I’ve never understood carbon capture and storage. I never went past high school and that was about 50 years ago. But I still remember the key principles behind why perpetual motion will never be a thing.
Unless there is an energy producing reaction that binds CO2 or separates the carbon from the oxygen without producing nasty byproducts, carbon capture and storage cannot work without pouring more energy into the project than what we gained from the release of the CO2.
Just imagine what anything else looks like. For every fossil fueled power plant that has ever existed, we need to build at least one larger non-carbon plant to power the capture and storage. There are several ways to reduce the fraction of our power that goes into capture and storage:
- Take more time to remove than it took to add
- Remove less than we added
- Find a less energy intensive method of binding the CO2 (that is we don’t need to turn the CO2 back into a fuel; is creating calcium carbonate an option?)
But no matter how you slice it, removing enough quickly enough will still require a large fraction of our power generation capacity.
The initiatives cannot be anything other than a shell game designed to hide the underlying perpetual motion machine.
Theoretically carbon capture can work, but just like you said, it takes additional energy to capture carbon, and that amount is more than what it takes to produce the needed electricity if you’re using a carbon based energy source.
That said, if you go for something like nuclear, than you do get a clean source of energy that can be used to capture existing carbon. But we’re already at the point where our energy infrastructure is inadequate for just electrifying what we currently have, and in a few years the Pickering plant is going to have to shut down due to being so old (though apparently the government is trying to delay it as there’s no plans for building a new plant of any sort to replace the Pickering plant).
So even in the best case scenario, it’ll be more than a decade before any sort of large scale carbon capture scheme can even be started, as that’s how long it’ll take to build enough new plants to cover existing demand, let alone accounting for future demand.
I hate the term clean energy for nuclear ! It is not clean energy ! Where do you put the waste ? If it’s so clean I guess you dont mind if we use YOUR backyard to put the waste ?
Yes, a few tons of high level nuclear waste from every reactor ever made each year is comparable to covering an entire farm for old windmill blades and burnt out solar panels aren’t comparable. Especially since nuclear waste can easily be recycled into new fuel while supposed “green energy” waste can’t.
The don’t ever say clean anything ever again.
Manufacturing ANYTHING generates waste. By this logic nothing is clean.
