TL: CO2 DISPOSAL FORUM
SO: Jeremy Leggett, Greenpeace International (GP)
DT: March 9, 1994

Keywords: atmosphere energy emissions oil /
New Statesman article on CO2 disposal 1994
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An immodest proposal. Jeremy Leggett looks at the technology of
the absurd.

The projector cast an image of the future on the screen. At the
podium, the Director of the Geological Survey of Japan, Hitoshi
Koide, paused, allowing the audience to take in the detail of his
vision, and the delegates at the 1993
International Energy Agency conference on carbon dioxide
disposal duly studied it. 
        Energy experts from Exxon to OPEC, Siemens to Statoil
packed the Oxford University lecture hall. The conference
documents showed that Koide's vision was shared by co-authors
from the Electric Power Development Company of Japan,
Mitsubushi Heavy Industry, the Japanese National Chemical Lab for
Industry, and the Kanto Natural Gas Development Company. There
was something on the screen for all of them. 
        An enormous fossil-fuel power plant sat on a concrete
coast. Behind it, a label revealed two smaller buildings to be a
carbon dioxide recovery plant. From these, pipelines led to what
looked like a chemical works. But another label
showed it to be a carbon dioxide compression and liquefaction
plant. From this, two further pipelines emerged. One led off
across a river into the country. 
        The artist at this point cut the ground away to show an
aquifer, an oil field, and a gas field. The first pipeline
ended at three wells above them, labelled "injection". One
well pumped carbon dioxide into the aquifer, where permeable
strata deep underground would evidently sequester the gas in
perpetuity. (The artist's idealized strata contained not a
single, leaky, geological fault). The injection wells above the
oil and gas fields had a different purpose, pumping the carbon
dioxide below ground to enhance recovery of oil and
gas. From production wells above these fields, oil and gas
pipelines led off towards glittering, grateful, cities in the
distance.  
        Back at the carbon dioxide compression and liquefaction
plant, a second pipeline took carbon dioxide off to a dock, where
a "carbon dioxide tanker" was being loaded. Out at sea, another
such tanker was under way, off to make use of other avenues to
dispose of its load of unwanted greenhouse gas.
        This tanker, in Koide's idealized future, would have
quite a choice of off-screen destinations. As I sat through the
remainder of the Oxford conference, I saw many further
images of technical fixes for the carbon dioxide problem.
Most of them chose the deep ocean as the best hiding place
for the gas. They featured a variety of pipelines extending from
the coast, or wells far out to sea, all pumping carbon dioxide in
megatonnes down into the depths. 
        Also present at the conference were those who favour
biological, rather than engineered, technical fixes to the
carbon dioxide problem. In such schemes, tankers would
deliver not carbon dioxide, but iron, to the open ocean. The iron
would promote the growth of the phytoplankton, the
miriads of microscopic plants at the base of the food chain in
surface waters, allowing them to take down more carbon
dioxide from the air as they photosynthesize.
        So what is wrong with all these technical fixes?
Scientists gave us the car, the coal-fired power station, and
most of the rest of the contrivances which contribute to the
modern global-warming dilemma. They didn't know at the time that
global warming would be the outcome of unrestrained
fossil-fuel reliance, or that consequent climate change would
appear scary enough a threat in 1992 to force 167 governments to
negotiate a climate convention, and in record time. But
now that global warming is recognised as a significant threat by
governments, can't scientists now provide us with devices that
will dig us out of the hole before we are forced to run the
gauntlet of a catastrophically destablized climate?
        The answer is yes, of course, in principle. But for the
environmentalist such contrivances have already been
invented, and wait virtually unused, under-researched, and
underdeveloped, in the wings. They involve a panapoly of
energy-efficiency devices, and a wide range of renewable-
energy technologies. Their uptake requires, among other
things, oil companies transforming themselves in the years
ahead into total-energy companies, positioning themselves to make
their money in the twenty-first century in multi-billion-dollar
markets in solar power and energy services, instead of oil-
dependency and energy profligacy. 
        Hisashi Ishitani of the University of Tokyo showed, at
the Oxford conference, a scenario whereby solar power could soon
come to power the world in the next century. But he
instantly rejected it, moving on to advocate another
scenario, wherein great use was made of technical fixes for the
CO2 problem. Why? "This (solar) scenario would not be
accepted in the real world," he observed, to laughter from
the assembled delegates.
        In dismantling such attitudes lies one of the central
challenges for environmentalists in the years ahead.
        The technical fixers have problems of their own. They
begin at the carbon dioxide recovery, compression and and
liquefaction plants in Hitoshi Koide's vision. These would
require fully a fifth of the electricity from the power plant
they service in order to work. And even then, only 30% of
fossil-fuel carbon dioxide emissions come from power
stations. What of the rest - in transport, commerical and
residential uses of oil, coal, and gas? 
        The 167 governments who have signed the Climate
Convention have committed to stablizing greenhouse-gas
concentrations in the atmosphere at levels which pose no
danger to adequate food supply, healthy economic activity,
and the ability of ecosystems to adapt to global warming. By any
reading of the advice they are receiving from their
scientific advisors on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, that goal must entail deep cuts in emissions. The
technical fixers can only dream of fixing a small part of the
problem.
        Economics also works against them. If you want to remove
carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by growing trees, you are
looking at costs of around 3 per tonne of carbon. At the
Oxford conference, scientists working for British Coal
described a scheme for piping carbon dioxide from a power
station in the Midlands across the country to Wales, and
thence out to the continental margin southwest of Ireland,
there to be dumped into the deep Atlantic. The cost? An
estimated 20 to 100 per tonne of carbon removed. Economics
to beat even those which made the UK nuclear industry
unprivatizable. 
