Posted by aogMonday, 14 August 2006 at 22:05 TrackBack Ping URL

My target in this post finally responded about what was meant by “carbon free”, which is “a carbon free energy supply and delivery system” and that I should netsearch for it. So I did. The first thing that popped up was this article with this lead —

Energy giants BP, ConocoPhillips and Shell announced Thursday they had formed a joint venture to build a plant in Scotland that would be the first in the world to generate “carbon free� electricity from hydrogen.

The project would convert natural gas into hydrogen and carbon dioxide, then use the hydrogen to fuel a power station and ship the CO2 to a North Sea oil field to increase oil recovery and for storage ultimately.

So, a process that creates carbon dioxide is “carbon free”? One might argue that it is “no net carbon” or “carbon neutral”, but hardly “carbon free”.

One is also left wondering about the “delivery system” being carbon free (that being the other half of the definition). Yeah, I’d like to see an example of a vehicle that doesn’t have any carbon in it.

I suppose it’s all a bit pedantic, but it stills reminds me far too much of what you get when from people who don’t have any real understanding of a subject but love the terminology, such as the way social scientists use jargon from physics. That kind of thing quite annoys me, and where would my personal charm be if I were not true to myself?