Can Clean Coal Actually Work? Time to Find Out. — “Using this technology will buy us time.”

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://discovermagazine.com/2009/feb/25-can-clean-coal-actually-work

Can Clean Coal Actually Work? Time to Find Out.

01.25.2009

The first "clean coal" power plant is now up and running.

by Jocelyn Rice

The world’s http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2008/09/05/worlds-first-really-clean-coal-plant-gets-a-try-out-in-germany/">first “clean coal” power plant fired up in September in the eastern German city of Spremberg. Traditional coal-fired power plants, which produce 36 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions in the United States, are the fastest-growing source of energy—and air pollution—around the world.

http://discovermagazine.com/2006/dec/clean-coal-technology">Clean coal technology does not release carbon dioxide into the air, instead using carbon capture and storage (CCS) to collect the gas, concentrate it, and pump it deep underground for permanent storage in natural geologic formations. At least that is the concept; there has never been an operational CCS system at a coal-fired power plant, until now.

The pilot plant in Spremberg, built by the Swedish utility http://www.vattenfall.com/">Vattenfall, focuses on the carbon capture part of the equation. First coal is burned, boiling water and producing steam that drives a turbine to generate electricity. Then the resulting waste gas, largely carbon dioxide and water, is cycled back into a boiler in a process that concentrates the carbon dioxide. The concentrated gas is “scrubbed” by sulfur-absorbent materials to remove the compounds that cause acid rain. The CO₂ that remains is condensed, compressed to a liquid under high pressure, and cooled to –18 degrees Fahrenheit, where it remains in liquid form. Vattenfall soon plans to begin trucking the liquid carbon dioxide more than 100 miles to a depleted natural gas field, where it will be pumped some 3,000 feet underground for storage.

Vattenfall has high hopes for clean coal, but the company regards this process as a bridge to renewable-energy technologies rather than a permanent solution to climate change. “Sooner or later we have to find something else,” says Vattenfall’s Staffan Görtz. “Using this technology will buy us time.”

…

[Radical Activist]

1. A bridge to what? We already have renewables.

Clean coal is unproven. Wind and solar work and are cheaper. Why does clean coal need to be a bridge to something we already have that does the job better? Not to mention that it still isn't clean from coal ash, solid wastes, strip-mining, mountain top removal, acid mine drainage etc etc.

By the time CCS is proven and implemented on a wide scale most of our coastal cities will be flooded out. This isn't the answer.

[Name removed]

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[TheWraith]

8. Because solar and wind are an astrisk on the national energy picture.

Coal supplies a HUGE amount of our national electricity, and at a tremendous environmental cost. Those plants need to be either replaced, and replaced fast, or made cleaner. We can't build enough wind power to supplant those plants in any reasonable time, and even if we started a crash program to build Westinghouse AP1000s, it still behooves us to make our coal power as clean as we can for however long we still have it.

[Radical Activist]

10. Ridiculous.

Yes, wind and solar are a small amount of our energy supply. That isn't an argument against building more. It means there's plenty of room for growth. Just because they make up a tiny portion of our supply now doesn't meant it has to stay that way five years from now. Wind and solar are expanding rapidly. There's no logic to your statement at all.

You wrote: "We can't build enough wind power to supplant those plants in any reasonable time"

Solar power plants can be constructed faster than coal plants. If time is you're issue then waiting ten years for CCS to be proven is not the answer. If time is a concern to you then you're making another argument AGAINST coal.

Not to mention that converting existing plants to coal gassification and adding still unproven carbon capture technology will raise energy prices far higher than wind and solar.

[TheWraith]

16. Just happened back across this thread, figured you needed correcting.

"Yes, wind and solar are a small amount of our energy supply. That isn't an argument against building more."

Who said it was an argument againt building more? The point is that you could multiply all existing wind and solar energy in the US by a factor of ten and it still wouldn't make a substantial dent in coal use. In fact, it would barely even be noticed. And despite the tendancy around here to hype rate-of-growth instead of installed capacity, going from 0.5% to 0.8% isn't going to solve our problems.

Five years production of solar and wind is not going to get rid of coal. Period. Not even ten or twenty years of production and deployment will do that. What's being talked about here is retrofitting our coal plants to reduce their harmful emissions for as long as we have to have the things in service. We've been waiting for the happy solar and wind powered utopia for decades now, and it has never happened.

Time is absolutely a concern, which is why we need to deal with the current facts and current deployed infrastructure, rather than thinking we can fix it by 2050.

[kristopher]

17. How the fuck do you know that?

It is extremely easy to demonstrate (by use of WW2 production statistics) that your assertion is pure hogwash.

"Five years production of solar and wind is not going to get rid of coal. Period. Not even ten or twenty years of production and deployment will do that. What's being talked about here is retrofitting our coal plants to reduce their harmful emissions for as long as we have to have the things in service. We've been waiting for the happy solar and wind powered utopia for decades now, and it has never happened"

[madokie]

12. By doing nothing except the way we burn the coal will cut about 50 to 60 percent

of the carbon dioxide out and that is using a gasifier rather than the direct burn most coal plants use today. A 50 to 60 percent reduction of making the carbon dioxide to begin with would buy us some time. IMHO

[CLANG]

2. Does anyone know

what prevents the -18F liquid from heating back into gas and rising back out of the ground?

