain evidence for lowered
temperatures and severe weather in the north Atlantic region around the mid-fourteenth century. Archaeological, palaeoecological and historical data specifically concerning the Western Settlement suggest that Norse living conditions left little buffer for unseasonable climate, and provide evidence for a sudden and catastrophic end around the mid-fourteenth century. Isotopic data from the GISP2 ice core provide annual- and seasonal-scale proxy-temperature signals which
suggest multiyear intervals of lowered temperatures in the early and mid-fourteenth century. The research synthesized here suggests that, while periods of unfavourable climatic fluctuations are likely to have played a role in the end of the Western Settlement, it was their cultural vulnerabilities to environmental change that left the Norse far more subject to disaster than their Inuit neighbours."
(C) 1998, Institute for Scientific Information Inc.

Also see: Why did Greenland fail as a colony? http://www.york.ac.uk/teaching/history/pjpg/Greenland.pdf

Tom,

Just curious, you disparage Steven Den Beste for commenting outside of his field of expertise. Your comments in this thread range from chemical engineering, petroleum engineering, economics, history, archeology, and agriculture. Why should I accept your comments on fields outside of your profession?

Tom,

Is your Greenland arguement that there is no change in global climate as described in http://www.fiz.huji.ac.il/~shaviv/Ice-ages/ice-main.html

or is it simply that the Greenland is a bad example?

If the first, you need to explain the other variations is climate that the earth has experienced and why Mars is loosing it's polar ice caps.

If the second, you may be right, Greenland may be a bad example but it seems that there is some debate about that.

In either case, my basic premise holds that things will change and trying to maintain everything at a statis based on current conditions is a waste of resources. At every level, from my daughter's allowance, to my household budget, to the great state of California, the the US, to the planet, we don't have enough money/resources to do everything we want. Better to recognize this and make economically wise decisions than to commit large amounts of resources to chase rainbows. Better to do real cost risk analysis than to accept politically motivated standards. Better to find the most cost effective low hanging fruit in pollution reduction than to reduce the arsenic standards to lower levels when there is no evidence of the current level causeing any problems.

Kyoto was not a environmental solution, it was a veiled form of economic warfare against the rich.

"You've got to be careful, if you don't know where you're going, because you might end up somewhere else.", Yogi Berra.

Stabilizing global CO2 levels at ~500 ppm would require a reduction in US CO2 emissions of ~95%, assuming that per-capita emissions in all countries were required to be the same. Change of this magnitude is not a $20 - 100 per family per year issue. Assuming that CO2 sequestration is as inexpensive as suggested above, this still means that virtually all CO2 production must be from point sources and that the emissions of these point sources be reduced to zero.

If this is where we're headed, we'd best know it now, because a lot of technologies are not on the path to a 95% reduction in CO2 emissions.

Wind, solar and hydro (to a lesser extent) are currently "sources of opportunity" - used when they are available and substituted for when they are not available. However, in a renewables-dominated energy scenario, they must become reliable sources which increases their costs dramatically. (For example, it takes one 1 kW wind turbine to produce 1 kW of "opportunity" power; but, it takes 8-10 such turbines at multiple locations to produce 1 kW of reliable power 8760 hours per year.

Last I checked, the sun seemed to have quite a bit to do with global warming & cooling, far more than any man-made influence. Both "global warming" and "global cooling" are 'solutions' looking for a problem. Curiously enough, they both propose the same 'solution': deindustrialize and return to some imagined non-Hobbesian state of nature. Bjorn Lomborg, I believe, has much to say of value in this debate.

FISSION for electrical generation is demonstratably viable, now. But it's sort of like the spotted owl or snail darter ... only viable in certain protected environments. To bring it back into widespread use the market must change, or the technology must evolve.

The problem is that any major and significant improvements to the overall technology for power generation has near-immediate impact on the technology for WEAPONS production. Say we develop a cheaper method of finding or mining uranium ore. So, Niger is NOT the only place that Iraqis might look for yellowcake. Suppose we have a cheaper or faster way of "enriching" (analogous to oil refineries) the fuel? Just run the enrichment process longer to get bomb-grade metal. Suppose we develop better neutron moderator/reflector materials, or better ways to extract Xenon or other neutron poisons, or to otherwise capture a smidgen more of the particles and energy necessary to sustain a chain reaction? That material or technique could be applied to making a bomb, smaller.

