£22Bn For A Rube Goldberg Machine?

[ToraToraTora]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce8jpj3z3n2o

It seems they saw Miliband coming. Funny how we always seem to have money to give to foriegners or waste on silly ideas and contraptions but our pensioners can't have their heating on.

[TheChair]

Still, at least it's not 32 billion on a guy with an old copy of Excel to run Track & Trace.

[davebro3]

Labour are obviously going all out to bankrupt the country before their single term is up.👿

[naomi24]

Where are they getting all this spare cash from?

[davebro3]

Maybe their mantra is "The Tories left us with a problem we'll leave THEM with an even bigger one"!

[New Judge]

Carbon Capture & Storage (CCS) has been investigated across the world and nobody has ever produced a model which will work on a large scale. Only very small experimental models have been tested and the results for them was not overwhelming. Its supporters suggest that because it has been proved to work in theory, only a bit more development is required to get it to work at industrial scale in practice. But it was proved to work in theory more than 30 years ago, but despite many attempts it has never been found possible to industrialise the process. So far upwards of £100bn has been spent globally (funded by taxpayers and energy consumers) to develop the technology at scale and all efforts, without exception, have failed. Some examples:

In 2006, the Chief Executive of the Australian Coal Association predicted that by 2020 it would be possible to capture 25% of emissions, but under 0.2% was achieved.

Chevron's Gorgon plant in Australia emitted more than double the amount it captured in one year.

Of course the arch-villains among the “net zero” snake-oil merchants are the Drax corporation. Their power plant in Yorkshire  produces around 7% of the UK’s electricity demand by burning seven million tons of mainly fresh timber, felled and processed in Canada and North America, and shipped to Yorkshire by diesel powered ships and trains.

Drax has been extracting government subsidies for more than a decade since it decided to convert its coal-fired boilers to wood burning. The emissions from this combustion do not count against the UK’s total but are instead attributed to the countries from where the wood originated. Drax is thus already near enough “net zero” (despite being  - by far -the single largest site of CO2 emissions in the UK).

Among the pledges Drax has been making during the time it has been extracting these subsidies is the development of a successful CCS system which will see its CO2 captured and piped into empty oil and gas wells in the North Sea. Some idea of the “creative accounting” that accompanies the “decarbonisation” industry can be gained when Drax suggests that (should it ever work) CCS will make it “carbon negative” – i.e. that it removes more CO2 that it emits.

The deadline for implementing its CCS has been extended many times. It is now currently set at 2030 and many sources believe that if it ever works at all, it will be nearer to 2040 before it produces any worthwhile results. The current subsidy arrangements for Drax expire in 2027 and there is little doubt the promised CCS will feature high in its pitch for more funds. 

A government considering spending £billions on this technology would be better simply printing £5 notes to that value and chucking them into Drax’s furnaces. A least some good will come of it.

Better still would be to instruct Drax to stop burning wood in vast quantities and leave the trees where they are to do their “Carbon Capture” for them. They could also reopen the Rough gas storage facility in the North Sea and fill it with gas. Then Drax could build a pipeline from there and convert its furnaces to run on gas.

[ToraToraTora]

judge: "Of course the arch-villains among the “net zero” snake-oil merchants are the Drax corporation." - a bug bear of us both judge, how any right thinking person can say this is anything but a complete con trick is beyond me. I think even the purps know but can't beleive their luck in being allowed to perpetuate the madness.

[Canary42]

has been investigated across the world and nobody has ever produced a model which will work on a large scale.////

Odd, that also happened for many many years with flying heavier-than-air machines. And look where we are now because some folk never gave up trying.  If everyone was like the whining naysayers we'd still be living in caves.

[ToraToraTora]

not the same thing canary, we always knew flight was possible it just needed refinement. Carbon capture is an entirely different matter.

[newmodarmy]

//Odd, that also happened for many many years with flying heavier-than-air machines. //

That doesn't seem like an equivalent situation. We didn't build and use lots of planes until they had been fully tested

[New Judge]

“Odd, that also happened for many many years with flying heavier-than-air machines.”

There are a couple of very big differences:

1. Heavier than air flight was developed by private individuals investing their own money. Taxpayers or others were not asked, let alone compelled, to contribute to it.

2. Developing heavier that air flight did not jeopardise the provision of a vital utility as a result of ideological dogma.

I have no time for he “decarbonisation” industry in the UK. “Net zero” is an unachievable and pointless aim. However, if it is to be done, some basics need to be understood.

The idea of the industry is to eliminate the burning of fossil fuels (and, in my view, wood as well). CCS merely prolongs their use (if it worked). 

Researchers for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) found underperforming carbon capture projects considerably outnumbered successful ones by large margins. Of 13 projects it examined for the study – accounting for about 55% of the world’s current operational capacity – seven underperformed, two failed and one was mothballed, the report found.

There’s plenty of material available to show that the technology is not viable at scale and that it will do little to control emissions. Here’s the report from the IEEFA:

https://ieefa.org/ccs

Its summary:

“Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is an expensive and unproven technology that distracts from global decarbonization efforts while allowing the oil and gas industry to conduct business as usual.

Even if realized at its full announced potential, CCS will only account for about 2.4% of the world’s carbon mitigation by 2030, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It’s worth noting that not one single CCS project has ever reached its target CO2 capture rate.”

Politicians in this country would be wise to have a read up on the subject before committing enormous sums which the country does not have on something that is unlikely to work, and even if it does, will produce only marginal benefits.

[douglas9401]

What are 'purps'? 🤣

 

[fender62]

the road to hell with sky high bills and blackouts, how the hell starmer green lit this green nutcase edd milipede *** belief, but i imagine lot's of lolly for the (law and energy) firms, one day it will all come out in the wash of government waste on a monumental scale, meanwhile the plebs suffer for idealism.

[ToraToraTora]

they are like twerps dougie.

 

[Old_Geezer]

Researching carbon capture is a good idea, but what's all this nonsense of charging research to customers' bills ?  If the government wants research they pay for it out of the public kitty, not forgetting to patent it. Roll it out when proven. And a project this large should probably be undertaken by a consortium of national governments to reduce costs to each.