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 James Greyson Jan 28, 2013 05:41  |
I wonder how to keep the CO2 frozen when it needs at least -78C and Antarctic temperatures are higher (http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/about_antarctica/geography/weather/temperatures.php )?
Would be interesting to consider the project emissions; pipe materials, pipe laying, gas pumping, freezing.
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 Tom Fiddaman Jan 29, 2013 10:35 |
It would seem that this would have to be orders of magnitude longer and larger than any existing pipeline in order to significantly reduce current net emissions (Technical and Economic Characteristics of a CO2 Transmission Pipeline Infrastructure, http://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/111111111/16038/1/reqno_jrc62502_aspublished.pdf ). Is there any indication that the cost per ton could pencil out to something reasonable?
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Michael Dombroski Mar 2, 2013 05:32 | Proposal contributor
Blindspotter,
The authors of the Antarctic CO2 sequestration proposal (http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JAMC-D-12-0110.1) have plans to deposit CO2 as snow and sequester it in Antarctica, where it would presumably be more practical to keep it insulated.
Tomfid,
Thanks for the link to the CO2 pipeline infrastructure pdf. It was interesting.
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James Greyson Mar 3, 2013 04:00 |
If the co2 is to be kept chilled and insulated, in a huge fridge, maybe ice would take up less space than snow? I wonder how the energy and resource needs of the whole process add up?
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 Ashwin Kumar Mar 4, 2013 12:56  |
Thanks for the proposal!
It might be interesting to look at how the costs of transporting gaseous CO2 these long distances to the Antarctic would compare to the costs of locally liquefying CO2 (where it is emitted) and transporting liquid CO2 (at high pressure) the same distances to the Antarctic; and importantly, how the costs of this proposal would compare to the costs of carbon capture and storage . Any thoughts?
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 Michael Maccracken May 2, 2013 05:51  |
To really make a difference, some substantial fraction of the 10 gigatonnes of carbon (almost 40 gigatonnes of CO2) would have to be gathered and transported. This would be a huge challenge, demanding lots of energy to do and given a fair fraction of the CO2 is released from distributed sources, that would be very, very difficult--and very, very expensive.
It would likely be far less expensive to let the atmosphere do the transporting and scavenge the CO2 out of the atmosphere (Klaus Lackner of Columbia, among others, has been discussing approaches to do this at costs that may be able to reach less than a few hundred per ton of CO2. A non-chemical way would be to simply to take air and increase the pressure (energy intensive) and cool it (low cost during Antarctic winter) and freeze out dry ice. But then what--storing this would require not only low temperatures (below about 200 K) and keeping the pressure up at several atmospheres. Alternatively, one would try to react it with some compound to make it a solid (but on ice sheet there are not many options) or to bury it geologically, but again, hard to drill down to such levels. So, again, costs would seem to be very high.
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 2013geoengineeringjudges 2013geoengineeringjudges Jul 10, 2013 02:08 |
Thank you for sharing your ideas and for the work invested to create this proposal. We have considered this proposal carefully, and note that many questions have been raised in comments about the difficulty and costs of implementing such a scheme on the scale at which it would make a difference to atmospheric CO2. However, these questions have not been answered and it is not clear that what is being proposed is feasible to implement.
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