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Stuffing a useful gas into holes under the ocean is harder than they thought
Chevron spent $3 billion to put just 5 million tons of carbon dioxide under the ocean floor. The project was plagued with delays and problems with sand clogging the machinery. They captured about one fiftyth of the Chevron emissions in a five year period.
CCS is a modern industrial talisman: Chevron concedes CCS failures at Gorgon, seeks deal with WA regulators
Reneweconomy
Chevron is understood to have spent more than $3 billion building the carbon capture facility, but it took several years after the start of gas production for the Gorgon CCS project even to begin operation due to delays and technical difficulties. The first CO2 was injected into an undersea deposit in 2019.
It is understood regulators may ask Chevron to offset the emissions it failed to store by purchasing offsets from either local or international carbon markets. If Chevron is made to buy Australian Carbon Credit Units, which currently trade at above $20 per tonne, the cost to the company could easily exceed $200 million.
So they could have done it all 30 times cheaper. (Or, if they […]
A major new “nail in coffin” study shows the more renewables we force onto the market the more expensive electricity gets.
Everyday someone tells us renewables are cheap, but these estimates come from flawed “LCOE” method (at best) supposedly the lifetime cost, but without many indirect costs. Granted, it’s hard to figure out what the bill for renewable energy is. But what really matters to every man and his dog, is the cost effect on the whole system, not a cherry-slice comparison of a few sunny-windy hours a day which doesn’t take into account the effect that renewable energy has on the rest of the 24/7 electricity grid.
Greenstone, McDowell and Nath have analysed all 29 states in the US where there are laws demanding a certain percentage of energy be renewable. On average a 4% increase in renewables led to a price rise of 17% and the impost was wildly high compared to any remotely sensible cost-benefit analysis. Renewables are the car insurance bill that costs 3 times as much as your car. Any serious environmentalist would hate renewables.
Michael Shellenberger, Forbes
The cost to consumers has been staggeringly high: “All in all, seven […]
Still leading the nation from the back bench
Scott Morrison wants to meet the Paris agreement and have cheap electricity. The have-cake: throw-cake-in-river option. How to resolve that dilemma (or at least have an answer for his Environment Minister, Melissa Price to give) — repeat the Tony Abbott plan.
“Direct Action” uses an auction system to find the cheapest ways to reduce CO2 — which obviously rules out intermittent renewables because they are wildly expensive. Abbott is painted as a denier, yet his plan was more effective at reducing CO2 than any of the Green’s schemes. Naturally this only makes the cult believers hate him more — because he threatens the cash cow for dependent renewables. He exposes how useless wind and solar are and thus, how most greens are hypocritical self-serving political activists who pretend to care for the environment in order to get rich, go on junkets, or pump their ego while they fly to skiing trips in Japan.
Direct Action back on the agenda
Graham Lloyd, The Australian
The Coalition will refocus environment policies on the Abbott-era Direct Action plan, including a rebooted Green Army and a reverse auction scheme to improve land management […]
Email just in from Marc Morano of Climate Depot
WASHINGTON – Multiple news agencies, including Reuters News, are now reporting that President Donald Trump has privately informed several officials in Washington DC that he intends to withdraw from the UN Paris climate pact.
Climate Depot’s Marc Morano statement: “A U.S. Clexit (Climate Exit from UN Paris Pact) would be a victory for science. Make no mistake, climate campaigners who tout UN agreements and EPA regulations as a way to control Earth’s temperature and storminess are guilty of belief in superstition.”
Latest developments below.
Axios Scoop: Trump tells confidants U.S. will quit Paris climate deal
By Jonathan Swan & Amy Harder
President Trump has privately told multiple people, including EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, that he plans to leave the Paris agreement on climate change, according to three sources with direct knowledge.
Why this matters: Pulling out of Paris is the biggest thing Trump could to do unravel Obama’s climate policies. It also sends a stark and combative signal to the rest of the world that working with other nations on climate change isn’t a priority to the Trump administration. And pulling […]
Those who say they want a “free market” in carbon still don’t understand what a free market is.