This has inhibited the industry since the 1970's. Carter's approach was to try and set up a US monopoly on the nuclear fuel cycle, that the US would buy all nations' nuclear waste, reprocess it for the good stuff, dispose of the bad stuff, and sell less-than-bomb-grade fuel back to all comers below cost -- just to keep them from developing their own nuclear industry. It *m*i*g*h*t* have worked. It's a smart, economical, and rational approach. However, we couldn't get past the NIMBY problem of putting "their" garbage in "our" dumps ... we can't even agree to put OUR garbage in our dumps. And so the North Koreans, the Iranians, and others are building their own "electrical generator" fuel sites which can't be other than dual-use.

Thus the emphasis on low-power-density ideas like biomass fuels and ocean thermal gradients ... hard enough to scale up to generators, much less making a soy-bean-oil bomb. Unfortunately, the genetic-engineering techniques that allow us to grow neo-Beans better suited for oil/gasoline production, or gene-gineer algaes for maximum methane making -- also afford tools for building a better anthax, tuberculosus, or plague bacteria.

It's hopeless, I say. Hopeless. We must all move back to caves and knapp flint...

From reading the thread of comments and reading Iv'e done, a few facts jump out:
- the issue of how much global warming is human generated is unclear. It is above 0 and below 100%. There is no general consensus.
- in the US, nuclear power is being totally discounted due to NIMBY concerns. Despite what DenBeste wrote, it is nonsensical to discard it as an option. (in gerneal, I'm a big fan of his writing.) There are a number of safer designs that have been tried out at small scale, but weren't pursued for commercial use. Suitable public education about the risks could turn that around, as well as the politicians getting some guts. (BTW, the US power companies made a big error in scaling up US Navy reactor designs that were optimized for miliary requirements, and not optimized for long-term use by civilians.)
- Sequestration is a non-starter at current costs if all future plants around the world need to have it designed in. Will China, India, etc. agree to this? They didn't agree to do much under the Kyoto treaty.

The key to all of this is more research, and I don't see much money being spent in these areas.

Even if bio-whatever can be made consistently to yield a net-positive energy output, and if we can integrate intermittent renewables with the grid on a huge scale, and if we can overcome public objections to the siting of wind, solar and nuclear plants, and if we can increase the rate at which we improve our efficiency of energy use, it still won't be anywhere enough.

According to several studies by researchers led by Martin Hoffert (NYU) and Chris Green (McGill), we will likely need over 35 TW of carbon-free primary power in order to stabilize CO2 concentrations at double the pre-industrial level by 2100, when likely trends in population, GDP growth, and energy intensity are taken into account.

Consider that the entire world energy system today uses about 13 TW of primary power, and only a small fraction of that is carbon-free; this means that we will need to build an energy system roughly three times the size of our current one, and one which is entirely made up of carbon-free technologies. Now consider the public opposition that arises when new dams or wind farms or nuclear plants are proposed, and scale it up by several orders of magnitude. Then consider the political difficulty associated with coordinating a worldwide move to carbon-free energy on a currently unimaginable scale. Ain't gonna happen.

We may have a deus ex machina in the form of dedicated sequestration plants that sit in unpopulated areas and scrub CO2 from the atmosphere via a reversible chemical reaction. Klaus Lackner has published several papers on this idea; the technology is utterly unremarkable, but the economics are currently prohibitive (since carbon emissions are free), and there are a lot of wrinkles to work out. If feasible, and implemented on a large enough scale, it may be able to reduce atmospheric CO2 concentration, even while we continue to use fossil fuels. This would piss off the Greens to no end, and may be worth doing just for the entertainment value. Otherwise, we're out of luck.

"Is your Greenland arguement that there is no change in global climate as described in http://www.fiz.huji.ac.il/~shaviv/Ice-ages/ice-main.html"

A critique of Shaviv's hypotheis published in Eos is at
http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/Publications/Journals/rahmstorf_etal_eos_2004.html

Two main conclusions result from our analysis of [Shaviv and Veizer, 2003]. The first is that the correlation of cosmic ray flux (CRF) and climate over the past 520 m.y. appears to not hold up under scrutiny. Even if we accept the questionable assumption that meteorite clusters give information on CRF variations, we find that the evidence for a link between CRF and climate amounts to little more than a similarity in the average periods of the CRF variations and a heavily smoothed temperature reconstruction. Phase agreement is poor. The authors applied several adjustments to the data to artificially enhance the correlation. We thus find that the existence of a correlation has not been convincingly demonstrated.