        The economics involves much more than direct cost.
Policymakers are searching, where the global warming threat is
concerned, for ways to trigger profound change in energy policy
in the face of limited and skewed energy funding. In a very real
sense, the large funds available for CO2 disposal research -
research on a technology which may never
materialize and wouldn't impact atmospheric CO2 much even if it
did - are in direct competition with renewables-and-
efficiency R&D. The latter has already been starved of funds for
years on an energy playing field skewed massively in the
direction of fossil fuels and nuclear.
        Environmental concerns, on top of all this, are
manifold. Let us begin with disposal in aquifers. A Danish
expert at the Oxford conference, Thomas Krom, summarized the
challenge as follows. "We would need to monitor the facility for
an extremely long time. It would be like a nuclear waste
facility. Compressed carbon dioxide is denser than air and
any catastrophic leakage contains a serious danger for the
local inhabitants." Krom suggested that the worst-case
analysis could resemble the 1986 disaster in which 1,750
souls perished when a volcanic lake in Cameroon belched
carbon dioxide.
        What of oceanic disposal, the out-of-sight out-of-mind
option? Proposals were put forward at the Oxford conference for
both shallow injection of liquid carbon dioxide, on the
continental shelf, hoping the dense nature of the plume would
cause it to sink into deep water, or at depth in the oceans,
where the density of liquid CO2 is such that it sinks, or
forms hydrates, which are solid and sink even more
efficiently. Objections begin with the ethics of what is,
ultimately, a transient "solution" to the problem. The deeper the
carbon dioxide is injected, the longer it stays in the
oceans, but it is important to realize that the gas - because of
oceanic circulation - would find its way back to the
atmosphere eventually. As Drs de Baar and Stoll of the
Netherlands Institute of Oceanographic Sciences have
observed, ocean circulation would "return the deep injected CO2
to the surface within decades or centuries. Deep sea
injection is at best a partial, expensive, and temporal
remedy to the CO2 problem."
        Then there are the environmental impacts of plumes of
acidic, asphyxiating water. Any environmental impact
assessment for mass-release (as opposed to local perturbation
trials) would have to be be based essentially on guesswork. In
particular, the impact on ocean organisms mistaking solid carbon
dioxide particles (so-called hydrate particles) for
food, which would have the effect of filling their guts and
starving them, would be impossible to assess in the open
ocean. As a Norwegian speaker told the Oxford conference,
"there is no doubt that marine life in the area affected by the
plume would be wiped out." To quote another speaker,
"public opposition is expected,...we must persuade the public
that this is less risky than emission to the atmosphere."
        Robert Hangebrauk of the US Environmental Protection
Agency injected a view more in tune with the environmental
realities of the 1990s. Speaking of the full range of
disposal options, he said "if the end result is nothing but a
modest delay in arriving at unacceptable atmospheric carbon
dioxide levels, a costly mistake may have been made. It may also
be a mistake for which there is no technically feasible or
economically acceptable remedial action  ...a new
anthropogenic source of carbon dioxide which could emit even if
all direct fossil energy emissions were brought to a
halt."
        Finally, there is the question of using the biological
route for carbon dioxide disposal, rather than the
engineering route. The problems here begin with
eutrophication. Might the phytoplankton, if successfully
fertilized with iron, then use up so much oxygen in the ocean
water that the planktonic ecosystem was disrupted? Who could say.
Much would depend on ocean circulation, something still very
imperfectly understood. The indicators from marginal
seas are not encouraging. "Eutrophication seems to be
happening at the mouths of almost all the world's rivers,"
concluded Science magazine in April 1990, reporting on an
international conference on algal blooms and eutrophication.      
  Second, there is the problem of toxicity in the
phytoplankton. The extent to which we would be playing
ecological roulette by going ahead with artifical
fertilization is truly alarming when you consider how little we
know about toxicity in microorganisms in the oceans. One of the
few oceanographers to have systematically studied
toxic algae in the oceans, Don Anderson of the Woods Hole
oceanographic institution, is far from alone in believing
that the incidence of toxic algal blooms has been growing in
recent years. He said recently that "previously unknown
organisms, and organisms thought to be harmless, have just
exploded." As Science magazine put it, "new types of toxins are
appearing and known algal killers are extending their
reach to new regions of the world." In Canada during 1987,
for example, three people were killed by eating seafood
contaminated with a poison traced to a bloom of diatoms (a
type of phytoplankton) previously thought to be innocent of all
toxicity. Such is our ignorance.
        There are other imponderables. Richard Dugdale and
Frances Wilkerson, of the University of California at Los
Angeles, have suggested that iron might favour the growth of
larger, less digestible, phytoplankton cells, which could
reduce the grazing rate, and that the iron could even have a
direct lethal effect on grazers.
        This, then, in the scarcely-understood environment in
which experiments would be taking place. Experiment becomes
something of a misnomer. A more apposite word would be
"gamble." 
        In their desperation to find ways of allowing fossil-
fuels to be burnt ad infinitum without penalty, the energy
establishment runs the risk of repeating the nuclear
industry's experience of technological determinism. Years
ago, nuclear engineers who understood little or nothing of
the natural world assured everyone that there would be no
environmental problems with closing the nuclear cycle. The
rest is history. Now the carbon dioxide disposal community, with
barely an ecologist in sight, presents paper after paper at
conferences like the Oxford one with dismissive references to
environmental problems, or passing references to the need for
more research.
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