Impact of Carbon Capture and Sequestration on Water Demand

Impact of Carbon Capture and Sequestration on Water Demand for Existing &
Future Power Plants

Not only does Carbon Capture and Sequestration use more COAL - it also uses MORE of our most precious resource - WATER! You will want to click on the link below to read the full article and look at their example of the amount of water used.



"Impacts of Operation on Water:

Capture & Compression: Increased power consumption for capture and compression directly reduces the facility power output -- results in increased water consumption above that for a similar facility without capture

Pipeline Transport: Pumping power required to boost carbon dioxide pressure during pipeline transport to maintain supercritical conditions further diminishes power generation facility output -- results in increased water consumption

Underground Injection: Additional power may be required for injection operations -- indirectly increases water consumption; water may be produced by sequestration operations which displace reservoir fluids"

"Conclusions

• Extreme variability exists in water production rates associated with geological sequestration operations

- The viability of potential sequestration locations requires assessment of the geological features of each specific site

• In some cases, water production during sequestration activities can be greater than water consumption during power generation and carbon capture

- Water generated during sequestration is often re-injected into a reservoir to aid continued oil/gas production

- Water produced during sequestration activities may require extensive remediation to make it potable or acceptable for agricultural uses

• Water production/usage during sequestration operations can dramatically effect the economic"

Click here to read the entire article

GovTrack -useful site

GovTrack.us helps you keep tabs on the U.S. Congress. This site is not affiliated with the U.S. government; it is non-commercial, non-partisan, and an open source project.

On this site you can TRACK CONGRESS - follow the status of federal legislation

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AND stay up with congressional committees and the congressional record to stay up to date with the debate on the house and senate floor.

http://www.govtrack.us/

2 Knoxville, TN Groups Speak Out Against Carbon Capture & Storage

From the Knoxville News -

"A press conference held by two activist groups promoted a recently released Greenpeace study that states carbon capture and storage is an unproven technology and is costly to taxpayers."

"Calling carbon storage technology too expensive and a hollow answer to the environmental issues surrounding coal as an energy source, two local environmental groups on Monday protested federal legislation they say encourages development of coal-based power production.

Save Our Cumberland Mountains, a state citizens organization, and Students Promoting Environmental Action in Knoxville, a group based at the University of Tennessee, held a press conference in Knoxville's Market Square, beneath the Tennessee Valley Authority headquarters towers, to protest what they called a "$424 billion federal boondoggle to promote the continued use of coal to produce electricity," according to a release."

Read the full story here on their web site May 6, 2008

Future of "Clean Coal" Power Tied to (Uncertain) Success of Carbon Capture and Storage

Photo by rich_awn on flickr - click photo

This article from the publication, Scientific American, is very interesting and worth your time to read. Below are a few quotes from the article....make sure to read the comments at the end of the article and follow the links they suggest.

"Sequestration, as envisioned in the report, involves capturing the CO2 from coal-fired power plants, compressing it into a liquid and injecting it deep beneath the earth into old oil fields or saline aquifers. There, according to geologists, the CO2 would be trapped by sealing cap rock to prevent it from seeping back to the surface and into the air. It is relatively cheap to get it there, the report says. The difficulty is capturing it at the power plant without sapping too much energy or pushing electric costs up too high. For example, one 500-megawatt coal-fired power plant (there are the equivalent of 500 of these in the U.S. and China is building the equivalent of two of them each week) produces three million tons of CO2 annually. Adding carbon capture technology to that plant sucks up 40 percent of the power it can produce and adds at least 2.7 cents to the retail price of that electricity."

"If you capture most of the CO2 and sequester it for the 50-year life of the plant, you're talking about one billion barrels of supercritical CO2," Moniz says. "That's a pretty big reservoir."

"To date, the largest sequestration project—the Sleipner gas field in the North Sea—slurps up one million tons of CO2 per year (11 million or so since inception) and relies on sonar to detect any major leaks. "So far, so good," says Howard Herzog, principal research engineer at M.I.T.'s Laboratory for Energy and the Environment. "The problem with Sleipner is it's not as instrumented as we would like."

In other words, it does not have the kind of in-place monitoring systems critical to understanding the true workings of liquid CO2 stored underground.

Nor is it big enough to help understand what would happen if even larger amounts of supercritical CO2 were pumped underground. In fact, it would take 3,600 projects of Sleipner's scale—which is the largest such project underway—to reduce current carbon dioxide emissions from coal by less than half, the report says. But even the small projects are already turning up surprises, such as the relative permeability of various rocks and the ability of CO2 to mix with saline and form carbonic acid, which eats away surrounding rock. And, of course, no one knows exactly how long the carbon dioxide could be contained. "The long-term, chemical fate of CO2 remains to be understood," Moniz notes. "It's like a mortgage. It gets us out of the problem in the 21st century, spreading it out over a longer time and not breaking the budget."

Click here to be taken to the entire article

One of the comments for this article -

"If carbon sequestration requires 40% of the electric power

produced by the plant, this is a "no-win" strategy.

I've worked as a consultant for fossil fueled plants, and

know that the present SO2/NOX/Precipitator power /Ash Handling

usage already requires 15% of the power plants output.

If you add 40% more to this, the plant is using 55% of the

energy it produces for internal requirements.

Considering that coal fired plants only have a 40%

efficiency to start with because they must first convert

the chemical energy of coal to steam energy, then the

steam to electrical energy; the carbon sequestration

process is a losing proposition."  David M Clemen

Click here to access the comments to the above article - then scroll down