My comment on the above article is that the increase in heat output of the sun (~5% since the Ordovician) + higher CO2 levels.

Read the Jones & Mann review article I linked to above. Over long periods of time (like, 10,000 years or more), the driver of climate is primarily changes in the earth's orbit or precession (believe these are called Milankovich cycles); but changes in insolation are insufficient to explain the warming seen in the 20th century.

"or is it simply that the Greenland is a bad example?"

That Greenland is a bad example, because of factors relating to both local climate there and cultural factors. You'll note that the articles I gave abstracts for and linked to say that changes in climate (short summers reducing hay output) were just one factor in the abandonment of the Norse settlements; the Norse were unable to culturally adapt, because their economy was pastoral, unlike the Inuit. I believe there's a lesson there, but it's not the same one you believe.

"If the first, you need to explain the other variations is climate that the earth has experienced"

See above.

"and why Mars is loosing it's polar ice caps."

Just as soon as you explain why we'd see stratospheric cooling at the same time as tropospheric warming, if changes in insolation are the cause.

Mars losing its ice caps - no idea; Mars has a more eccentric orbit than Earth and more variations in precession (no moon to stabilize the angle), and so might have more radical Milankovich cycles. I'll ask the xenoplanetary atmospheric chemists I sometimes have lunch with, but they'll probably talk about Venus instead.

"Just curious, you disparage Steven Den Beste for commenting outside of his field of expertise. Your comments in this thread range from chemical engineering, petroleum engineering, economics, history, archeology, and agriculture. Why should I accept your comments on fields outside of your profession?"

In the first three, I have professional expertise. In the last three, I've read extensively on Norse historial sagas, so I think I can comment better than most on their lifestyle and history. If you've read the Greenland saga and the Saga of Erik the Red, the idea that Greenland circa 1000 AD was a welcoming verdant land is a bit hard to believe.

On DenBeste, it was evident to me (as someone who knows about CO2 mitigation technologies) that DenBeste wasn't remotely familar with the technologies employed or even with performing mass/energy balances (he makes a two-order of magnitude mistake in one calculation).

"- Sequestration is a non-starter at current costs if all future plants around the world need to have it designed in. Will China, India, etc. agree to this? They didn't agree to do much under the Kyoto treaty."

Under Kyoto, there is a mechanism where Annex I countries (developed and former Eastern Bloc) can claim emissions credits for aiding developing countries reduce their emissions. So, under Kyoto, if an Indian power plant was built with the aid of a Western power company so that CO2 capture/sequestration was built in, the Western power company could claim credit for preventing CO2 emissions from that plant. (The exact mechanism of this is still being hashed out, though).

This issue would disappear if President Bush would simply announce that he has embraced the precautionary principle and is declaring a preemptive war on global warming. The Left would immediately oppose any effort to reduce CO2 emissions, and the media would lose interest. The Administration could then declare that its initiatives and support for McCain-Lieberman has been stymied by a Kerry-led filibuster.

Look, we know from past history that climate is GOING to change. It's only a matter of time and the changes can be wild indeed.

It would be a lot more constructive to start thinking about how we're going to respond to the change, rather than worrying about causes. What caused the last ice age? Did the cause matter to the people who froze their butts?

Tom, I think you're selling den Beste short. So he took the density for liquid methane instead of gaseous methane the first time through. It's a silly mistake and shouldn't be used as representative.

Now I've got a question for you, since you seem to know about CO2 sequestration. You quote a price figure for capturing CO2 from a natural gas combined-cycle plant with amine scrubbing. When you refer to amine scrubbing, you do mean that one molecule of amine fixes one molecule of CO2, right?

So if I may borrow a point from SdB: Does it scale? Where are we going to get enough of that amine (is it ethanolamine?) to soak up all the CO2 we get in generating energy on a nationwide scale? What do we make it from? (Seems to me just making ammonia is pretty energy-intensive, then you have to take it on from there.) After you're done you get a whole lot of (I'm guessing) this ammonium alkoxycarbonate salt; where do we bury it all once we convert wholesale to this method?

Not saying you're wrong; just asking about scale, since 100g is a large scale reaction for me. Seems to me that den Beste's reminders about problems of scale in the big picture are valuable.

