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    Returning Carbon to Nature: Coal, Carbon Capture, and Storage
    Returning Carbon to Nature: Coal, Carbon Capture, and Storage
    Returning Carbon to Nature: Coal, Carbon Capture, and Storage
    Ebook236 pages2 hours

    Returning Carbon to Nature: Coal, Carbon Capture, and Storage

    By Michael H. Stephenson

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    About this ebook

    Carbon capture and storage is one of the main carbon emissions policy issues globally, yet you may know little about it if you’re outside the academic community. As the global push to address the impact that carbon emissions has on global warming continues, awareness and knowledge of viable solutions must be communicated in layperson terms. Returning Coal and Carbon To Nature breaks across traditional barriers among history, geology, biology and climate change to address the topic from a multidisciplinary, Earth System Science approach. If you’re a policymakeror someone who influences policy, this book will explain carbon capture and storage—a relatively new concept—in easy-to-understand terms. Clearly presented charts, tables and diagrams explain critical concepts, and a range of full-color photographs will help you visualize the carbon capture and storage process and its principles.
    • Discusses carbon capture and storage in terms easily accessible to a range of stakeholders, including policymakers worldwide and geoscientists who influence policy.
    • The first cross-disciplinary look at the history, geology and biology of coal, and presents carbon capture and storage in the context of Earth System Science.
    • Authored by one of the world’s foremost carbon capture and storage experts who has more than 30 years of field research experience.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherElsevier Science
    Release dateAug 14, 2013
    ISBN9780124076563
    Returning Carbon to Nature: Coal, Carbon Capture, and Storage
    Author

    Michael H. Stephenson

    Mike Stephenson is Director of Science and Technology at the British Geological Survey. He began his career as a schoolteacher in rural Africa and stayed there for nearly ten years but returned to Britain to pursue research in the Middle East and Asia, including highlights in Oman, Jordan, Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan. Mike has degrees from Imperial College and Sheffield University and runs the Science Programme at BGS, the UK's national geoscience and data centre, with 520 scientists and technologists. He has professorships at Nottingham and Leicester universities and has published over eighty peer-reviewed papers, while also acting on the editorial boards of several journals, and as Editor-in-Chief of an Elsevier geological journal. In 2012 Mike published an acclaimed study of carbon capture and storage called Returning Carbon to Nature, published by Elsevier.

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      Book preview

      Returning Carbon to Nature - Michael H. Stephenson

      1

      Of Hockey Sticks and Coal

      Coal and the Industrial Revolution

      Where is the Coal?

      Use of Coal in the Future

      Coal in India

      Coal in China

      Coal in South Africa

      Solving the Problem of Coal Use

      Bibliography

      Most people have heard of the hockey stick graph in relation to global warming. The term was first used by the climatologist Jerry Mahlman who pointed out the shape of global temperature change through time was approximately flat up to about 1900 apart from the ‘medieval warm period’ and the ‘little ice age’ (the shaft of the stick), and then rapidly upturned into a ‘blade’ which got steeper with time. The hockey stick graph for CO2 is rather more uniform in shape but broadly similar as might be expected since the chief control on temperature rise is believed to be the atmospheric content of CO2. In this chapter I’ll look at the shape of the CO2 hockey stick graph and the part that coal had in creating it. I’ll also look at the future for coal.

      In June 2012 the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere reached 395 parts per million by volume (ppmv) or 0.000395%. It has been rising at about 2 ppmv every year since 2000. We can be absolutely sure of these amounts because since 1958 they have been measured directly from the atmosphere at Mauna Loa in Hawaii. Before that date we rely on more indirect measurements of bubbles of air trapped in cores of ice from Antarctica and Greenland. Antarctic cores show that atmospheric CO2 levels were about 260–280 ppmv immediately before industrial emissions began in the mid-eighteenth century and did not vary much from this level during the preceding 10,000 years. Going back 400,000 years, which is possible by looking at progressively deeper and deeper ice, a pattern of CO2 concentration is revealed which synchronizes with ice age cycles (Figure 1.1), but nowhere is there a sign of such a large leap of CO2 concentration nor a rate of increase so extreme as in the last few decades.

