By by Chris Johnson | The Daily Sceptic
In the last few weeks a number of serious errors have come to light in the Climate Change Committee’s (CCC) plan for Net Zero. The CCC plan was published mid-2019 in a document titled ‘Net Zero Technical Report’.
In summary, the CCCs plan for Net Zero is to shift transport and heating from using petrol, diesel and gas to using electricity and then to decarbonise the electricity grid.
To decarbonise the grid, it is assumed that electricity will be generated using nuclear and renewables. During periods when nuclear, wind and solar cannot meet demand, Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) will be deployed to remove CO2 emissions as the electricity must be generated using gas.
Carbon Capture and Storage is a new and untested technology that has never been deployed at scale anywhere on earth. However, it is clear from the CCC’s report that CCS plays a major roll in achieving Net Zero. As I reported in a previous article, regardless of this being an untested technology, the U.K. only plans to build a quarter of the required capacity to hit Net Zero by 2050 (the plan requires the U.K. to capture and store 176Mt of CO2 annually).
Nevertheless, our Government envisages significant CCS capacity at 50Mt annually. Carbon Capture and Storage involves filtering CO2 from the exhaust produced from gas turbines used to generate electricity, then piping the captured CO2 to plants that compress the gas into a liquid before it is then injected into underground storage areas around the U.K.
Compressed CO2 is currently being commercialised as a way to store energy for use in periods when nuclear and renewables are unavailable. The company Energy Dome has developed a working 4MWh system in Sardinia, Italy. The company says its technology has an energy storage density 10-20 times higher than other compressed air energy storage (CAES) solutions and two-thirds that of liquid air energy storage (LAES).
The CCC’s plan requires vast quantities of CO2 to be compressed and stored under the U.K. Given this potential energy could be released at any time should something go wrong, it seems sensible to consider the safety implications of Carbon Capture and Storage.
Energy Dome has recently raised $11m and is building a larger 100MWh system. Its 100MWh store requires about 2,000 tonnes of CO2. This means the company is expecting to store 0.05MWh of energy per tonne of compressed CO2. Using this energy density, the CCC’s plan to store 176Mt per year will mean 8.8TWh of potential energy is being trapped beneath the U.K. annually. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima exploded with an energy of about 15 kilotons of TNT or 0.0174TWh. Therefore the energy we will be storing under our feet is equivalent to 505 Hiroshima bombs every year or the energy released by 16 magnitude seven earthquakes per year. Read Full Article >