"Tom, I think you're selling den Beste short. "

I always would. Aside form the verbosity, I dislike hsi belief that because the engineering gestalt is useful for solving many problems, it is useful for solving almost all problems. Hence, he often does not bother to familiarize himself with what the state of the art (or even the basics) is in a particular area. Why bother, when you can work it out from first principles?

So he often gets the actual state of thinking Spectacularly Wrong, even when it involves an engineering problem, as in this instance it's not his flavour of engineering, and he doesn't understand the appropriate mindset or know the relevant technologies.

In some areas, working it out from first principles isn't sufficient; you need the appropriate domain knowledge also.

[Mind you; I wouldn't want to be in the position of a friend of mine who was one of the few experts in fuel cell market a few years ago, only to find once fuel cell became the flavor du jour that her expertise wasn't as rare a commodity as before.]

"Now I've got a question for you, since you seem to know about CO2 sequestration."

*off-topic rant* Not enough to get this damn amine absorption column in this damn simulation to bloody converge, goddamn its eyes. *endrant*

"You quote a price figure for capturing CO2 from a natural gas combined-cycle plant with amine scrubbing. When you refer to amine scrubbing, you do mean that one molecule of amine fixes one molecule of CO2, right?"

No, the CO2/amine ratio depends on the temperature, partial pressure of CO2, and temperature, and the structure of the amine.

"So if I may borrow a point from SdB: Does it scale? Where are we going to get enough of that amine (is it ethanolamine?)"

(Bangs head against wall.) You don't sequester using the bloody amine. You use the amine to *capture* the bloody CO2, and then you separate the CO2 and the amine using a temperature-swing or pressure-swing cycle. That's why you use an amine, not NaOH or suchlike, because recycling the amine is easier. You then get a reasonably pure CO2-steam, which you then sequester by subsurface disposal or underwater disposal in the ocean.

Tom, since you are quite knowledgible about so many things, help me out here, will you?

I live in the Western US. Not that many years ago -- well, maybe ten thousand or so, there were glaciers all over the western part of the country. In fact, Death Valley once contained a lake about 600 feet in depth fed by glaciers from the Sierra Nevada mountains. As recently as a couple of thousand years ago there was a lake 30 feet deep in the Valley. In the Pacific Northwest there were enormous glaciers covering much of the landscape.

Now, to the best of my knowledge, these glaciers disappeared at least several thousand years ago. I haven't noticed any glaciers at all driving through Death Valley or up the Columbia River Gorge. Obviously, the climate has warmed up considerably.

So for my question -- where did the CO2 come from that caused this warming?

Oh, and while you are at it. . . .just how much of your favorite amine do you need to sequester a ton of CO2? How much energy does it take to pump the CO2 underneath the sea or into the ground? Will introducing CO2 into the sea require an environmental impact statement?

Just how far down into the sea do you have to pump the CO2 so it just doesn't bubble to the surface and get into the atmosphere anyway. 100 feet? 500 feet? 1000 feet? I am somewhat knowledgible about thermodynamics, so if you tell me what pressure you need, I can tell you just how much energy it's going to take to pump the CO2 to the bottom of the ocean. It won't be a trivial number.

And how deep do you have to pump the CO2 into the earth to make sure it's completely sequestered and doesn't sort of gurgle up around the various fault lines? What pressure head to you have to pump against?

I look forward to your answers!!

'Fess up, "Tom". You're the omniscient shoe-shine boy from Police Squad, aren't you?

I am extremely skeptical of any comment that alternative energy is cheaper and/or equivalent to the cost of fossile fuels. If alternative energies were economically viable, we would be using them (even if the coal and oil barons opposed the idea, somebody would want to make money off of it). Until we know what we are dealing with, I don't see how we can address the problem in a way that makes sense.

Every year in my chem eng. department some groups do 4th year projects on carbon sequesration. The conlusion seems to be fairly consistant that equipment assosiated with the sequestration is at least as big and costly as the plant itself. You are also using on the order of a third of your power to run, transport and compress the co2. Oxygen purification does not help. The other issue is going to be the environmental impact of the release of millions of tonnes of the amines used in the capture.

Still seems to me the best bet right now is cellulose produced ethanol (there is at least as much corn stalks, husks and cobs, as there is corn strach produced, and generally after producing ethanol the prtiens and minerals are still available as feed/fertalizer) as a transportation fuel, and fission reactors as electrical production. A CANDU style reactor helps for proliferation (no enriched uranium required)

Well, Tom, I should have said I thought you were being overly harsh on den Beste, and I still do.

