Category: Carbon sinks

The fossil fuel industry has for many years said that there is no problem burning coal, oil and gas, and that it is soon possible to capture the carbon dioxide resulting from burning these fossil fuels. As this BBC news shows, this will very unlikely be any solution.

The outgoing government in Norway has buried much-vaunted plans to capture carbon dioxide and store it underground amid mounting costs and delays.

The oil and energy ministry said the development of full-scale carbon dioxide capture at Mongstad oil refinery had been discontinued.

It said it remained committed to research into carbon capture.

When the Labour Party presented the plan in 2007, it was hailed as Norway’s equivalent of a “Moon landing”.

Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and his allies lost a general election to conservatives and centrists this month, and are due to step down shortly.

Mongstad had already run into difficulties.

“At both the national and international level, the development of technologies to capture and store CO2 has taken longer, been more difficult and more costly than expected,” Oil and Energy Minister Ola Borten Moe told reporters.

Read more here about why such reduction of nature’s ability to store the extra carbon emitted through human activities will have serious consequences.

One of the reasons for the current building up of carbon in the atmosphere is that the natural systems, which can normally handle and stow away such extra carbon are being destroyed. Carbon levels in nature have always fluctuated. Massive volcano outbursts have often added carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, but over the next years land vegetation, oceans and soils would accumulate the extra carbon and levels would soon be back to the normal level again.

This is possible when the natural systems are healthy and as long as the extra carbon is not overwhelming.

Conditions nowadays are neither of the two. The amounts of extra carbon pumped into the atmosphere are staggering. Humans have over the last one and a half century burned maybe one third of the easily accessible fossil fuels – coal, gas and oil. This corresponds to releasing to the atmosphere an amount of carbon which it took nature maybe 100 million years to accumulate (fossil fuels formed when organic matter was compressed at high temperatures over long periods in the Earth’s crust).

The part about sound natural systems is just as bad. The healthy vegetation that should be able to absorb extra carbon is in a serious crisis itself. Most of our planet’s forests have over the centuries been cleared for agricultural areas, and most of our agricultural systems are of a kind that deplete the soil more and more. Amounts of humus, which is the long-term carbon storage compound in the soil, are decreasing in the huge monoculture fields of agribusiness, so less and less carbon is stored there. In no way can such systems take up the extra carbon our consumer society is spitting out.

Oceans could then do the job. At least they are much more difficult for humans to destroy because they are so huge. But in spite of this, scientists can measure that they take up less and less atmospheric carbon, even though the amount to take from increases.

So, there is no way out. We will need to find carbon neutral energy production methods and agricultural systems that build up a carbon rich soil.