According to a story in Gizmag yesterday, a group of researchers at Newcastle University in the U.K. may have accidentally stumbled on a solution to the problems that have bedeviled carbon capture and sequestration — by studying sea urchins.

“We had set out to understand in detail the carbonic acid reaction, which is what happens when CO2 reacts with water, and needed a catalyst to speed up the process,” Dr. Lidija Šiller, the leader of the team, said in a press release. “At the same time, I was looking at how organisms absorb CO2 into their skeletons and in particular the sea urchin which converts the CO2 to calcium carbonate.”

The use of calcium carbonate to grow shells and other bony parts is a trait urchins share with other marine animals. And when the team examined the urchin larvae, they found a high concentrations of nickel on their exoskeleton. Working off that discovery, they added nickel nanoparticles to their carbonic acid test. The result was the complete removal of the CO2 as it was converted into calcium carbonate.

According to Gaurav Bhaduri, a PhD student in Newcastle University and the lead author of the team’s paper, the methodology they derived — and have now patented — is simpler and much cheaper than the traditional enzyme-based approaches:

“The beauty of a Nickel catalyst is that it carries on working regardless of the pH and because of its magnetic properties it can be re-captured and re-used time and time again. It’s also very cheap – 1,000 times cheaper than the enzyme. And the by-product – the carbonate – is useful and not damaging to the environment.”

The research team developed a process to capture CO2 from waste gas by passing it directly from a chimney top through a water column rich in nickel nanoparticles. The solid calcium carbonate can then be recovered at the bottom of the column.

The researchers say their discovery could provide big CO2 emitters, such as power stations and chemical processing plants, with a cheap way to capture and store their waste CO2 before it is released into the atmosphere.

Every method invented so far to capture or sequester carbon from emitters before it can enter the atmosphere has suffered from difficulties regarding cost, feasibility, and side-effects. Pumping CO2 into the ground, for instance, is difficult, expensive, and carries risks of leakage, water contamination, and even earthquakes. Other processes, like the ones mentioned by Bhaduri, also convert CO2 into calcium carbonate or magnesium carbonate through the use of enzymes like carbonic anhydrase. But because of the chemical complexities they’re inefficient and expensive.

Calcium carbonate, which is essentially chalk, is widely used in the building industry to make cement and other materials. It’s even used by hospitals to make plaster casts. So once removed from the Newcastle team’s carbon capture process, the calcium carbonate could potentially be put to other uses.

The discovery certainly isn’t a cure all. The process can’t be fitted to car, so its use is limited to power plants and other major emitters. But Dr. Šiller believes it could someday have a big impact: “It is an effective, cheap solution that could be available world-wide to some of our most polluting industries and have a significant impact on the reduction of atmospheric CO2.”

The votes are in.  The people have spoken.

Snap!

Since online voting is the definitive way to settle key issues, it’s time to move on to climate solutions we can rely on….

More seriously, let’s review the case.  In my opening statement on the role carbon capture and storage will play in solving the climate crisis, I focused on the vast economic challenge.  In my rebuttal, I explored how “Feasibility, Permanence and Safety Issues Remain Unresolved.”

My closing statement looks at the solutions we need to embrace aggressively now so that CCS  even has a chance of being a contribution to avoiding catastrophic global warming:

Time has run out for delay.

In my opening statement on the role carbon capture and storage will play in solving the climate crisis, I focused on the economic challenge.

The Economist has now posted my “rebuttal,” which focuses on the issues of permanence, transparency, and public safety.  My bottom line:  There are simply too many unanswered questions for anyone to say today that we could rely on large-scale deployment of CCS in the 2030s as a major climate solution.

The debate will be “decided” by online voting, so do go and vote.

Here is my full rebuttal:

Read more

For the second time, I’m participating in an online debate sponsored by The Economist.

The proposition is awkwardly worded, as always, “This house believes that climate-control policies cannot rely on carbon capture and storage.”

The debate will be “decided” by online voting, so do go and vote.  And, no, I haven’t changed my view of online voting, but I don’t make the rules. Yes, it is sponsored by Statoil.  ’nuff said.

Here is my opening statement as the “proposer”:

Read more

Key Story Below: A tax break that could help get America’s first offshore wind farm up and running has been available for two years. But no one can qualify for it.

Coal Project Hits Snag as a Partner Backs Off

The leading American effort to capture carbon dioxide from coal plants has hit a stumbling block that could imperil the project and set back a promising technology for addressing global warming, people involved in the venture said.

Ameren, the Midwestern power company that was to be the host for the project, has told its partners that because of its financial situation, it cannot take part as promised, although it has not told them exactly what it will do. The company had agreed to supply an old oil-fired power plant in Meredosia, Ill., that would be converted to demonstrate the carbon-capture technology on a commercial scale.

Read more

Other key stories below: Belgium Looks to Phase out Nuclear Power by 2025; Is Carbon Capture and Storage Storage on Track, Despite Setbacks?

