While hundreds of millions of dollars remove a few million tonnes of CO2 from smokestacks; hundreds of millions of fish swim home into nets and onto plates as a result of repurposing a similar millions of tonnes of CO2 into restored oceans.

The European Commission has confirmed that the White Rose carbon capture and storage (CCS) project is in line to be heavily subsidized with cash equivalent to about $400m. (€300m)

DRAX CCS project in UK

The CO2 gas will be siphoned from the smoke stacks of a new coal-fired power station, liquified, and stored in undersea rock formations. Construction might start as soon as late 2016 with completion date about 4 and half years later.

“It’s very good news for the UK and EU,” said Dr Vivian Scott, from the University of Edinburgh. “”The money is conditional on the project being delivered; you have to deliver a project that injects the relevant quantity of CO2.”

Climate scientists meeting in Berlin earlier this week endorsed CCS technology as an important element of containing and repurposing emissions of carbon over the next 100 years.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says that if the world wants to limit temperatures rises and continue using coal and oil, then the CO2 has to be captured and repurposed whether to geologic storage or more useful end purposes.

“CCS technologies could reduce the life-cycle of greenhouse gas emissions of fossil fuel power plants,” says the report, which also stresses many of the downsides of the technology, including worries about the long-term integrity and safety of CO2 storage.

Another costly CCS project in Western Canada is already underway. Shell Canada’s Quest carbon capture and storage project is at the midway point and the facility should be ready to start operating in late 2015, company officials said Thursday.

Quest project in Alberta

Quest will be the world’s first oilsands CCS project, and Shell’s first CCS project on a commercial scale. It is expected to reduce direct emissions from the bitumen upgrader at Scotford by one million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year — equivalent to taking 175,000 cars off the road, according to Shell.

Quest is expected to cost $1.35 billion. The Alberta and Federal governments are each paying about 1/3 of the project cost wiht Shells group picking up the last 1/3. It is being built on behalf of Athabasca Oil Sands Project joint-venture owners Shell (60 per cent), Chevron (20 per cent) and Marathon Oil (20 per cent).

The large-scale carbon-capture units under construction at Alberta site will recover CO2 from flue gases. The CO2 will be compressed, then transported in an underground pipeline to an injection site in Thorhild County, 60 kilometres north of the upgrader.

The CO2 will be injected into three storage wells, each more than two kilometres underground, and trapped in porous sandstone under multiple layers of impermeable geological formation.

A fact coming to light in these heavily subsidized industrial CCS projects is the cost of hundreds of millions, perhaps even a billion, dollars in infrastructure investment is required for each million tonnes of annual CO2 capture by the plants.

What governments and their industry clients are worried about is the now proven technology that repurposes far more CO2 per project from its harmful form in the environment into restored ocean life and abundance. Our 2012 project has shown what a tiny fraction of the money being spent on these government subsidies to the large energy industry can do in the form of green stewardship of ocean pastures.

The first large scale demonstration project of ocean stewardship was complete in 2012 in the NE Pacific. The scientific analysis of a mountain of data is still ongoing, though the success of the project is unequivocal.

The Fish Came Back

But even more dramatic results swam home last fall in the form of the largest catch of salmon in all of history in the state of Alaska near to the restored ocean pasture. Where the expert projections were for a very good catch of 50 million Pink Salmon instead 226.3 million “Pinks” swam into the nets and onto the plates in Alaska last fall (2013).

The fish keep coming as well and this year predictions and observations for salmon up and down the west coast of N. American are showing historic abundance of salmon have mysteriously returned.

These fish are part of the result of a different sort of Carbon Capture and Storage, CCS. In our ocean pasture replenishment and restoration project we have shown that a few million tonnes were repurposed into restored ocean abundance and hundreds of millions of additional fish!

Fisheries experts have shown they are unwilling to include the ocean pasture restoration work in their fishery forecast models and metrics. The work to demonstrate green stewardship, replenishment, and restoration of the ocean pastures of the NE Pacific were you see, not invented there – meaning by the government fisheries agents.

There have been unexpected results from the 2012 ocean pasture restoration and the fish coming back. The US government has just purchased and is sending 60 million servings of our pasture fed healthy Alaska salmon bounty to hungry children enrolled in the USDA domestic food aid programs. Providing 60 million meals for kids seems like a good thing to do with our industrial CO2.

THE FISH CAME BACK! and they keep on coming…

Further projects to restore and replenish ocean pastures around the world will easily repurpose a billion tonnes of CO2 into billions of additional fish. https://russgeorge.net/2014/04/11/bring-back-fish-everywhere/