AIArchitect

Global warming is a theory. Read Shattered Consensus: The True State of Global Warming by Patrick J. Michaels. The underline models are unreliable.

That being said, gas is expensive and a scarce resource, I support alternative fuel sources and alternative transportation methods. But coal seems like a step backward, not forward. Coal is a scarce resource. Let's keep looking.

Mountaintop coal removal is devastating to the Appalachian region. It involves removing entire mountain tops and bulldozing them down into the valleys below. Any measures which promote liquid coal are costly to the environment. Read the Washington Post article on Wednesday June 13th concerning how much coal it takes to produce one barrell of liquid fuel. This process produces more greenhouse gasses than burning gasoline.

Let's see:

"The notion of high-sulfur coal as a clean source of fuel is about as credible to one side of the environmentalism debate as the notion of human-caused global warming is to the other."

One side sees no credibility in the possibility of a process for the clean use of coal, without any reliable scientific data or testing to rely on for that opinion. They also accept that humans are a major contributor to (cyclical) global warming, again without any reliable scientific data in support of the proposition. Detect a pattern here?

Let's all be a bit skeptical, and see what this new technology can do in practice. (Remember, the scientific process is a distinctly different approach than propaganda, whether it wins an Oscar or not.) Then, if successful, it can be implemented as part of an energy diversification movement that will phase out oil in due time, just as coal will itself be phased out in rational fashion. In the mean time be a bit more maturity, and fewer unreasonable and unsupported claims about the demise of the planet, would be appropriate.

I am quite convinced that the great efforts to maintain the existing energy paradigm are rooted in fantasy rather than science. Although it is possible to clean the carbon from the gas arising from the use of coal for power generation, it is difficult to comprehend why this would be better than spending the same money on the solar alternative.

Here is what they have in mind:

Carbon Capture
CO2 is captured using technologies that have been developed and proved in other applications. Currently, there are three main CO2 capture approaches:

· From combustion products from power plant flue gases

· Before combustion in gasification systems (see below)

· By burning coal or gas in oxygen to produce a concentrated CO2 flue gas.

The main technology in use today involves separating CO2 from flue gases or other streams using an amine solution, then recovering the CO2 by steam stripping.

Hydrogen production / Carbon dioxide separation
Gasification of fossil fuels (see above) produces a hydrogen and carbon monoxide gas stream, which when reacted with steam (the water shift reaction) produces a mixture of hydrogen and carbon dioxide, which can be separated (by pressure swing adsorption).

The hydrogen can then be used as:

· A chemical feedstock,

· A fuel in a gas turbine combined cycle plant or a fuel cell to produce electricity,

· A fuel for transportation.

The carbon dioxide can then be stored or sequestered in some way.

Perhaps CO2 Compression and transport
After capture CO2 is compressed to a liquid state at ~80 atmospheres pressure and pumped to the storage site. The CO2 may then be injected into the target geological formation. Really?

CO2 is largely inert and is already transported in high pressure pipelines. For example, the Weyburn project in Canada currently transports over 1 million tonnes of CO2 through 320 kilometre long pipeline.

Is sequestration or Carbon Storage Feasible?

For CO2 storage to be an effective way of avoiding climate change, the CO2 must be stored for several hundreds or thousands of years.

CO2 storage also requires minimal environmental impacts, low costs to be affordable, and conformity to national and international laws.

The main options for storing CO2 underground are in depleted oil and gas reservoirs, deep saline reservoirs and unminable coal seams.

CO2 is stored in gas-tight natural reservoirs, such as those that already hold oil, gas or water. These must be at depths greater than 800m, where the CO2 can be stored in a comparatively dense form.

Monitoring and verification

If CO2 storage is to be used as a basis for emissions trading or to meet national commitments on emission reductions, it will be necessary to verify the quantities of CO2 stored. We would have to prove that it was not leaking back into the atmosphere.

Measurement of the amounts of CO2 injected during geosequestration uses established and well understood technologies. However the quantities that would need to be stored are formidable. The issue is making sure the CO2 stays where it is placed; and hence requires both;

an understanding of the reservoir geology, and recognition of both secure versus potentially leaky storage sites; and

the ability to measure CO2 both at point of placement and should it leak.

Major oil and gas companies and their contractors can track gas flows in underground reservoirs using seismic and well logging techniques and reservoir simulation tools. These technologies are being successfully applied in sequestration projects in Europe and North America.

Further development of these technologies is required, along with the demonstration of techniques for measuring and controlling small gas leakages.

What has actually been done in coal-fired capture?

There are commercially operating plants throughout the world that utilise CO2 captured from the flue gas of coal fired power stations. This is then used as a raw material for use in food and chemical processing plants. However these operations typically only recover of the order of one to two hundred tonnes of CO2 per day which would represents less than TWO PERCENT (2%) of the DAILY TOTAL of CO2 emitted from a typical 500 MW coal fired power plant. (SEE http://www.tmm.com.au/zets/faq/faq.htm )

Little or no actual demonstrated feasibility.