RET’s or Renewable Energy Targets are screwed (in the head): If Tony Abbotts Direct Action plan was useless, RETS are five times more useless.
In Australia the Renewable Energy Target (RET) in theory, helps wind and solar, so we lower CO2 emissions and cool the world, slow storms, things like that. But Tom Quirk calculates it costs $57 a ton (at best) for those “savings”. Since the Direct Action plan cost $11 a ton, we could reduce five times as much CO2 if we blew up the RET scheme.
The secret is that the Abbott plan tackled CO2 directly rather than picking winners (see “competition”, “free markets” that sort of thing). Predictably, the Greens hated it — who needs CO2 reduction if you can support big-government-loving industries instead? (Especially the kind who lobby for the side of politics that wants more bureaucrats, more handouts, and less independent competition?)
Those who say they want a “free market” in carbon still don’t understand what a free market is. It’s pretty simple, if they want a reduction in CO2, they need to pay for a […]
Looking for some mythical myths?
Sydney Morning Herald/Age serves their subscribers up a few. Apart from “Myth 1” below, Adam Morton avoids answering the most important points skeptics are making, but offers up some secondary bit and pieces. He supplies vague wordy answers announcing definitive conclusions based on irrelevant, motherhood type reasoning, non-sequiteurs, and little research: it’s just what we’ve come to expect from a Fairfax “investigation”.
“Myth 1”: The new climate target will be difficult to meet
Adam’s has four arguments (3 irrelevant, 1 wrong) to convince us it will be easy. I’ve paraphrased the wordy stuff. His arguments are so weak, the marvel here is that our national conversation is so irrational. “Not even trying” as they say.
Lo, behold, it will be “easy” to cut our carbon emissions by 26%, because:
1. The last small target we set for 2020 of a “5%” cut was less than other countries are achieving.
Jo says: There’s a reason our target was smaller. Australia’s population is growing faster (proportionally), our distances are larger, population density smaller, our largest export earner is “coal”, and some of our other exports have “energy” built in (so the carbon emissions occur in […]
The Australian Abbott government has announced the target of a 26% reduction in emissions of CO2 by 2030. This futile effort to change the weather is all cost and no benefit. It’s 26% reduction in 1.3% (Australia’s share) of 4% (human share) of total CO2 emissions globally. If we succeed there’ll be 0.01% less CO2 in the air (at best).
The only good thing is that the policy supposedly can be achieved without “without any need to purchase emissions reductions from overseas.” That means Australia won’t be feeding the global banker-broker machine and assorted “carbon market” bureaucrats — not until the Labor Party come to government, anyway. This is a big win, helping to slow the cycle of governments feeding vested interests who promote big-government.
For once the Greens had a realistic response, though they probably did not intend it that way:
“The Greens party room also discussed the government’s target. The party’s MPs agreed it was “an all-around science fail” and they “all nodded vigorously”, a senior source said.”
Because “carbon accounting” is a joke, measured in a dozen mindless ways, all sides are spinning this in equal and opposite directions. Black IS white simultaneously, and too […]
Landfill gas
All the usual suspects declared it could never work. Instead, “Direct Action” is likely to be wildly cheaper and more effective (at reducing CO2). The catch is, it won’t reward friends of big-government and it won’t punish miners, manufacturers and small businesses — which must be why climate activists don’t like it.
Results are just in from the first Abbott government Direct Action carbon auctions. The government offered to pay for carbon reduction, and held a reverse auction (where people who bid the lowest price would win). The average price came in at $14 a ton.
The Numbers: The Australian government will spend $660 million to reduce emissions by 47mT. These projects will run for about 7 years, and mean the government is on track to meet the target of 180mT reduction by 2020. — Details are at the Clean Energy Regulator.
It’s a lot less than the fantasy schemes that use wind and solar power, of which cost estimates vary partly because no one really knows what the lifespan and disposal costs are. One MIT study estimated the cost of abating carbon with wind was about $60 AUD per ton, and the cost of […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
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