The Futile Capture of CO2 Persists

The May 2 issue of C&E News has an article on CO2 capture.

The article says that carbon dioxide is related to climate change and that the rising level of atmospheric CO2 is widely regarded as one of the most pressing environmental concerns of our age. This is obviously an opinion based upon no facts that I have ever seen, and very different from what I personally believe.

Stuart Haseltine, a geoscientist at the University of Edinburgh, says that capturing and storing CO2 emitted by power plants has the potential to decrease global emissions of CO2 by some 20%. So what? Why do I want to decrease global emissions of CO2 by 20%? It doesn't do any harm. No one has ever proven scientifically that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have any significance to climate change. This is merely a game to justify grant money for additional research. It is also intended to justify additional revenue to the federal income by taxing CO2 emissions. Justin Song, a specialist in catalyst and energy related materials at Penn State, says that coal-fired power plants emit 1500 megatons of CO2 per year. Is that supposed to impress me? How much CO2 is emitted by all human beings and animals in a year? How many molecules of water in all the oceans?

CO2 is not a poison. In high concentrations, it can deprive a person of obtaining enough oxygen through breathing. This is also true of nitrogen and argon, which are present in the atmosphere. However, we are not talking about that kind of maximum concentration. We are talking about parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Eliminating that side issue, the drum beaters are really concentrating on the theory that minor concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere affect climate. It is likely true, because the CO2 is a greenhouse gas. So is nitrogen and oxygen, and argon, and water vapor. In fact, we need all of these greenhouse gases in our atmosphere to normalize Earth temperatures. Without the ability of these gases to insulate against loss of heat, nighttime temperatures on Earth could fall to almost absolute zero in the neighborhood of -200°C.

The high concentrations of nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere protect us from those radical temperature changes. The very small concentration of CO2 has a minimal effect on the whole.

I'm not opposed to capture of carbon dioxide, if it is worth capturing. Oil and gas drillers are said to be using a new technique of increasing production of oil and gas by a fracturing process, which uses carbon dioxide. The cheaper the CO2 source, the better. In all likelihood, capture would be from a high concentration source or some mixture that needs purification. Natural gas normally contains some carbon dioxide, which should be removed in order to make the remaining methane and ethane more effective as fuel sources. If we can take that carbon dioxide out of the natural gas and use it in fracturing to produce more natural gas, so much the better. However, the key point is not to confuse ourselves into thinking that the major consideration is to remove carbon dioxide from the environment. It is not necessary to do that. Various living plants have been naturally engineered to do that job. In the process, those plants also produce oxygen, which we need as humans for our own metabolism.

Let's get off the kick that carbon dioxide is detrimental to climate change or anything else of practical significance. Nature has already handled that matter. If we want to do something practical, let's get on with building flood control devices. There will be a constant amount of rain falling on the Earth each year. Unfortunately, it is not evenly distributed, nor is the distribution always the same.. We need to protect ourselves against the detriment of floods. We cannot control the amount of rain or its distribution. We can build flood control devices.