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18 comments on EuroNews: November 29, 2006

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Euan Mearns on November 30, 2006 - 5:06am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Luis, The Peterhead powerstation is just up the road from where I live - My Mac is probably running on Peterhead electricity as I write.  The power station was built to burn nat gas from the Miller oil field - its sour gas so the pipeline is built to cope with corosion.

The Miller Field (like most N Sea Fields) is now near spent.  So what BP are proposing to do is to source nat gas else where (note they just built a gas export line from west of Shetland to the Magnus oil field as a tertiary recovery project) and to convert this nat gas to hydrogen and carbon dioxide by reaction with steam:

CH4 + H2O ------ H2 + CO2 (unbalanced)
CH4 + 2(H2O) ------ 4(H2) + CO2 (balanced I hope)

The hydrogen is easily separated from the CO2 at this stage. So the hydrogen then gets burned in the power station - releasing only steam to the atmosphere.  The CO2 gets piped out to the Miller oil field (in the exisiting pipe line) and injected there. This is a win - win situation for BP.  The CO2 injection acts as a miscible gas flood for the near spent oil reservoir and will boost oil recovery (tertiary recovery) and the CO2 that would normally have been released into the atmosphere is buried (sequestered) in the reservoir.

The conundrum here is the fact that the process leads to greater oil recovery and this leads to more CO2 (this will be completely ignored by BP and the politicians) but on the other hand, UK oil production is in free fall - and I personally strongly advocate that everything that can be done should be done to boost recovery.  Without this project, the Miller Field will be decommissioned soon.

The project as is stands is uneconomic and will depend on large government subsidy to go ahead.  And this is the bit that really pisses me off.  The government here are have added 20% extra tax to the operating oil companies in recent years - but may then subsidise the companies they are taxing.

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Luis de Sousa on November 30, 2006 - 9:21am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Ok Euan this makes more sense, they react methane with water to get the hidrogen and the CO2.

It seems to me that this is just a project to create a terciary recovery method.

releasing only steam to the atmosphere

I supose this is water vapour. If so one should remember that water vapour procuduces a Grean House Effect at least one order of magnitude higher than CO2.

This project is clearly not going ahead on GHG emission worries.

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Euan Mearns on November 30, 2006 - 9:42am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Not quite Luis.

First you gotta remember that the residence time of water vapour in the atmosphere is very, very short compared to CO2 - the water vapour is quickly removed by rainfall. What's more, the amount of water vapour produced is tiny compared to back ground levels and what is evaporating off the oceans every day.

Equally important, if the methane was just burned - as happens today, it produces CO2 and water:

CH4 + 2(O2) ----- CO2 + 2(H2O)

So the "BP" process will remove the "hazardous" CO2 from the greenhouse equation.

One problem though is that the whole process uses energy, so the ERoEI will drop - leaving less energy for society to use - the cost of trying to save the atmosphere by burying CO2.

Because the process is more "energy expensive" I will have to pay more for my electricity - on top of the rises that are likley to occur from higher gas prices.

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BobCousins on November 30, 2006 - 10:33am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
If so one should remember that water vapour procuduces a Grean House Effect at least one order of magnitude higher than CO2.

Really, I am surprised to see you repeating that old chestnut! It is simply not true, even if junkscience.com says so.

There is a good site for debunking anti-GW counter arguments at How to Talk to a Global Warming Sceptic . I'll just paste in their answer:

There is no climate model or climate textbook that does not discuss the role water vapor plays in the Greenhouse Effect. It is the strongest Greenhouse gas, contributing 66% to 85% to the overall effect when you include clouds, 36% - 66% for vapor alone. It is however, not considered as a climate "forcing" because the amount of H2O in the air varies basically as a function of temperature. If you artificially increase the level of H2O in the air, it rains out immediately (in terms of climate response times), similarily, due to the abundance of sea surface, if you somehow removed water from the air it would quickly be replaced through evaporation. This has the interesting consequence that if one could somehow instantly remove all CO2 from the atmosphere, the temperature would begin to drop, causing percipitation to remove H2O from the air causing even further drops, in a feedback effect that would not end until no water was left unfrozen on the ground.
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