      Figure 1.1 Carbon dioxide variation in the last 400,000 years. Inset shows the variation since 1000 AD. From Wikipedia.

      To understand what part coal might have played in increasing CO2 levels we need to know the fluxes of CO2 in and out of the atmosphere, both natural and man-made. Volcanoes belch out CO2 during eruptions but the natural burning of peat, wildfires, oxidation of organic matter in exposed rock and the respiration processes of living things, also all produce CO2. Of course human beings breathe out CO2. In fact we breathe out about 5% CO2 or about 25 ml with each breath. Taking an average of 13,000 breaths a day an average person exhales about 1 kg of CO2.

      Man-made industrial sources of carbon dioxide include burning of fossil fuels for heating, power generation and transport, as well as processes such as cement and ammonia manufacture.

      What about processes that take CO2 out of the atmosphere? Plants convert carbon dioxide to carbohydrates during photosynthesis. They gain the energy needed for this reaction through the absorption of sunlight by pigments such as chlorophyll. The resulting gas, oxygen, is released into the atmosphere, and then used for respiration by animals and other plants, forming a cycle, which is part of the larger carbon cycle. Weathering of rocks containing silicate minerals also sucks CO2 from the atmosphere converting it to insoluble and soluble carbonates.

      The inputs and outputs of CO2 to and from the atmosphere are nearly balanced. For example, the natural decay of organic material in forests and grasslands, and forest fires, releases about 439 gigatonnes (a gigatonne is a billion tonnes) of carbon dioxide every year, while new plant growth more than counteracts this effect, absorbing 450 gigatonnes per year. Although the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of the ancient Earth shortly after its formation was produced by volcanic activity, modern volcanic activity releases only 130–230 megatonnes (million tonnes) of carbon dioxide each year, which is less than 1% of the amount released by human activities (at approximately 29 gigatonnes). In the pre-industrial era these fluxes were largely in balance. Now the balance is lost because of increased man-made CO2 emissions: currently only about 57% of human-emitted CO2 is removed by the biosphere and oceans, so man-made CO2 is on the rise.

      Direct evidence that this increase is from fossil fuel burning comes from the isotopic composition of the carbon in the CO2 of the atmosphere through time (Figure 1.2). Carbon occurs naturally in the form of three isotopes ¹⁴C, ¹³C and ¹²C, and the ratios of the different isotopes are quite significant. The graph shows the isotopic ratio of the isotopes ¹³C: ¹²C which is known as δ¹³C and is expressed in parts per thousand using the symbol ‰ (the equivalent of a percentage but based on a thousand).

      Figure 1.2 δ¹³C records of the carbon in atmospheric CO2 from Mauna Loa Observatory and ice core from South Pole ice. The trend is clearly decreasing. Circles from Mauna Loa Observatory and squares from South Pole ice. From Ghosh and Brand (2003).

      The graph shows that in the last 200 years the δ¹³C of CO2 in the atmosphere has decreased by 1.5‰. Ice core data show the trend across a greater time period (from 1700 AD) with a particular increase in the steepness of the curve at about 1800, not long after the start of the industrial revolution.

      So what’s happened? It’s partly a matter of dilution of atmospheric CO2 with older carbon in CO2 released from fossil fuels. The carbon in CO2 that’s released from burning coal, gas and oil has much lower δ¹³C than atmospheric CO2. It’s old because it was incorporated into ancient plants millions of years ago and then formed into coal. For example the carbon in 300 million-year-old Carboniferous coal has a δ¹³C of between −23 and −24‰ because this was the δ¹³C in the plant tissues that formed the coal. This is much lower than the δ¹³C of the CO2 in the modern atmosphere (about −8‰), and so when the low δ¹³C CO2 of the burned Carboniferous coal enters the atmosphere, the δ¹³C in the mix of modern atmospheric CO2 decreases. The changing values of δ¹³C through time as shown in the graph are also interesting because they in turn will be incorporated into modern plants as time goes by. In the next chapter I’ll explain how this is useful in understanding the long-term carbon

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