A new Bill Gates-funded scheme has emerged that seeks to pump compressed carbon dioxide (CO2) underground with ferocious force in order to meet “Net Zero” targets.
In the UK, the government’s Climate Change Committee (CCC) has approved the plan to “decarbonize” the country’s energy.
The CCC’s plan for “Net Zero” is to shift transport and heating from using fossil fuels to using electricity.
After this shift is complete, the government will then “decarbonize” the electricity grid.
To decarbonize the grid, it is assumed that electricity will be generated using nuclear and renewables.
During periods when nuclear, wind, and solar cannot meet demand, Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) will be deployed to remove CO2 emissions as the electricity must be generated using gas.
CCS is being championed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.
A startup backed and incubated by Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures has engineered a hybrid technology that combines engineering with natural photosynthesis processes to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it underground.
“It’s important to understand that carbon removal is not an excuse to keep emitting, or to slow down our transition to a clean energy economy — we need to keep innovating as fast as we can,” Gates wrote in his firm’s “State of the Transition 2023” report in November.
“But it’s become clear that carbon removal will be a necessary tool to have in our toolkit.”
Carbon Capture and Storage is a new and untested technology that has never been deployed at scale anywhere on Earth.
However, it is clear from the CCC’s report that CCS plays a major role in allegedly “saving the planet” from so-called “climate change.”
The UK government alone envisages significant CCS capacity at 50Mt annually.
Carbon Capture and Storage involves filtering CO2 from the exhaust produced by gas turbines used to generate electricity, and then piping the captured CO2 to plants that compress the gas into a liquid.
It is then injected into underground storage areas.
Compressed CO2 is currently being commercialized as a way to store energy for use in periods when nuclear and renewables are unavailable.
Another Bill Gates-funded company called Energy Dome has developed a working 4MWh system in Sardinia, Italy.
The company says its technology has an energy storage density 10-20 times higher than other compressed air energy storage (CAES) solutions and two-thirds that of liquid air energy storage (LAES).
The CCC’s plan requires vast quantities of CO2 to be compressed and stored underground across the UK.
Given this potential energy could be released at any time should something go wrong, it seems sensible to consider the safety implications of Carbon Capture and Storage.
Energy Dome is currently building a larger 100MWh system.
Its 100MWh store requires about 2,000 tonnes of CO2.
This means the company is expecting to store 0.05MWh of energy per tonne of compressed CO2.
Using this energy density, the CCC’s plan to store 176Mt per year will mean 8.8TWh of potential energy is being trapped beneath the UK annually.
The bomb dropped on Hiroshima exploded with an energy of about 15 kilotons of TNT or 0.0174TWh.
A standard modern nuclear bomb has a yield of around 500 kilotons.
Therefore the energy stored underground is equivalent to roughly 35 nuclear bombs, or the energy released by 16 magnitude seven earthquakes, every year.
Fracking is currently banned in the UK due to the risk of triggering earth tremors.
However, the planned Carbon Capture and Storage facilities pushed by Gates are of an altogether different magnitude.
Fracking can be stopped in an instant if a problem is detected.
However, if there is an issue with 35 nuclear bombs worth of compressed carbon underground, it wouldn’t be possible to simply release this vast amount of trapped energy.
No one knows what the effects may be of creating a whole series of high-pressure areas underground as it has never been done at this scale.
There are other issues too as CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas that is toxic to humans in high concentrations.
In addition to the asphyxiation hazard of CO2 displacing oxygen in the air, the inhalation of elevated concentrations of CO2 can increase the acidity of the blood, triggering adverse effects on the respiratory, cardiovascular, and central nervous systems.
A CO2 concentration of around 5% by volume in the air may cause headaches, dizziness, increased blood pressure, and difficulty breathing within a few minutes.
If concentrations above 17% by volume in the air are inhaled, this could cause loss of purposeful activity, unconsciousness, convulsions, coma, and death within one minute.
The Lake Nyos disaster saw a massive release of carbon dioxide in Cameroon on August 21, 1986.
The 1.6 million ton cloud of magmatic gas was deadly, and a count of the fatalities indicated that 1,746 people, most from villages by the lake, had been asphyxiated by it, along with some 3,000 cattle and innumerable birds, insects, and other animals.
The bodies of the dead showed no signs of trauma or struggle; these people had simply died where they were.
The CCS plan means vast quantities of CO2 are going to be piped around the UK and ultimately injected into the ground.
By 2050 we will be dealing with over 110 times the amount of CO2 released in the volcanic event that took place at Lake Nyos, every single year.
In order to meet the goal of “Net Zero,” the CCC plans to store 176Mt of CO2 by 2050.
No comments:
Post a Comment