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The year is 2321. All life on Earth has been extinguished. The ground is a desolate wasteland of rubble and desert. Humanity has committed environmental suicide by greedily releasing vast quantities of carbon into their atmosphere. If you could witness this, you could see the remnants of an advanced human civilization that, despite its momentum and progress, had collapsed on itself, but no, you're dead. The carbon problem is a dire situation that, if not treated correctly, could reduce us to this bleak future. We have working technologies in place but need scientific miracles soon to completely solve our predicament.
One such hope lies in carbon capture and storage technology (CCS) as a feasible solution. Though at this time, because of viability, commerciality, and risk; traditional Carbon Capture and Storage is not the solution to significantly reduce our carbon emissions dilemma. According to Joe Romm (2013), founding editor for Climate Progress and author of "Carbon capture and storage: One step forward, one step back", "CCS would no more than 10% of the answer to the carbon problem by 2050". Proficient in: Chemistry
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There can be, however, a promising future for this technology and ultimately us.
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The carbon problem is here and now. With projects like FutureGen, CCS technology will not be ready in the given time. Planned carbon capture projects have significantly dropped in the past year and won't be effective large-scale until the 2030s at the earliest (Romm, 2013). If we can't even get initial plants up and running, not only will the dilemma increase, we won't be able to acquire data as to whether or not we should continue spending our time, energy, and research on something that is ultimately not worth the effort. The US proposed integrating a carbon capture and storage system to a coal power plant in Illinois called FutureGen that would work by essentially draw out the carbon dioxide as the coal is being fired and pump it into rock formations deep in the ground.
According to Pam Hunter (2015), author for Engineering News-Record, the FutureGen complete CCS project first announced by President Bush in 2003 started construction in 2014 and has since restructured, canceled, relocated, and restarted. As of Feb. 4, it still hasn't achieved sufficient funds to continue development for the project, which is now named FutureGen 2.0. After 12 years in which we still haven't been able to get this initial project up and running, there is little hope to successfully implement these systems across the country and world. Romm (2013) concludes, "While C.C.S. projects are progressing, the pace is well below the level required for C.C.S. to make a substantial contribution to climate change mitigation." What we need is a plan or method of reducing our carbon footprint as immediately as possible or it may be too late.
Even if we had the money and no catastrophic deadline, the costs required to implement the capture and storage systems is too much and could be better spent on other methods. Carbon capture can get expensive. According to Mohammed Al-Juaied and Adam Whitmore (2009), in their paper "Realistic Costs for Carbon Capture", "First-of-a-kind CCS plants will have costs of carbon abatement of some $150/tCO, avoided (with a range $120 180/tCO2 avoided), excluding transport and storage costs." With the billions of tons released each year, this cost could be overwhelming. Not only that, but with existing carbon capture technologies in our large power plants there would be a 30% higher cost for electricity and a loss of 20-30% of the power generated to actually capture and compress the carbon.
Could we feasibly spend so much cash on something that will also reduce our generated power? Better yet, another important question needs to be asked; Is it even worth the effort? Chris Nelder, author of "Why Carbon Capture and Storage will never Pay Off" implies that the reasoning behind CCS is just an excuse to continue using our traditional, dirty, power plants. Why should we funnel millions of dollars more into our old power systems that have a majority of the blame for these problems in the first place? Instead, we could be funneling the time, money, and energy into cleaner methods like nuclear, wind, or solar energies.
The U.S. Department of Energy seems to have the same idea. "The U.S. Dept. of Energy has pulled out of the $1.65-billion FutureGen 2.0 carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) demonstration project in Meredosia, Ill., striking a major blow to the project just as it was gearing up to begin construction.” (Hunter, 2015). As we can see, the costs for this technology is definitely not something our country and economy can handle.
Even if we could attain the funding, while no longer having the CO, cause problems in the atmosphere, storing the substance below us comes with its own troubles. Storage of CO, in rock formations or deep water is too risky and unsafe with possibility to add more problems than they solve. According to Elvira Hoffman (2010) in the article "Pipelines for Carbon Sequestration: Background and Issues", CO, becomes much more dense and solidifies at depths of around 800 meters, making them much less likely to slip away from an underground storage.
However, there would still be some leakage. Even with a very small leakage rate, the underground storage system is all but useless when it comes to permanent sequestration. Not only that, but leaks can bubble up and infiltrate our drinking water and the resulting pressure could cause earthquakes that would, in turn, cause more leaks (Romm, 2013). Underground sequestration may not seem promising, but the plans for underwater sequestration may be even less favorable.