The goal of carbon sequestration is to take CO2 that would otherwise accumulate in the atmoshere and put it in safe permanent storage. This can be done in really big natural or man made bbottles underground or chemically trapped. We must question what sorbent would be used in the latter case and how that sorbent could be recycled if at all. You see whatever it is, it will take a lot of it to scrub the CO2 from all that coal. It will have to be kept scrubbed for a very long time.

It is kind of like nuclear waste you see. there is really no place to put the waste product.

On site capture may be a sensible approach for the large sources such as a coal plant if there was some place to put the captured CO2, but obviously it is not feasible for small or mobile sources. Where do we dump it? How do we secure it? How much is that going to cost? What make that the best alternative?

A paper written by Klaus S. Lackner, Pattrick Grimes and Hans-J Ziock explores the options and suggests that extraction of CO2 from free air flow could provide a viable cost effective alternative to changing transportation infrastructure to non carbonaceous fuels. This paper suggests that first we burn the coal and consequently pollute the air, live in that polluted air and then clean it in a big air laundering facility.

Although possible, in reality the feasibility of 100% CO2 capture has not been demonstrated anywhere and is simply not available for implementation at this time. The sorbents required to my knowledege have not been identified and are not available. Before you wade in with your right wing rhetoric please show us your science. Before we build those coal plants show us an opperating economically feasible cost competitive working model.

This is not high school science. In a classroom experiment we can bubble air through calcium hydroxide solution and remove the CO2 component. Under controlled conditions we can scubb CO2. However, in real life we are faced with the scale of the task which can not be economically addressed! Where do we put the calcium carbonate? How do we keep the CO2 chained to it?

Giberto Rozenchan arrived at the price of $10 to $15 per ton of CO2 using capture and storage by an active recycles sorbent. The significant cost involved in carbon capture and storage is the capture process. Various studies by the IEA GHG R&D programme and others have assessed the costs of capturing CO2 from new pulverised coal, integrated coal gasification and natural gas combined cycle power plants, which range from approximately US$15 to 90 per ton CO2 avoided or about 75 percent of the whole problem solution cost of CO2 capture, transport and sequestration.

It is estimated that transport and storage costs are typically in the range US$5 - $15 per tonne, depending on transport distance and storage method.

Current estimates from the Electric Power Research Institute on the cost of electricity from power plants with carbon capture and storage indicates a 40 – 50 % increase in the cost of electricity for new integrated gasification combined cycle plants and approximately an 80 – 90 % increase for new pulverised coal plants utilising conventional processes.

Is the coal option viable where the cost of solar collection plant has at the most a one time installation cost of $30/kwh without the forever cost burden of the fossil fuel itself and the associated cleanup burden.

We are currently adding globally a net 10 billion tons of carbon to the atmoshere every year! Wake up to the reality that the amount of CO2 is measurable, has been measured and that this is hard science and not political smoke.

According to US agencies, that is simply what is so.

The net zero carbon economy works better than expanding the fossil fuel economy, obviously existing solar power plants in opperation do not add to the CO2 burden at all. Obviously they are also cheaper when subjected to a rational analysis of the cost. We have reason for high hopes.

Where we have hydro electric facilities we save power as water behind the damn that will be there when we need it each year. With existing fossil fuel plants we will have plenty of fossil fuel in the ground as a back-up fuel supply. All of the necessary existing plant and distribution infrastructure, the externality, is in place and long since amortized.

The pundits will talk about the cost. So while we are at it let us defuse the arguement. The installation price of photovoltaics and other alternative energy production options are actually just an externality.

The high initial installation cost is a sunk cost, not an ongoing cost like those of fossil fuels. Does anyone take into account the cost of building the entire drilling, shipping, storage and refining infrastructure for crude oil, when analysing the price of gasoline? No they do not. Or the similar costs when analysing the price of coal plants or hydro-electric plants? No they don't. These costs are long-ago amortized, and are no longer reflected in the price we pay.

The economic problem associated with photovoltaics isn’t their ongoing opperational or replacement cost, which is minimal, it is the cost of building a photovoltaic infrastructure on american rooftops- building the installed base - from scratch. The current cost wholesale to build that infrastructure is about $10.00 per watt installed.

Coal is not a sustainable source of power. There is simply no logic in planning a future around non-renewable sources of power.

Whether new technologies can or cannot produce cleaner coal is not the issue here. The notion that "clean coal" can be the wave of the future is about as far-sighted as asking the passengers of the Titanic to chew enough gum to plug the hole!

The fact is, no matter how clean, coal IS NOT RENEWABLE and moving towards greater use of it does not solve the core issue of eliminating reliance of finite resources.

We also have not considered the fact that coal mining butchers the earth and removes the very vegetation that helps ABSORB greenhouse gases.

Traditional energy producers are scrambling to protect their businesses and markets by proposing quick fixes that don't do anything but pad their profits.