It seems that the environmentalist movement has come to the conclusion that there is good fracking and bad fracking. Bad fracking is when we drill a well and extract hydrocarbons. Good fracking is when we expend huge sums to stuff a perfectly harmless gas back down those same holes. It’s a variation on Keynesian economics: wherever we find existing holes, we should pay people to fill them in, even if there is no need to do so. The article goes on to point out all sorts of potential problems with this idea, but then Keynesians will likely argue that remediation efforts will “stimulate” the economy.
With support from the Biden administration and billions of dollars in new subsidies and tax incentives, energy companies and others are planning to capture millions of tons of industrial carbon dioxide emissions and then pipe the climate pollutant for underground storage, part of an effort to reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas pollution. Federal and state regulators are reviewing 69 projects or permits to store CO2 underground, with 24 of those in Louisiana. Nine projects have already been approved while one more, in California, is pending.
Continued expenditures of time and taxpayer dollars to bow down to the climate emergency scam. Who do we sue? Sign me up for the class action lawsuit
What happens if the harmless gas leaks?.. LOL..
I feel a big fart coming on…
Should have pumped it under water to try and capture whatever is floating around rather than making the ground more unstable.
nothing like injecting a few billion tons of mild acid into a reservoir full of old pipe
Just as we today laugh at the fools who believed in geocentrism, and humorism… so will future generations laugh at us pumping CO2 a couple hundred meters into the ground.
Sheer madness, right up there with tobacco smoke enemas, bloodletting and human sacrifice for better crop results. Climate change insanity. Of course they sold everyone on the ever mysterious carbon tax (Seriously, where does the money go?) so this isn’t a surprise.
But I guess there’ll be money it for some folks in the form of subsidies inevitably leading to lighter wallets for taxpayers which is what they want anyways.
The most telling factoid in the article is the consequences of filling these rock formations with harmless gas should you happen to miss or improperly cap an old well in the vicinity. All of the toxic products that the anti-fracking crowd goes on about will come shooting out of that well.
Not sure about the harmless comment.
Atmosphere that we breath is 21% O, 78% N, 1% Ar with CO2 being 0.04%. We know at 0.04% it is harmless.
If you are in a room that is filled with CO2, you die. If the stuff is under pressure and it leaks out, being in the area where it leaks could be deadly (e.g., basement, cave, well that hits a CO2 gusher).
I believe those CO2 scrubbers are run by electricity. Now, I’d like to know how much CO2 is being emitted by the powerplants that make that electricity, and what the ratio of CO2 emission to capture and storage is. I’d bet, based on the obvious mathematical incompetency and upside-down thinking of the left on any other subject, that it is, at best, a wash, and therefore a huge waste of money, time, and effort. A big virtue-signaling political credit. Another big scam by the people who make the machinery, just like wind turbines and solar panels.
The most egregious example that you refer to is the 960 MW nameplate capacity San Juan Generating Station in NW New Mexico. The DOE sponsored FEED study estimated the parasitic load (i.e., the power required to scrub CO2 from the flue gas) to be 460 MW. Including scrubbing SOX and NOX, this is approx. 50% of the nameplate capacity.
There are lots of old oil and gas fields with quite permeable rocks, so you really don’t need to frac away the CO2.
CO2 is harmless compared to the petroleum gasses that previously occupied these formations. Many of the oil and gas bearing formations contained gasses with moderate to high levels of CO2 and H2S.
Your drive home from work, shopping, sports event, or whatever is far more likely to kill you than a possible ?CO2 leak from deep underground.
Toxic materials from solar panel disposal is more likely to harm you that storing CO2 underground.
Having said all the above. CO2 storage underground is just a money waste.
If Liberals/NDP in Canada, and Democrats in the US, would just stop using cars and take public transit; and turn off their air conditioning, they could enjoy lower CO2 emissions, and stop annoying the rest of us.
Of Course, no one has any idea what geological effects the placement of all that CO2 into the strata will have. Based on government’s history, though, we know it won’t be good. More likely a massive enviro disaster.
Actually we know very well what will happen, at least if we inject too much at pressures that are too high for the fracture gradient of the reservoir.
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/11/08/earthquake-west-texas-oilfield-fracking/
West Texas is now the most seismically active region in the Contenental US; Oklahoma had to severely limit wastewater injection for the same reason.