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This site may, in fact always will contain images and information likely to cause consternation, conniptions, distress, along with moderate to severe bedwetting among statists, wimps, wusses, politicians, lefties, green fascists, and creatures of the state who can't bear the thought of anything that disagrees with their jaded view of the world.

May 11, 2013

The Inaugural Golden Fleece Award – for Flagrant Fleecing of Community Resources


By Viv Forbes,
The Carbon Sense Coalition has awarded its Inaugural Golden Fleece Award to Kevin Rudd and coal industry leaders for “flagrant fleecing of community savings in futile ‘research’ on Carbon Capture & Sequestration – a costly and complex process designed to capture and bury carbon dioxide gas produced by burning carbon fuels such as coal, oil and gas”.
It is obviously possible, in an engineering sense, to collect, separate, compress, pump and pipe gases, so new “research” is largely a waste of money. Engineers know how to do these things, and their likely costs. But only foolish green zealots would think of spending billions to bury a harmless, invisible, life-supporting gas in hopes of cooling the climate some time in the century ahead.
About 2.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide are produced for every tonne of coal burnt in a power station. To capture, compress and bury it could take at least 30% of the electricity produced, greatly increasing the cost of the limited amount of electricity left for sale - more coal used, increased electricity costs, for ZERO measurable benefits.
We have come to expect stupidity from politicians, but coal industry leaders who agreed to waste money on this should be sued by shareholders for negligence. Maybe they were just drooling at all the extra coal they would sell in order to produce the same electricity?
Kevin Rudd wins this award for “a Flagrant Fleece of $400 million taken from tax payers to fund the fatuous Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute.” There is little to show for the millions already spent except a lot of receipts for high class salaries, consultants, travel, entertainment and “operational expenses”.
Pumping gases underground is sensible if it brings real benefits such as using waste gases to drive oil recovery from declining oil fields.
Normally, however, CCS will just produce more expensive electricity.
This result is not needed as politicians have already invented dozens of ways of doing just that. 
Disclosure: Viv Forbes holds shares in a small Australian coal explorer which may benefit if the carbon tax is raised high enough to make Carbon Capture and Burial “economic”.
Further reading:
The Warming of the last Century  is too Small to Notice
‘The warming we have had the last a 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have had meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.’ - Lennart Bengtsson, one of Sweden’s leading climate scientist.

2 comments:

  1. The US govt blew through 72 million here in Arizona to find out sequestration doesn't work. Talk about throwing money down a hole(s).

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  2. Seems that if you manage to come up with a really silly idea to harness the GW scare, the sky's the limit on the funding available from us mug punters.

    ReplyDelete