Thread by @SteB777

I'd like to tell a tale about Carbon Capture and Storage CCS. I'm sure @KevinClimate will appreciate the irony. It's a sort of tale in the manner of the Emperor's Clothes, to illustrate the amazing hubris of the powerful. Maybe the wonderful @thejuicemedia could use it.
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Essentially, what the aim of CCS is about, is to suck the excess CO2 out of the atmosphere, released by our burning of fossil fuels, then pump it deep underground, where it will be stored safely for generations to come.
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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_ca…

Superficially, it seems a genius idea, which will allow us to carry on burning fossil fuels BAU, whilst sucking the problem product out of the atmosphere. A sort of have your cake and eat it solution. The dream of techno-fantasists (sorry techno-optimists) everywhere.
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We know the whole plan appears to be feasible, because the whole method has already existed for hundreds of millions of years. It's called photosynthesis. That's what photosynthesis is about in plants and algae.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynt…
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What those darn clever plants do is to take just 3 ingredients, sunlight, water and carbon dioxide - they suck out of the atmosphere. Then through an amazingly complex process, they turn it into carbohydrates, which along with soil minerals they can turn into other compounds.
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Everything you see in a plant comes from this simple, but amazingly complex process (PS I know about nitrogen fixation). The lignins that form tree trunks are created through this process.
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However, the genius of the natural world doesn't stop there. The natural world has 2 powerful CCS processing factories, which bury this CO2 sucked out of the atmosphere deep underground, in a form for long term storage.
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These 2 natural CCS processing factories are called peat bogs and ocean/lake sediments "oozes". Both have a common feature, they are anoxic (without oxygen), stopping normal decomposition, and preventing release of carbon back into the atmosphere.
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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelagic_s…

Okay I'm skipping over lots of detail, so not to break up the important narrative. However, over long periods of time, these 2 natural CCS processing factories store up deposits of carbon rich organic matter, primarily the products of photosynthesis (CO2 out of the atmosphere)
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Deep peat deposits and oceanic and lake bed oozes are a pretty stable deposit, but can still be released back into the atmosphere if they dry up, get exposed to the air etc. However, the genius of nature doesn't stop here. Eventually, these medium term deposits can fossilize.
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Over time, if peat stays wet and it is buried through geological process, pressure etc, it can fossilize, and turn into a rock like substance that can get buried deep below the ground. That fossil substance is called coal.
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In a similar sort of process those oceanic and lake bed oozes can then get transformed to another fossil substance, which can get buried deep below the ground through geological process. This fossil substance is liquid, known to us as oil, or petroleum (rock oil).
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So effective is this long term storage that many of the Earth's coal deposits date from the Carboniferous period 360-300 million years ago. This really is effective CCS. These fossil deposits are super concentrated, consisting mostly of carbon sucked out of the atmosphere.
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Essentially what we are attempting to do with modern human CCS is to continue burning those natural CCS deposits, then to vainly try at scale, to suck all the excess CO2 out of the atmosphere created by the fossil fuel burning and stick it back in the ground.
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Okay, physics and all the mathematical stuff was never my strong point, but I had to do enough of it along the way, to understand the basics. No energy process is anywhere near efficient and most machinery etc, is relatively inefficient.
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Therefore whilst I couldn't give you the figures, I can say with absolute certainty, that it is going to take far more energy that we got from burning those fossil fuels, to suck up all the carbon released into the atmosphere and stick it back from where it came.
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Neatly illustrating that the whole CCS thing is a complete and utter scam of the Ponzi Scheme, pyramids scheme, chain letter type thing i.e. the idea is specious i.e. superficially plausible, but deeply fallacious on close examination.
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Self-evidently, it is far more efficient and more likely to succeed, to simply leave the natural CCS fossil fuels in the ground, and to develop alternative energy sources, whilst vastly reducing our profligate use of energy (which has other adverse consequences).
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It's also self-evident who benefits from these red herring scams like CCS and Not Zero by 2050. The billionaires and their hangers on, profiting massively from the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, which they have got our governments and people addicted to.
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The way billionaires and corporations have got people addicted to consumerism, profligate energy use, and the consumption of fossil fuels is very similar to way the large scale dealers in heroin and other opioids operate. First get your consumers addicted and you're all set.
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They just sit back and guaranteed massive revenue just keeps rolling in. A switch to a sustainable, none fossil fuel burning economy threatens their status, wealth, power over us and their revenue, so it must be opposed at all costs. Red herrings like CCS can perpetuate BAU.
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The question is not the feasibility of CCS, because it is completely unfeasible that it could ever work at the scale necessary, but how it was ever taken seriously, given how I can dispose of it with a big picture view, in just over 20 tweets.
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As an aside, it must be remembered that the whole Paris Climate Agreement was premised on a fantasy of techno-fixes to suck excess carbon out of the atmosphere - to allow business as usual BAU to continue.
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theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

@KevinClimate @GretaThunberg @GeorgeMonbiot @JKSteinberger @DoctorVive @NaomiOreskes @ClimateHuman @ClimateBen @IUCNpeat

@threadreaderapp Please unroll?

For clarity, when I say CCS I mean all human technological methods of removing CO2 from the atmosphere, not the specific method referred to as CCS i.e. just after the fuel is burned.