How Black Is My Carbon
Critical drinking of KoolAid
Reader Note: thank you Michael D for the wonderful cup of coffee that fuelled today’s rant!
I recently came across the following paragraph in an as-yet unpublished report:
“BECCS (Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage) is characterised by the combination of biomass energy production with the capture and storage of CO2 emissions. This process inherently involves the combustion of biomass, which is considered carbon-neutral over its lifecycle, due to the CO2 absorbed by the biomass during its growth phase. By integrating CCS technology, the CO2 released during combustion can be captured and stored underground, effectively removing it from the atmosphere and contributing to negative emissions.”
The argument in this report is that burning “biomass” only releases carbon dioxide that was captured by plants during their growth cycles, thus it is carbon neutral. But wait a minute, according to the Generally Authorized Narradigm (GAN), coal/oil/gas are "fossil fuels" made from plant matter, and thus are “biomass”. Ergo, burning fossil fuels is a carbon-neutral process, n'est-ce pas?
The report goes on to say:
“[A] report by the EFI Foundation indicates that the cost of BECCS varies widely, from $20 to $400 per metric tonne of CO2 captured, depending on the scale and specific application. A study by the Nordic Council of Ministers further emphasises that high costs, coupled with insufficient financial incentives, remain major barriers to the widespread deployment of BECCS technology.”
My favorite part comes further down:
“Current BECCS plants capture only 11% to 13% of their CO2 emissions, and the technology itself consumes around 30% of a plant’s energy output, raising doubts about the overall effectiveness of BECCS as a negative emission solution.”
So, um…a power plant fitted to capture carbon dioxide to reduce emissions would have to burn 30% more fuel to maintain status quo output, not to mention the cost of retrofit, the emissions added by transporting the “biomass” to the generating plant, processing the “biomass” to be usable by the plant, the infrastructure to liquify the CO2, and then the cost of transporting it to a “storage” site and shoving it in the ground.
The report says that the CO2 shoved in the ground can be used in aging oil/gas fields to increase output, which would provide more fuel to increase power generation needed to run the BECCS systems and all the additional transportation and processing needed for the “biomass”.
I’m getting a headache. This is starting to sound like a grotesque merry-go-round in a creep show carnival.
Wouldn’t it just be easier to pump sea water into depleted reservoirs to force more oil/gas out that can be used for more productive work, like we’ve been doing for the past 60 years?
But wait! There’s more!
“On a global scale, BECCS would consume 20% of the world’s nitrogen fertiliser production—an activity that itself generates significant emissions—and require 4 trillion cubic meters of water per year, equivalent to all current global water withdrawals for irrigation. CCS operations also require substantial water; to sequester 12 gigatonnes of CO2 annually would use 3% of the water currently consumed by human activities, though some can be recycled. Water demand estimates for BECCS vary considerably, ranging from 0.72 trillion to 24.4 trillion cubic meters annually, depending on biomass type and location.”
I’m trying very, very hard to not use colorful and indelicate locker room epithets here.
“Proper management of biomass production is essential to avoid environmental issues like deforestation, soil degradation, and biodiversity loss, which could offset the intended benefits of BECCS. In [Southeast Asia], home to some of the world's most biodiverse rainforests that act as major carbon sinks, unsustainable land-use changes could have severe global consequences. Additionally, the increased use of fertilisers and pesticides for energy crops risks polluting important river systems, threatening regional ecosystems.”
This, I say making a grandiose indicative sweeping motion with my arm, THIS is the Great Green Reset (GGR) laid bare. We need to grind up the forests, deplete the world’s arable land, poison the water that we can no longer drink anyway, turn it all into pellets, burn it to ash, suck out the CO2, liquify it and transport it hundred of kilometers to shove it in the ground, all so global temperatures don’t rise one stinking degree, increasing the arable land and fresh water, and releasing literal plant food?
OK, I have to stop before I have a stroke. “[L]and and biomass availability, technological and economic feasibility, environmental and social impacts, infrastructure, transportation, and storage capacity” are just the broad issues faced by Bumbledicks in creating their Rainbow and Unicorn Utopia (RUU).
