INEOS plans to transform the Nini oil field in the North Sea into a carbon storage site. The company aims to inject liquefied CO2 into depleted oil reservoirs beneath the seabed.
If you’re pulling CO2 out of the air, why in the world would you turn around and burn it???
That makes zero sense. For one, biofuels require processing, which means they might even be carbon positive before you burn it, and again, the scale needed to produce it in meaningful quantities is totally impractical.
And again, you can’t just pump CO2 in the well and put an acme sized plug on it. The structure of the rock is destroyed by the process, it’ll just leak out. We’d need an entirely new method to store it, which was never the plan here
This whole scheme is a fever dream designed to continue burning fossil fuels while siphoning away money from actual green movements
If you’re pulling CO2 out of the air, why in the world would you turn around and burn it???
Because the CO2 we pull out of the air is not in a form that we can feasibly sequester. It’s padded with excessive hydrogen and oxygen into carbohydrate chains. When we burn that vegetation, we convert it to primarily to H2O, along with some CO2. Targeting the CO2 alone, we can sequester a lot more for the same energy and same volume.
The structure of the rock is destroyed by the process, it’ll just leak out.
That rock sequestered hydrocarbons from the biosphere for millions of years. It’s not destroyed by the process. We use comparable methods for the strategic petroleum reserve and the national helium reserve.
This whole scheme is a fever dream designed to continue burning fossil fuels
That may be true. And yet, when used with non-fossil fuel sources, it does, indeed, serve to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, rather than simply reducing the emission of CO2.
I get what you’re saying, it sounds very reasonable conceptually. But the problem is that this is a chain so riddled with weak links it’s infeasible
You’re right about biofuel… Except that biofuel is already refined biomass. The water is already removed, usually to become as close to pure hydrocarbons as possible. That’s a far more efficient CO2 sink than pure CO2, because the oxygen component is in the atmosphere
It’s insane to burn biofuels to lower atmospheric CO2.
And as far as the process being non-destructive… This technology was developed to use pressured CO2 to break smaller pockets in the rock, it’s like using a pressure chamber to deflate foam. Except the rocks aren’t plastic until your get a whole lot deeper, and the amount of pressure means the whole well is being pressurized beyond a level it was ever at naturally
Can a big cavity in the Earth store gasses? Sure. Can an oil well? Maybe… But so far, the answer is it leaks
As for your last point… If you instead ask if we should cram biofuels in the ground? That’s a way better idea, there’s something to it. It’s not a solution, it doesn’t scale to the levels where we can keep using fossil fuels everywhere, but it would sequester C02 very effectively. Kind of like it was before we dug it up and burned it
The biofuel thing is just further nonsense.
If you’re pulling CO2 out of the air, why in the world would you turn around and burn it???
That makes zero sense. For one, biofuels require processing, which means they might even be carbon positive before you burn it, and again, the scale needed to produce it in meaningful quantities is totally impractical.
And again, you can’t just pump CO2 in the well and put an acme sized plug on it. The structure of the rock is destroyed by the process, it’ll just leak out. We’d need an entirely new method to store it, which was never the plan here
This whole scheme is a fever dream designed to continue burning fossil fuels while siphoning away money from actual green movements
Because the CO2 we pull out of the air is not in a form that we can feasibly sequester. It’s padded with excessive hydrogen and oxygen into carbohydrate chains. When we burn that vegetation, we convert it to primarily to H2O, along with some CO2. Targeting the CO2 alone, we can sequester a lot more for the same energy and same volume.
That rock sequestered hydrocarbons from the biosphere for millions of years. It’s not destroyed by the process. We use comparable methods for the strategic petroleum reserve and the national helium reserve.
That may be true. And yet, when used with non-fossil fuel sources, it does, indeed, serve to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, rather than simply reducing the emission of CO2.
I get what you’re saying, it sounds very reasonable conceptually. But the problem is that this is a chain so riddled with weak links it’s infeasible
You’re right about biofuel… Except that biofuel is already refined biomass. The water is already removed, usually to become as close to pure hydrocarbons as possible. That’s a far more efficient CO2 sink than pure CO2, because the oxygen component is in the atmosphere
It’s insane to burn biofuels to lower atmospheric CO2.
And as far as the process being non-destructive… This technology was developed to use pressured CO2 to break smaller pockets in the rock, it’s like using a pressure chamber to deflate foam. Except the rocks aren’t plastic until your get a whole lot deeper, and the amount of pressure means the whole well is being pressurized beyond a level it was ever at naturally
Can a big cavity in the Earth store gasses? Sure. Can an oil well? Maybe… But so far, the answer is it leaks
As for your last point… If you instead ask if we should cram biofuels in the ground? That’s a way better idea, there’s something to it. It’s not a solution, it doesn’t scale to the levels where we can keep using fossil fuels everywhere, but it would sequester C02 very effectively. Kind of like it was before we dug it up and burned it