We said it was a stupid idea at the time, and that the maths did not stand up. Subsequently, on 23 April 2009, as the dying Labour administration embraced the technology and the Tories cried out for more, we observed that this was nothing more that a "cynical and meaningless" ploy to keep the Greenies on board.

So it has come to pass that Longannet, the flagship scheme for carbon capture in the UK, has been junked, despite the availability of £1 billion funding from this moronic administration. And since it is the only remaining project in the running for CCS funding, that makes it about thirty months from inception to total collapse of this absurd policy. God only knows how much money has been wasted on it.

View full article here

Does this mean we won't have to close our coal fired power stations or will we be forced top buy our CCS plants from the Germans?

In the article, Richard wrote:



Forgive my ignorance if this is a stupid question, as you know I don't live in the UK, but couldn't we find out this information from a well formulated FOI request?

The more people who know about these loonies and how much their loonie schemes have cost (and are still costing) the better, in my view.

Re ICIPARIS. You do not have to live in the UK to make UK FoI requests. I have made several although I, too, live in France.

Richard. Interesting programme on BBC last night on the need for many more HV pylon routes. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b015zrkl They are needed to join the windfarms to the existing grid. Yet another reason not to install windfarms off-shore, in the NW England nor the highlands of Scotland. I.E. regions of low population.

Far too much pessimism on this site.....

Look....



http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2 ... an-funding




We're not domed after all.......



Can't get the parable of the drowning man clutching at a stick out of my head for some reason.....

............and at what total & ongoing cost? Money just doesn't disappear, so into who's pockets?
Trivia: My few indoor plants are thriving on Carbon Dioxide poisoning.

The entire carbon capture scheme is almost criminal.
Under all circumstances the amount of coal needed to compress transport and store the CO2 would double our coal consumption.

In other words we would have accelerated our use of coal.

In principle all Green schemes from wind to solar and hybrid and electric cars accelerate the use of energy and resources like steel, concrete and rare earth metals.

This is apart from the fact that these technologies are highly ineffective, the costs are unsustainable and the problem these applications solve non existing.

Criminal covers it all right.

It was known from an early stage before any serious money had been spent that it would cost nearly all the energy that a coal plant produced to capture a meaning full amount of the CO2 in the exhaust flue. In fact many think that CCS was industrially impossible to achieve when to capture just 1% of the CO2 was calculated to cost 30% of a plants electrical output and increase the cost of the power by 100%

So the argument was about how much to capture and what that would cost and what the market would tolerate. Now that it is becoming obvious to even species stupid that there is no more money these schemes are unravelling faster than they have the capability to think.

I just hope that people realise that these schemes were always doomed to failure and are not just being cancelled for lack of funds. We need to see the mud stick

Money solyndering won't get out of fashion easily. For example, BBC reports that "Companies call for tougher climate action": http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15352764

No, it is not as easy as that.. Shed loads of money has been spread around on research projects, directly and indirectly related to the project, some part governmental funded, some joint funded with the EU. It is not at all easy to find out the sources, much less the sums paid and there is no single record. It would take a very substantial effort to come up with even an approximate figure.

CCS is/was a bonkers idea, the feasibility/actualisation of which was even more mad - purely on cost and pumping the 'excess', then, all the rest.

Now that CCS is off the menu [thank **** for that!!], it does present a near future energy shortfall conundrum. We must therefore attend, to the next logical step which is, to ignore the LCPD whilst our elderly but otherwise reliable coal fired energy generating plant potential is still required.

Did I say logical? Not a word familiar to anyone working in the DoE&CC is it?

But that was always the name of the game ... to make coal-fired generation so expensive that wind became competitive.

This is splendid news. It proves that if something is stupid and economically impossible, then it cannot happen, however much Fascist elves such as Chris Huhne insist it must. Reality wins. The same process must spell the doom of wind farms, the Euro, and, sooner than we might think, the European Union.

The Soviet Union took about 70 years to destroy itself. I knew that the EU would suffer the same fate, but given the wealth of western Europe, I thought it would take a lot longer. I had not factored in the hubris and stupidity of our ruling class. Their Euro project has accelerated the end of the EU by decades. I cannot wait for the final denoument, even if the guilty men escape the fate of Gaddaffi, however much we might like to see the Green Tosser and Ed Millipede dragged behind a truck whilst we hit them with our shoes.

Indeed Richard, and I figured it would be an almost Herculean task before I even posed the question.

It would probably take about 10,000 FOIs, salami style tactics, starting either bottom up or top down, to start to even get a rough idea. Mass crowdsourcing, a wiki like Sandy has set up to compile and make public the results, and much more besides. Is the 'Blog Army' up to the task? I don't know; but one thing - if JohndeF is correct and anyone, wherever they are and regardless of their relationship with or interest in the UK can ask FOI questions, then crowd numbers could work in our favour - the idea of a nomad from Outer Mongolia (probably freezing his bollocks off) being able to demand information about how all this money was spent, by whom, etc. is appealing.

For JohndeF. Could you please give me a link explaining my right as a UK Citizen (not that that seems to be a determining factor) living abroad can go about making FOI requests?. That would be very helpful as I (mistakenly) didn't get involved in the recent Council Tax / Baillif campaign as I thought I had no right. Do foreigners have the same rights to ask the French Government FOI questions?; that would be very interersting. In fact, does France have the equivalent of a FOIA? I've never come across it, but would like to make use of it. Do you have any useful links in this regards

Cheers

James

How the UK Government solves the problem of fuel poverty: By fiddling the data just like they did at CRU.

And what is the outcome: One million fewer in fuel poverty

http://cbullitt.wordpress.com/2011/10/2 ... l-poverty/