I, on the other hand, would seem to have deserved your line about cracking a book before displaying one's ignorance of the details. Thanks for an explanation that, for all its impatience, was actually pretty patient. How's your head?

"Just how far down into the sea do you have to pump the CO2 so it just doesn't bubble to the surface and get into the atmosphere anyway. 100 feet? 500 feet? 1000 feet?"

Below 75 feet the ocean is not in equilibrium with the CO2 in the atmosphere; there's little mixing between the deep ocean and the atmosphere. So you could inject CO2 by pipeline (either fixed or towed behind a ship to increase dispersion (you could even dump dry ice in blocks over the side of a ship); but yes, some leakage of CO2 to the atmosphere would result. Below 2000 m, liquid CO2 is denser than water, so a pipeline with outlet below that depth would create a pool of liquid CO2 on the ocean floor.

Problems are more creating the pipeline/transport infrastructure than the cost of compression, BTW. Aquifer injection is preferred because saline aquifers are ubiquitous (about 70% of the US has a suitable saline aquifer in the subsurface), so no pipeline issues.

"I am somewhat knowledgible about thermodynamics, so if you tell me what pressure you need, I can tell you just how much energy it's going to take to pump the CO2 to the bottom of the ocean. It won't be a trivial number."

Err, actually, it kinda is, compared to the cost of compressing air for the gas turbine. For a 500 MW gas plant, we're talking 18 MW for CO2 compression compared to 370 MW for the air compressor.

"And how deep do you have to pump the CO2 into the earth to make sure it's completely sequestered and doesn't sort of gurgle up around the various fault lines?"

About 600 m subsurface is best; deeper than 1000 m and increased temperature adversely affects the sequestration. The geophysical papers on the issue suggest that about 20% of the CO2 dissolves immediately, the remainder is in gas form (maybe in a supercritical state) and dissolves into the aquifer over centuries. The CO2 is eventually converted to carbonates. Aquifer injection has been used in a StatOil/Kvaerner project in the North Sea, and will also be used in a project off the coast of Malaysia for disposal of CO2 resulting from purification of natural gas.

Typical wellhead pressures in the literature are 105 bar. Don't forget you can compress the CO2 to ~75 bar and then liquefy, and then pump up to the necessary head; you don't have to use expensive compression all the way.

"What pressure head to you have to pump against"

"Every year in my chem eng. department some groups do 4th year projects on carbon sequesration. The conlusion seems to be fairly consistant that equipment assosiated with the sequestration is at least as big and costly as the plant itself."

Err, there are some high-efficiency packings developed by Mitsubishi which reduce column diameter, and some proprietary mixed amine solvents which have better thermodynamic, kinetic & corrosion properties than bog-standard methanolamine; these reduce the hit on the capital costs. Kvaerner have used a membrane absorber instead of a packed column; this also reduces capital cost. Cap cost hits I've seen in the literature are more on the 30-60% range; obviously, the less energy hit you take in your absorption/regeneration system, the less of a capital cost hit you take.

Oxyfuel combustion is the worst of the three alternatives for power plant (post-combustion CO2 removal, pre-combustion CO2 removal, and oxyfuel).

"You are also using on the order of a third of your power to run, transport and compress the co2. Oxygen purification does not help. The other issue is going to be the environmental impact of the release of millions of tonnes of the amines used in the capture."

Arrrrrgggghhhhh. *No* amines are released, save fugitive emissions in the flue gas (very low), and a small amount of heat-stable salts.

"Still seems to me the best bet right now is cellulose produced ethanol"

I'm with you there, only I think that methanol-from-cellulosic-biomass via syngas is probably even more promising.

Tom graciously answered some of my questions. . . .

First question: How deep do you have to pump CO2 in the ocean?

Answer -- Well, I'm not quite sure what the answer is -- somewhere between 75 feet and 2000 feet. Water pressure increases about one atmosphere for every 10 meters of depth. At 100 meters (300 feet) you are looking at about 10 atms of pressure.

If we make the following assumptions: 1) CO2 is an ideal gas with an n-value of 1.4, 2) CO2 compressor efficiency of 90%, and prime mover efficiency of 50% (probably fairly generous), the amount of energy to compress the CO2 will be about 4.7% of the fuel energy used to drive the prime mover. In other words, if the prime engine is used to power the CO2 compressor, it will take about 4.7% of the prime engine's output to do so. For a 500 MW plant we are looking at about 23.5 MW. The largest diesel locomotive that you can buy is rated at about 4 MW (6000 hp), so we are talking about six large locomotives running 24 hours a day to just dispose of the CO2.

