Pharoz

There was a program on Catalyst on ABC TV a while ago that showed that someone had worked out how to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. (I couldn’t find the article on the website for Catalyst just now.) That can be done. Perhaps the outer surfaces of cooling towers on some power stations could be fitted with devices that extract CO2 from the air and transport the CO2 in solution back to the power station where the carbon can be separated from the oxygen. (Perhaps similar kinds of technology might be appropriate to filter CO2 from the exhausts of power stations on the inside of the cooling towers.) Solar cells as part of the outfit might provide energy for transporting the fluid in cycles up and down the cooling towers and also for removing the CO2 from the solution.

The main problem is breaking the carbon dioxide into carbon and oxygen. There might be a few intermediate steps needed in the chemical process. The net energy required to split the carbon dioxide into its constituent elements would possibly be greater than the energy extracted through burning the fossil fuels in the first place. It would not be feasible to power this process all through fossil fuels. Renewable energy sources such as arrays of solar PV panels near the power station, and electrical storage to keep the process going 24/7 if possible, would have to be part of the energy generation system to keep the net energy from the power station positive. Carbon emission caps and carbon trading systems would provide the financial edge to make these changes to fossil fuel power stations economically advantageous.

The option to geosequestrate carbon dioxide is only considered as an option, in my opinion, to keep the net energy output from fossil fuel power stations positive while reducing CO2 emissions, in the absence of any other inputs of energy into the power station apart from fossil fuels. With PV solar power being available to power the capture and transformation of CO2 into harmless components there would be no need to bury the carbon dioxide. The extra input of energy that arrays of solar PV cells can provide would change the net energy equation used for dealing with the carbon dioxide so that it can be transformed into harmless chemicals.

The important point is that renewables are needed to push these power stations into zero CO2 emission power stations or even to turn these power stations into net CO2 sinks. These power stations would maintain all the advantages of fossil fuel power stations, with natural gas turbine power stations being the most flexible and least polluting. With the widescale uptake of PV solar cells feeding the grid, and with suitable storage capacity in the network, baseload coal fired power stations could be the first to be retrofitted solely to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Peak load natural gas power stations might be in use for a long time yet.

Finally, I can see no reasons for building new nuclear power stations. They will not deal directly with reducing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere as these retrofitted fossil fuel power stations can be made to do. All the many other reasons against nuclear power stand. Even recently an earthquake in Japan happened to close down the largest nuclear power station in that country after the earthquake started a fire there. There are no valid reasons for nuclear power stations in Australia, none at all.

More ideas for strategies to deal with global warming and sustainable energy systems are in the *Solar Energy category.

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