Energy/Industry Fossil Fuels Environment Climate Change Science Politics and Technology Nations

Use Coke to Sequester Carbon – It Would Be Funny if it was meant to be a joke

April 18, 2015

232

April 18, 2015 – I like my carbonated drinks and coke in its many branded iterations is my preference. But I never thought that my favorite beverage would be included in an energy white paper. This one entitled, Energy White Paper – Investing in Australia’s Energy Future, produced by the current Australian Governments Energy Council and endorsed by the Honorable, Ian MacFarlane, Minister for Industry and Science (see picture below) was released in the last couple of weeks.

In the section of the report entitled “Low emissions fossil fuel” the authors talk about capturing CO2 before it is released to the atmosphere where it “can either be utilised in other products….such as carbonated drinks.” Obviously the authors are referring to carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) as the means of collecting CO2 from fossil fuel sources. But really? Are they serious that putting in in a bottle of coke equates with sequestration.

Now before you accuse me of taking words out of context, here is the entire phrase appearing on page 56 of the report which states that there would be “opportunities to utilise CO2 in products such as carbonated drinks and plastics or to enhance the growth of oil-rich algae in solar bioreactors to produce biofuel.”

I thought maybe this was a prank, an April Fool’s joke on the part Minister MacFarlane. I assume he has read this report in endorsing it. But sadly, this is no April Fool’s prank and MacFarlane is some kind of April fool.

The truth is that Australia’s government is fixated on strip mining the country of coal to feed Asian markets so that it can continue to grow its economy while increasing its contribution of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

The country has one CCS project under development, the Gorgon LNG project which will start operations in 2016 and store 3.4 to 4 megatons of CO2 underground annually. Compare that to Australia’s 373 megatons of CO2 output in 2013 and you can see that CCS has a long way to go to be any kind of factor in reducing the country’s contribution of carbon to the planet’s atmosphere.

As for bottles of coke as a CCS tool. A typical soft drink contains about 2.2 grams of CO2 per can, a little more from a bottle. To sequester that carbon you can never open the bottle, pop the can or ingest the liquid in it. Any of these actions will return the CO2 to the air. Now look at just how much Australian’s drink soft drinks and the absurdity of the report becomes even more grotesque. Australia consumes 944 million liters of soft drinks a year amounting to 2,000 tons of CO2.

Minister MacFarlane, you and your Prime Minister, Tony Abbott (the man seen to the left in the image below), should be up for some kind of award granted to stupid people. I thought the Darwin Awards might be appropriate but the actions of these two politicos unfortunately won’t lead to their immediate demise. Instead their ignorance as leaders making policy will drag all of us down in time.

For Americans who are just learning who will be running in the next presidential election more than a year-and-a-half away, please take note. Should one of the many Republican candidates suggest drinking coke to sequester carbon you can say you read it here first.