January 12, 2023
Carbon Capture Is a Woke Fantasy
By John M. Contino
Let's say you're brainstorming with some friends, trying to figure out how to cash in on the woke green wave. It would probably not occur to the less boldly imaginative among us to propose 1) capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from agricultural areas covering five Midwestern states (see map from a corporate website here), 2) dehydrating and compressing it into liquid form at various capture locations, 3) transporting it via brand new pipelines, and 4) sequestering it into its permanent rocky tomb a mile beneath the surface, safe from climate change, nuclear war, and all but the most severe cosmic catastrophes. As a bonus, liquid CO2 that survives burial has commercial industrial applications, like dry ice for food preservation or creating cloudy or foggy effects for Hollywood productions. It's also used in fire extinguishers and to carbonate soft drinks, and it is even an important cooling agent for cryogenic freezing, as was done, for example, to Ted Williams and his son John Henry.
If you're wondering where the money comes from for these enterprises, the Department of Energy has announced many tens of millions of dollars in funding for research and implementation of carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) projects. Additionally, carbon credits for industry are shaping up to be a powerful incentive for generating private and public investor capital.
Private industry is currently developing new processes/technologies to capture and sequester CO2 from ethanol fermentation plants. Plans are underway for Colorado and Nebraska to pioneer this process, and to start burying CO2 from ethanol in 2024. Ethanol production is a big business, consuming more than 40% (!) of the U.S. corn crop. Last summer, to help lower gas prices, Biden increased the amount of ethanol that must be added to gasoline from 10% to 15%. Ethanol's chemical composition is C₂H₅OH — almost a hydrocarbon itself, but for that outlying oxygen molecule. Ethanol is corrosive to car engines, and its production results in a net loss of energy: "Adding up the energy costs of corn production and its conversion to ethanol, 131,000 BTUs are needed to make 1 gallon of ethanol ... [which] has an energy value of only 77,000 BTU."
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/01/carbon_capture_is_a_woke_fantasy.html