Keep in mind that all of this relies on the same people whose technical and managerial expertise brought us Maui and Los Angeles wildfires, multiple hurricane fiascos, global flood disasters, fresh water crises, food shortages, and puffball pandemics that nearly crashed civilization itself.
The dear reader will pardon me if I’m just a wee tiny tad bit skeptical of these clowns geoengineering the planet. When the report states that “fostering public-private partnerships and providing financial incentives, such as tax breaks, low-interest loans, and clear carbon pricing mechanisms,” I spewed my precious coffee all over the screen. It took me a half hour just to clean up my own mess, not to mention the ones they propose to make using fascist money-laundering schemes.
The Bumbledicks further propose “[e]ngaging local communities in decision-making through advisory boards will ensure that social impacts are considered.”
This is the very definition of the Hegelian Dialectic, where farmers are scared out of their wits by a bunch of lab-coated numbnuts, who then propose insane Rube Goldberg solutions for non-existent problems, followed by conning the farmers into believing they thought of it all by their widdle wonesomes.
Let’s not forget the obligatory “education programmes” (brainwashing) performed by NGOs, that convince the yokels to leverage their entire livelihoods to hire Western corporations to come in and rip those communities apart to test their theoretical mitigation technologies, before doing it back home.
As Sheridan Whiteside bellows at the opening of The Man Who Came to Dinner, “I may vomit!”
First of all, CO2 is produced by nearly every living thing on the planet. Second, carbon is the only element on the entire Periodic Table that is common to all life as we know it. Third, CO2 constitutes just 0.045% of Earth’s atmosphere and is NOT a greenhouse gas, though it is widely pumped into greenhouses to make plants grow faster and produce more good stuff. And fifth, imagine what we could do to improve existing technology with all the money and hot air expended on pie-in-the-sky megaprojects.
For a little perspective, 0.045% is 450 parts per million (ppm). According to OSHA, CO2 becomes toxic to humans at 5,000 ppm, and deadly at 7,000 ppm. I think we can relax now. Even if we set the entire planet on fire (which the Bumbledicks are desperately trying to do), we couldn’t raise atmospheric CO2 to toxic levels, much less raise temperatures one stinking degree.
For a fraction of the price of “saving the planet,” we can find a cure for bumbledickery.
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Bumbledicks are always fantasizing about total ecological collapse, especially if it involves the word “nuclear”. For that reason, I have chosen The China Syndrome (1979), the movie that started it all. Hanoi Jane, Michael Douglas, and (sadly) Jack Lemmon all collect sizable paychecks in this “leftist journalist hero finds conspiracy theory” dramedy.
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Don't get your underware twisted in a celtic knot, the brainchilds of perversion have a better plan for co2 recapture, under lockdown every human has to wear a mask to capture the CO2 release and prevent the spread of COVID. Seems to me that somewhere I read that plants need CO2 to produce the oxygen in the atmosophere that we breathe. Since the bankers can;t control the process, they'll burn it down to reconstruct. Then Drumpf will roll and just take it for the Imperialists. Maybe the NWO will have a plastic plant that will replace natures miracle in those 15 minute cities that are so expertly designed!
"Carbon capture" ... just one more money-making scheme to rip-off the U.S. taxpayer, that was apparently arrived at after a gaggle of morons and idiots happened to try to think one day.
The scrubbers on manufacturing plant exhaust stacks are already so technologically advanced that the U.S. has some of the cleanest air on the planet. But, rather than continuing down this rabbit hole, the American people simply need to keep restoring their forests -- cut a tree down, plant a tree, a practice utilized by the logging industry today; along that line, replant trees in fire ravaged regions, whether we are speaking of the Amazon Basin or California.
Reforest the forests ... there's your carbon emissions removal.
Thank You for this incredibly technical and detailed report, Radio Far Side, even tho' it was somewhat maddening trying to weed through the gibberish of the "experts" you quoted.