Josh Clark (2008), author of the article, "Can We Bury Our CO2 Problem in the Ocean?", reports that experiments have been done at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute to see if carbon storage in deep ocean is feasible. After leaving a liquid CO, beaker down 12,000 feet below sea level, it grew in volume and broke apart into globs that were then swept away by the current, likely upsetting the ocean's ecosystem (Clark, 2008). He goes on to state that there is a possibility to store gigantic bags of CO, at the bottom of the ocean, each with the possibility to contain two days' worth of the world's emissions, or around 160 million metric tons. But should one of these floating mines happen to pop, complications galore could ensue. We have direct evidence that large amounts of carbon dioxide stored underwater can be disastrous.
Calamity struck one August night, 1986, in the African nation of Cameroon. Atlas Obscura (2013), journalist for Slate, states that Lake Nyos in Cameroon literally exploded from the buildup of carbon dioxide under the lake from nearby volcano. It is now known as a limnic eruption that caused water to fly over 300 feet in the air, creating a small tsunami and releasing hundreds of thousands of tons of CO, at 60 mph in a 15-mile radius. From this one terrible disaster, 1,745 people died from the initial blast or subsequent suffocation. With one timebomb ticking above us, we don't need another below making us a chaos sandwich.
It doesn't look too good for us by the look of the time, cost, and storage problems CCS technology would bring. What we need is a method of capturing the carbon then destroying or recycling it. Luckily, there are already working carbon capture systems in nature today, particularly from whale poop. According to Congressional Digest (2014), the ocean already absorbs one-fourth of the CO, we emit annually. A lot of this comes from the great blue monsters of the depths, whales. According to George Monbiot (2014), author of "Why Whale Poo Matters", when whales come up from the deep to breathe, they fertilize phytoplankton near the surface by releasing large fecal plumes, otherwise known as poonamis.
These phytoplankton then capture carbon from the atmosphere and sink to the bottom of the ocean when they die, storing the carbon with them. Trish Lavery (2010), author of "Iron Defecation by Sperm Whales Stimulates Carbon Export in the Southern Ocean", states, "By enhancing new primary production, the populations of 12,000 sperm whales in the Southern Ocean act as a carbon sink, removing 2 × 10 tonnes [sic] more carbon from the atmosphere than they add during respiration.
The ability of the Southern Ocean to act as a carbon sink may have been diminished by large-scale removal of sperm whales during industrial whaling.” Whale numbers may be lower now, but Monbiot reports, "...when they were at their historical populations, whales are likely to have made a small but significant contribution to the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere." (Monbiot, 2014). While we can't completely rely on whale fecal matter, it does serve as a template of carbon capture that we can hopefully emulate and refine.
Obviously, whale poop is not going to be our cure-all, but if we can learn to recycle carbon effectively, we can create biologic carbon capture systems that can sustain themselves. According to Richard Sayre (2010) in his article "Microalgae: The Potential for Carbon Capture", certain algae, like the ones from poonamis, are able to draw CO, from the atmosphere as biocarbonate in man made ponds, reducing atmospheric CO2 emissions. These algae can be harvested at any time of the year and, if grown under stressful conditions like low nitrogen, can redirect production to create storage compounds like lipids which can become energy-rich biofuels, further drawing carbon out of the atmosphere.
According to European Biofuels Technology Platform (2012) in their article "Biomass with CO2 Capture and Storage - The way Forward for Europe", "...Bio-CCS could remove 10 billion tonnes [sic] of CO, from the atmosphere every year by 2050 using available sustainable biomass..." If we can mass-produce ponds full of these algae, we can effectively pull the carbon already in the atmosphere down to earth and store it away or recycle it by using it as fuel. These negative emissions are just one method we could use to reduce the carbon in the atmosphere.
In an ideal scenario, we would be able to cut our emissions down to a point that we could actually have negative emissions and our problem would slowly fade away. But if we can't store this captured carbon underground or underwater, what can we do with the vast quantities of CO2 that are now lying around us? Reduce, reuse, recycle. Mantra Energy, a new green chemical company based in Canada, has just this idea. But like most large ambitions, money always plays a factor.
What better way to raise funds than to tickle people's greed? It is a wonder that even though this “carbon problem thing” is life-threatening for us as a species, people are not aware nor care enough to band together and stop the danger! Instead of scaring the people about carbon, we should sell it to them. Mantra's goal is to develop carbon capture and utilization technology and expand its commercial application. There is great hope that they can turn the carbon dioxide that we capture into usable fuel cells. By making captured CO, a commercial commodity, people will be much more eager to fund upstarting CCS projects and development.
With the carbon problem literally looming over our heads every minute, we need a solution before its too late for our world and species. However, the viability, commerciality, and risk associated with traditional Carbon Capture and Storage keep it from being the solution to significantly reducing our carbon emissions dilemma. CCS has a long way to go, but if we continue to develop and fund upstarting projects, we may be able to escape the bleak, lifeless wasteland that is waiting for us on the horizon.
An Examination of the Carbon Problem of the Environment. (2023, Mar 26). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/an-examination-of-the-carbon-problem-of-the-environment-essay
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