[OKIsItJustMe]

3. Good luck?

Seriously, that's a concern for many of us.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage#Leakage

However, consider, what keeps natural gas in the ground?

[Turbineguy]

4. The overall thermal efficiency

would have to be pretty low, but in the scheme of things might be OK. You still however have the enormous heat rejection.

[Gregorian]

5. Even if the process works, it's nonrenewable. We're consuming the planet.

And WE are still growing. The amount of oil and coal we need is quickly going to be at it's end. Quickly could even mean 500 years. But since we're so focused on living OUR lifestyles, quickly is more like decades. We need to think way far ahead. This shortsightedness is our downfall.

As we grow, our required fuel consumption has grown exponentially along with us. And it's fascinating to see just how much fuel we are going to be needing. More than we've used in the entire history of using fuel. So shortly we'll need more fuel than exists.

There is only one answer. Renewable. And it's not even based on global warming. Just rate of consumption. If we factor in global warming, well we're talking about an emergency that has to stop. And that is where we'd have to take another look at just how effective their sequestration method is. "Storage". What does that mean? Will it store forever? For a century? It sounds more like at best we are hoping for a strategy that postpones the forthcoming disaster.

Folks, we need to start discussing population. This is the other factor in this two factor equation. We talk about energy, but we always fail to talk about the other factor- what is using that energy. People. And people are population. If we don't discuss that, we might as well not discuss the other.

[ConcernedCanuk]

6. ON the Population thing - the USA's WarMachine is trying to address that

.
.
.

Over a million killed in Iraq in the last decade - and

the WarMachine spread around enough Depleted Uranium that should keep their population down for a few centuries . .

And I'm sure that their drones and smart bombs will keep killing enough people across the globe to keep our population in check

and won't interfere in massacres in places like Somalia and Darfur -

as for their OWN population?


Well

Katrina should tell you how much the gubment cares about that . . .

[OKIsItJustMe]

7. Puny wars

If you actually wanted to put a serious dent in world population, the US wars in Iraq just don't come close. Drones and "smart bombs?" (Seriously?) Drunk drivers killed more people on US highways in 2007 (41,059) than drones and "smart bombs" killed. http://www.iraqbodycount.org/ Don't get me wrong, I opposed this stupid war from the beginning of the propaganda build-up. I'd like to see the people responsible prosecuted, but, compared to a World War? It's nothing. "WWI" had about 40 Million casualties. "WWII" killed about 70 Million. The US war in Vietnam killed more people than the war in Iraq.

Katrina? How many people were killed? Far too many, but probably less than 2,000.

The genocides in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somalia#The_2006_civil_war_and_invasion_by_Ethiopia">Somalia and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darfur_conflict">Darfur? They're tragedies; there's no doubt about it. The dead may number in the Millions. But will that affect the world population?

When the world population is approaching 7 Billion, I'm sorry, but a thousand, even a Million deaths is tragic, but they hardly register as a significant drop in the global population.

No, if you want to seriously affect world population, you're going to need something dramatic. Like social change:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#Rate_of_increase

The United Nations states that population growth is rapidly declining due to the demographic transition. The world population is expected to peak at 9.2 billion in 2050.

http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/wpp2006/WPP2006_Highlights_rev.pdf

(BTW: You forgot to blame the US War Machine for the Tsunami in 2004 and the Sichuan and Iranian earthquakes.)

[Kolesar]

9. little babies are beautiful and more people is God's way

Don't ya' know?

DU needs a population control thread. I don't know where to start.

[damienian]

11. How Does Clean Coal Work

Clean coal technology usually addresses atmospheric problems resulting from burning coal. Historically, the primary focus was on sulfur dioxide and particulates, due to the fact that it is the most important gas which leads to acid rain. More recent focus has been on carbon dioxide (due to its likely impact on global warming) as well as other pollutants. Concerns exist regarding the economic viability of these technologies and the timeframe of delivery, potentially high hidden economic costs in terms of social and environmental damage, and the costs and viability of disposing of removed carbon and other toxic matter

Here is a link that might be useful: http://www.lincenergy.us

[NNadir]

13. No matter how many shades you try, lipstick on a pig is still lipstick on a pig.

I note, with due contempt, that it always anti-nukes who couldn't care less about the millions who die each year from coal - and who have fetishes for the less than 50 people who died from Chernobyl in 1986 - who are trying to put lipstick on the coal pig.

[madokie]

14. I note, with due contempt.

:rofl:
Just think where we would or could be today if we had not spent the last half century or so trying to put lipstick on the Nuclear Pig, we'd be well on our way to energy independence today. A shit pot full of money and a hell of a lot of time has been shown to have been a waste of time, money and effort in trying to convince us that nuclear is safe when the one issue we all had to begin with so many years ago has never been sufficiently addressed. What to do with the highly radioactive and extremely dangerous, for a long long time, waste.

Oh and if Mr Douglass was alive today and knew you were using his picture as an avatar here, he would search you out and choke you within an inch of your pitiful and pathetic life. I just know that...

[wtmusic]

15. CCS sounds like the answer to all of our energy problems!

Scrub the CO2? Truck it 100 miles? Pump it 3000 feet underground?

Very funny.