Moom, back in the 1980s, when I was trying to figure out how to solve the greenhouse effect problem, I did some boe calculations on CO2 compression, liquefaction and maybe even freezing into dry ice to be stacked up "for a rainy day" to be released if an ice age loomed.
One thing that very quickly became apparent is that the oxygen added on makes a very large volume of CO2 to be disposed of.
It was a long time ago now, going on 20 years, since I was doing that, but as I recall, reinjecting the carbon with oxygen attached into old wells to get rid of it and maybe help displace more oil and gas would fill the wells very quickly.
As you pointed out, where oil comes from and where it's burned are two very different places usually, so shipping the CO2 back to the well would be an enormous cost too.
Stacking CO2 in mountains of dry ice seemed like a lot of fun, with skiing available right there in the city.
But the best idea seemed to be compression and cooling to liquid, then piping it down to 400 metres under the ocean where it would remain a liquid in a big puddle, or just pouring it down to 400 metres and letting it sink and dissolve at that depth and lower.
My calculation at the time was that about 25% extra energy would be needed to do that. So it wasn't as cheap as feeding it to atmosphere breathing plants and giving them a fractionally warmer environment.
While ocean acidity increase will change things a little, we are still well within historic bounds of CO2 levels in the atmosphere, so it's not as though the oceans will die.
I say pump on, burn on and damn the torpedoes. Americans have a right to SUVs with no or low taxes on the fuel. Personally, I think it would be much better to double the price of fuel via taxation and cut other taxes by the same amount. Taxing pollution and commons destruction is a lot better than taxing productive enterprise which does not harm and does a lot of good.
It's also very easy to tax fuels as pipelines, refineries and supertankers are easy to measure and collect from. The tax is also spread across the economy so it would not ding a narrow segment of society.
Mqurice |
