How about question 9 :

How many power stations using this “innovative” technology have been built and commissioned?

Their web site http://www.sargas.no/ makes no mention of any power stations already built or ordered. It only states that its concept is being tested at a power plant in Sweden. It appears this company wants to use Malta as a testbed for yet untested technology in what would turn out to be a very expensive (for Malta) experiment with yet unknown, possibly disastrous, results.

Alert’s owner is a Malta Today columnist.

Is Sargas the new Santa?

You can always find ‘artikli ta’ sugu’ to your liking somewhere else. Cara daqs il-kristall.

It would be most interesting to find out who the local Sargas representative happens to be.

They may be pushing Sargas so that the local rep can get a commission equal to or greater than the one received by the BWSC rep. Just keeping up with the Joneses?

At the earliest, Sargas can have the plant up and running is not before 2016. Had they been the choice, (instead of the Delimara extension) what would have happened with the Marsa power station? Would it have to remain operating well beyond the EU stipulated operating hours at a punitive cost?

Such is the economic prowess of Joseph and Edward.

‘A very technical CCS controversy by Kate Mackenzie

Carbon capture and sequestration is nothing if not controversial. The cost, effectiveness and the public reaction to extracting CO2 from coal- or gas-fired plants and storing it underground are still hotly debated, and likely will continue to be until a commercial-scale power generation CCS project is fully up and running.

Two Texas-based engineers last year pointed out what they see as an unavoidable technical flaw in the whole proposition: the pure limitations of how much CO2 can be stored. Their work has drawn strong criticism from four geologists.

The authors of the original reports, Christine Economides-Ehlig of Texas A&M University and husband Michael Economides of Houston University, presented a paper to a Society of Petroleum Engineers conference, and this year had a journal article published which attracted the attention of the Guardian. Economides outlined the work on his blog at the Houston Chronicle’s website:

The conclusions are quite negative and, in fact, sobering. Earlier published reports on the potential for sequestration fail to address the necessity of storing CO2 in a closed system. Our calculations suggest that the volume of liquid or supercritical CO2 to be disposed cannot exceed more than about 1% of pore space. This will require from 5 to 20 times more underground reservoir volume than has been envisioned by many, and it renders geologic sequestration of CO2 a profoundly non-feasible option for the management of CO2 emissions. Kyoto Protocol or successor accords would imply orders of magnitude larger problem than anything possible as CCS.

The full paper looks at existing CO2 sequestration carried out in enhanced oil recovery (EOR), in deep saline aquifers and in depleted hydrocarbon reservoirs to show that CCS is not possible on the scale expected of it, for climate change mitigation purposes.

However CCS is nothing if not technically complex, either. Four geologists from the UK and Canada have written a rebuttal of Economides’ and Economides-Ehlig’s paper, arguing that:

In essence, this unusual theory assumes that storage of CO2 will be injected to the deep subsurface into a sealed container, with no-flow of existing water through the lid, sides, or base. Un-surprisingly, if extra CO2 fluid is added to a sealed container, the pressure within the container will increase.

The problem, they say, is the assumptions on which this is based:

The most profound error, is that the subsurface is not made of sealed boxes. If it were, then oil and gas would not have been able to move for tens or hundreds of kilometers laterally and vertically, to be caught in the traps where these fluids are discovered today. The oil industry would not exist.

There are other errors, they add; most importantly the assumption that the reservoir is only 30 metres thick. The authors in their full response say that between them they have analysed 20 CO2 injection, only one of which experienced a severe pressure problem and nine of which operate – or could operate – at industrial scale.’ …………..’

The technology in question, is still untested on an industrial scale, and if these people want to sell the system, they should come clean about the real issues they’re facing in the US.

My question is why they offer a full power plant and not the CCS system as an auxiliary modular component to existing plants.

It does seem that by doing so, the coal lobby intends to gain a stronger foothold in the EU. Wouldn’t it be wiser to go for cleaner fuels, and shouldn’t these people offer a tested system which builds on those?