That, of course, will only work for a power plant close to the ocean. If we are going to pump the CO2 underground against a head of 75 atms we are talking about twice the amount of power to do so, or double the number of locomotives.

A 500 MW plant is, of course, quite large -- about half the power output of the typical nuclear plant. This size plant, providing 10 kw of power to each household, would be sufficient for a city with 50,000 households or roughly 200,000 people. Industry, of course, is not considered in these calculations.

As far as pumping the CO2 into the ocean -- has anyone actually tried this? At what depths? I would think that this would be an excellent way to force water from the depths to the surface. I would also be interested in the local effects of increased CO2--is there a "greenhouse" effect with increase growth of algae and perhaps more fish in the area? (Greenhouse as in greenhouses using high CO2 to spur the growth of plants.)

If we are talking about compressing the CO2 to 75 atms, you are looking at a little less than twice the power requirements.

Now as far as the "For a 500 MW gas plant, we're talking 18 MW for CO2 compression compared to 370 MW for the air compressor" --

I think you are a bit high on your estimates. A gas turbine that is 40% efficient with a compression ratio of 10:1 and a combustion temperature of 3000 deg F will require 0.46 MW of work for air compression for every MW of output. (Obviously, I'm not talking about a combined cycle, which would lower the ratio even further.) For a 500 MW plant you are looking at about 200 MW to drive the compressor. You can actually improve on this with intercooling and/or inlet fogging.

However -- this number is really beside the point. The important number is the percentage of the plant output that has to be dedicated to CO2 injection, either under the sea or under the ground. Your sources suggest that the figure would be 3.6%. My calculations suggest between 5 and 10%, depending upon the injection route.

It's interesting to compare these figures with what has happened with another pollution reduction scheme -- that of diesel engines involving nitrous oxides and particulate matters. EPA requirements as of October 2002 has necessitated the use of exhaust gas recirculation to decrease these pollutants (except for Caterpillar, but that's another story.) Engine manufacturers predicted that fuel mileage figures would take a 3-5% hit. It's turned out to be more like 6-10%. The cost of these modifications has been about $5000 per engine -- which is significant, considering the engines used to only cost $5000-$12000.

Am I wrong in suspecting that the CO2 scheme you describe would essentially do the same thing to the power industry that the new EPA regs have done to the diesel engine industry -- knock down efficiency 5-10%, and perhaps double the capital cost of the plants?

A scarier possibility is that there will be a massive release of undersea hydrates (http://www.nrl.navy.mil/content.php?P=03REVIEW181) will happen. Since these are composed of frozen methane which is much worse than CO2 as a global warming factor, then they could easily provke the tipping point to disaster.

We could start on global warming, accept any and all costs and still end up in the same spot if these hydrate releases happen.

damned if you do, ...

Tom -

Even if you are correct about carbon sequestration, you are still selling Den Beste a bit short, for the simple fact that he never talks about it. His subject was alternative energy, and the folly of thinking that some grand scheme was going to magically erase our dependence on fossil fuels. You are merely talking about a way to make fossil fuels emit less CO2 - a completely different subject.

And as for cellulose based biofuels, I'm still sceptical, since they still have all the issues of energy density that Den Beste describes in his section on other biofuels. Just as with biodiesal, it might be a great way to make use of what would otherwise be a waste product, but it won't scale to a primary energy source...

Er, Tom, Mars has two moons...

"Now as far as the "For a 500 MW gas plant, we're talking 18 MW for CO2 compression compared to 370 MW for the air compressor" --

"I think you are a bit high on your estimates."

Not an estimate, it's from an ASPENTECH simulation.

"A gas turbine that is 40% efficient with a compression ratio of 10:1 and a combustion temperature of 3000 deg F will require 0.46 MW of work for air compression for every MW of output."

Combined-cycle plants get close to 55-58% efficiency. Remember that the 500 MW of power is *net power*. The output of the gas turbine is 760 MW, with an additional 110 MW from steam turbines. Also, you have to use an excess of air as the limit to the operating temperature of the turbine is 1340 C; some of the air is just a working fluid.

