I received this email – at first I assumed “Haszeldine” was someone taking the micky out of “Haseler” – however, it does appear that there is an Professor in Edinburgh (a hot bed of alarmist fanatics in Scotland)
Dear Professor Haszeldine,
Thank you for your views, which as you say do not coincide with mine on carbon capture and storage (CCS) or on alleged man-made climate change.
As a professor of CCS I suppose it is only to be expected that, to paraphrase the immortal words of Mandy Rice-Davies, “You would say that, wouldn’t you”.
I will defend my stance by disputing just the first two of your climate assertions, which seem to me to be particularly unfounded.
1) “2015 is the warmest year since modern records began”.
This is disputed by the satellite temperature record which many experts say gives a better indication of man-made global warming, or the lack of it, than surface temperature records. In any case, so what? All of the global warming since 1659 (when CET recording began) has been natural, not man-made. I have still not seen a credible rebuttal of this assertion, evidently dismissed by some as not being sufficiently “erudite”. (It is not my assertion, it is credited to Bob Tisdale, an expert in ocean climate thermodynamics, whose extensive source material I link to in my paper.) Even the biassed, politician-controlled UN IPCC say (indirectly) that we have had only a barely perceptible 0.25ºC of man-made global warming since the start of industrialisation, which the biassed media and politicians routinely obfuscate to be 0.8ºC or even, when laying it on thickly, a full 1ºC.
2) “Sealevel rise rates are above the norm 2000 years and are measureable”.
This is disputed by a leading expert in this field, Dr Nils Axel-Mörner, who describes how biassed scientists have manipulated the data. In any case given that we are not causing any global warming there is nothing we can do about it, other than to adapt.
This exchange illustrates how discussions around this subject have been poisoned by deliberate spin, exaggeration, obfuscation and deception created mainly by politicians. I am walking away from it for the sake of my mental wellbeing. I will restrict my future “campaigning” to the ballot box, to vote for the least bad option.
Finally, I am all for sustainability, which is why I think unsustainable CCS is a particularly bad idea, because it would increase the consumption of finite fossil fuel reserves and would probably exhaust safe long-term underground storage reservoirs, on top of being very expensive.
Yours faithfully,
Douglas S Brodie
Stuart Haszeldine was one of my undergraduate lecturers.
I’m a Canadian oil and gas geologist familiar with the world example of “sucessful” CCS scheme at Weyburn, Saskatchewan. I can’t count the number of times I have had to explain that the Weyburn scheme is NOT CCS but a tertiary oil-recovery gas-injection program. The whole point was, is and forever will be to recovery more of the 65% oil that is left in the Weyburn Mississippian oil pools after its initial, primary (solution gas drive) recovery period.
Not only that, but the CO2 comes back out as the oil (and associated natural gas) is produced. That happens as soon as “breakthrough” occurs, i.e. the injected CO2 works its way along higher permeability beds or has been absorbed by the produced oil and expands at surface pressures. This CO2 is”captured” a second time, collected (with some loss) and reinjected. Eventually there will be more value to the CO2 than the oil/gas that comes with it (you have to buy the CO2, remember: it ain’t free), and it will be collected at surface and sent somewhere else ….. for a different pool’s tertiary recovery stage.
CCS as practised at the world’s premier site is NOT about sequestering CO2 and not about reducing CO2 emissions. It is about harvesting more oil and gas than would be possible otherwise.
And, by the way, the CO2 comes from North Dakota, from Beulah, where it is a valuable by-product of the gasification of COAL.
Ain’t that sweet: turn coal into gas (with a CO2 product from the energy needed to do this), separate the CO2 from the dry gas you produce (with a loss to the atmosphere), ship it to Canada (with transmission losses and gas-turbine compressor CO2 emissions) to inject (with CO2 emissions from the injection pumps), in order to get additional oil and gas out of the ground that you can burn …… to produce more CO2.
And THIS is the “carbon capture and sequestration” scheme that makes sense in the world!
If the eco-greens were any more technologically stupid or self-deluded, I would expect them to cease successfully reproducing shortly and save us from final ruin. (Actually, since the white European-based groups have a birthrate below replacement, I suppose that is already happening, when you consider the origin and culture of the Gore/McKibben/Suzuki groups.)