Obama Questions China’s Clean Energy Practices

President Obama, asked about a trade case U.S. solar manufacturers have filed against China, said China has “questionable competitive practices” on clean energy and his administration has fought “these kinds of dumping activities.”

Oregon-based SolarWorld Industries America Inc., the largest U.S. maker of solar cells and panels, and six unnamed U.S. solar manufacturers petitioned the U.S. government Oct. 19 to halt what they said was the dumping of heavily subsidized products by China’s state-supported solar industry into the U.S. market.

Obama, in an interview Tuesday with KGW NewsChannel 8 of Portland, Ore., responded to a question about whether he’d be willing to look at “any kind of actions” to protect green jobs in the U.S. He answered:

“We have seen a lot of questionable competitive practices coming out of China when it comes to the clean energy space, and I have been more aggressive than previous administrations in enforcing our trade laws. We have filed actions against them when we see these kinds of dumping activities, and we’re going to look very carefully at this stuff and potentially bring actions if we find that the basic rules of the road have been violated.”

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE OR COMMENT

Read more

A round-up of climate and energy news. Please post other stories below.

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is the planet’s largest reef system and one of the seven natural wonders of the world, but it may not survive the century.

Coral reefs ‘will be gone by end of the century’

Coral reefs are on course to become the first ecosystem that human activity will eliminate entirely from the Earth, a leading United Nations scientist claims. He says this event will occur before the end of the present century, which means that there are children already born who will live to see a world without coral.

The claim is made in a book published tomorrow, which says coral reef ecosystems are very likely to disappear this century in what would be “a new first for mankind – the ‘extinction’ of an entire ecosystem”. Its author, Professor Peter Sale, studied the Great Barrier Reef for 20 years at the University of Sydney. He currently leads a team at the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health.

The predicted decline is mainly down to climate change and ocean acidification, though local activities such as overfishing, pollution and coastal development have also harmed the reefs. The book, Our Dying Planet, published by University of California Press, contains further alarming predictions, such as the prospect that “we risk having no reefs that resemble those of today in as little as 30 or 40 more years”.

Read more

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), now the senior senator from the Appalachian state after Sen. Robert Byrd’s death this year, rebuked his state’s climate deniers at a forum about the future of coal on Wednesday. West Virginia’s politics are dominated by coal interests, including the mountaintop removal giant Massey Energy run by right-wing climate denier Don Blankenship. Many of the state’s top politicians are in denial about the costs of coal pollution, even as mountains are destroyed, children poisoned, and towns washed away. Rockefeller told coal supporters should stop “pretending climate change doesn’t exist“:

People think they are protecting coal by pretending climate change doesn’t exist or that (by saying) carbon capture and storage is not needed. But burying one’s head in the sand is not a solution and can only backfire. Denying the problem of climate change may feel good in the short term, but in the long term, it only locks in an existing infrastructure for other fuels like natural gas and will cost coal miners’ jobs.

Rockefeller “said such thinking will put the state behind the rest of the world in embracing new energy technology, and could lead to coal losing out to natural gas as the major energy supplier of the future,” WVNS TV’s Walt Williams reported. Rockefeller said “it is a natural instinct for people to ignore a problem hoping it would go away, but it won’t in this case.”

Responding to the propaganda campaigns by Massey Energy, the West Virginia Coal Association, FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity, American Solutions for Winning the Future, and other coal-powered front groups, Rockefeller said he’s not on the “bandwagon” that “climate change is a myth”:

I’m concerned that powerful voices in West Virginia continue to argue that climate change is a myth. I’m not on the same bandwagon that some of you are. I am really concerned that these voices are so loud, dominant (and) shaping public opinion.

“The question is not should we try to address climate change,” he said. “The question is what tools should we develop to tackle it,” supporting the Obama administration’s efforts to jumpstart American carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology.

Unfortunately, Rockefeller is still attempting to delay action on global warming pollution, with his proposal to suspend Environmental Protection Agency rules and his support for Lisa Murkowski’s (R-AK) amendment to deny that greenhouse gases are a pollutant. Ironically, as the Charleston Gazette’s Ken Ward Jr. notes, establishing limits on coal pollution are critical for creating a domestic market for CCS technology, allowing the United States to compete with the current market leaders in Europe and Asia.

Before his death, Byrd demanded that the coal industry get real about the costs of mountaintop removal, telling it to end the “fear mongering, grandstanding and outrage.” Opposing the Murkowski amendment, Byrd said that to “deny the mounting science of climate change is to stick our heads in the sand,” and “the regulation of greenhouse gasses is approaching, whether done by Congress or by regulation, despite naysayers who rail about the non-existence of climate change.”

One hopes that Rockefeller will continue to honor the legacy of Sen. Byrd by standing up for the real interests of West Virginians, instead of the short-term interests of its handful of coal millionaires.