" (Obviously, I'm not talking about a combined cycle, which would lower the ratio even further.) For a 500 MW plant you are looking at about 200 MW to drive the compressor. You can actually improve on this with intercooling and/or inlet fogging."

AFAIK, the power industry doesn't use intercooling for the air compressor in NGCC. I think that it is because doing so would also lower the outlet temperature from the combustion chamber, and so lower the enthalpy of the gas entering the gas turbine (and hence lower your power output), but I haven't modeled it or graphed out the Brayton cycle.

"It's interesting to compare these figures with what has happened with another pollution reduction scheme -- that of diesel engines involving nitrous oxides and particulate matters."

I'd prefer another, more directly relevant comparison - removal of SO2 from flue gases, where the costs were 6 times less than projected. Remember, the technologies I'm talking about are borrowed straight from the ammonia industry. If more exotic technologies like CO2-hydrate or perovskite-based oxygen-conducting membranes, then the cost lower than what I'm showing.

"Er, Tom, Mars has two moons..."

Two pee-wee captured asteroids that don't contribute to stabilizing its angle of precession.

Commentary on the 'Hydrogen Economy'.

Every time people debate this it ends up revolving around making hydrogen from water. While this works, is easy, and would have lots of applications - it can't be the end choice if we really did 'switch' over. It isn't a source of energy - but fuel cells would themselves be a solid step in the right direction.

So... if you aren't electrolyzing water, how are you getting hydrogen? While the huge energy stores represented by fossil fuels hold out, the first approach is 'steam reforming'. Heat + hydrocarbon + steam -> H2O + CO2 + H2. Yes, there's a CO2 in there. But there is less CO2 produced via this route than via the straight 'burn the fuel in air' route. And any toxic byproducts (you always get NOx burning anything in air) are easier to scrub at a factory. The _car_ will emit pure H2O with zero pollution control devices.

If you really want to sequester carbon, you can switch to straight reforming _without_ the steam. You pay an unavoidable penalty upfront - but the entire process now emits only solid C, H2O and energy. There aren't any 'pollution control' devices needed anywhere. Solid C is _easy_ to sequester. You end up consuming more fossil fuels than before for the same output - but _ZEROING_ the CO2 emission. (If it turns out CO2 isn't so bad, or the next ice age starts... someone has a whole pile of research grade 'coal').

Tom wrote:

"AFAIK, the power industry doesn't use intercooling for the air compressor in NGCC. I think that it is because doing so would also lower the outlet temperature from the combustion chamber, and so lower the enthalpy of the gas entering the gas turbine (and hence lower your power output), but I haven't modeled it or graphed out the Brayton cycle."

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The reason they don't use intercooling is that they use inlet and interstage fogging, which is much easier to implement. Essentially the same thing happens -- the temperature of the charge air is reduced, and hence less work is required to compress the air.

This technique is so successful that it has been used in jet engines. Power gas turbines without fogging/water injection are becoming an endangered species. There is a significant after-market industry to equip older power gas turbines with this technology.

I compared costs between the 2002 diesel engine EPA requirements and Tom's CO2 scrubbing proposal. Tom commented:

"I'd prefer another, more directly relevant comparison - removal of SO2 from flue gases, where the costs were 6 times less than projected. Remember, the technologies I'm talking about are borrowed straight from the ammonia industry. If more exotic technologies like CO2-hydrate or perovskite-based oxygen-conducting membranes, then the cost lower than what I'm showing."

Well, you might note that the 2002 EPA regulations have caused chaos among diesel engine manufacuturers, and has cost considerably more than early projections -- involving billions of dollars and essentially doubling the cost of diesel engines, while significantly reducing fuel mileage.

It would be nice if SO2 scrubbing, which was implemented 30 years ago, does serve as an indication of how trivial CO2 removal cost would be.

I'm not holding my breath, though.

It is magnificent to watch a true believer like "Tom" work. As with all religious fundamentalists, all questions lead to one answer, and he is always right. This person with a phoney email is expert in several sciences, and has little respect for a writer that everyone here knows, and has read, for years. Yet "Tom" himself is anonymous, with no real credentials, just unsupported statements.

The breezy way he allows for a lake of liquid CO2 under the oceans, without a care for the consequences, shows him to be a non-serious troll. I am always amazed how such posters can become the main actor in threads like these. He believes that humankind is vermin, has despoiled his nest, yet breezily advocates taking control of the global climate.

Wake up, people. He's a fraud.

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