Proposed European Carbon Dioxide Pipelines & Terminals Would Endanger Tens Of Millions

In 2020, a bucolic part of western Mississippi, the tiny village of Satartia, experienced a terrifying disaster. About 300 people live in the village and surrounding area. It’s in the county of Yazoo, whose population density is 11 per square kilometer. For contrast, New York City’s density is 1,000 times that and London’s is 500 times that.

But in the southern USA, sometimes they liquify it, put it in pipelines and pump it over to enhanced oil recovery sites. Why do they liquify it? Because gaseous carbon dioxide takes up 590 times as much space as liquid carbon dioxide for the same number of kilograms. It’s cheaper to pump liquid carbon dioxide through pipelines than gaseous carbon dioxide.

No, the problem was the carbon dioxide. It’s obviously a significant problem as a greenhouse gas when it’s down around 420 parts per million, or 0.042% of the atmosphere. We breathe it in at those levels without concern. 40,000 ppm or 4% is immediately dangerous to human health. 80,000 ppm, 8% of the air we are breathing, results in dimmed sight, sweating, tremor, unconsciousness, and possible death.

And when a big pipeline carrying liquid carbon dioxide ruptures, the contents of the pipeline start gushing out and expanding 590 times into a thick sheet of carbon dioxide that pushes all of the atmosphere aside. Then it spreads, preferring to go downhill and to settle into any low-lying areas. It managed to travel 1.6 kilometers, kill car engines, render people unconscious, and required hundreds of people to be evacuated — in a county with 11 people per square kilometer.

There is even the potential for some of the carbon capture to be bolted onto existing or new fossil fuel power plants, something which has always been found to work poorly, require a lot of extra energy hence burning of more fossil fuels, rarely meet targets and result in uneconomically expensive electricity.Shaping the future CO2 transport network for Europe

As a reminder, all of the things I’m comparing the pipelines to have economic value in and of themselves, and carry goods, energy, or people, which are productive for Europe’s economy. The proposed 19,000 kilometers are waste disposal lines of no secondary economy benefit.Overlay of proposed European CO2 pipelines and terminals on top of a map of European population density by author

By definition, the most industrialized parts of Europe also have some of the highest population densities. Any carbon capture at industrial or fossil generation plants will results in thousands of kilometers of pipelines running through Europeans’ back yards.

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