In his July 31 letter, “Altered pH threatens food pyramid,” Jim Comrada summarizes the CO2, carbonic acid and PH environmental problem and writes, “You cannot ‘scrub’ CO2 out of our atmosphere like you can sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide from coal-fired plants.”
Coal is dirtier than gas, but information at econ.st/1r4GoaT states that engineers from Shell, an oil firm, and SSE, an energy company, plan to add technology that will capture the carbon dioxide from a power station’s aging gas-fired furnace and store it in a depleted gas field more than a mile beneath the North Sea. That could cut its emissions by up to 90 percent, making the Peterhead power station in Aberdeen, Scotland, by far the cleanest gas plant in the world and lopping $51 billion off Britain’s annual energy bill by 2050, says the Energy Technology Institute, a government and industry research body.
Carbon capture and storage is currently a pipe dream, and like the Columbia River Crossing, it will have absorbed significant capital before delivering more than paperwork.
Merv Murphy
Vancouver
