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Post by redwolf on May 30, 2008 6:37:33 GMT -6
Mounting Costs Slow the Push for Clean CoalBy MATTHEW L. WALD WASHINGTON — For years, scientists have had a straightforward idea for taming global warming. They want to take the carbon dioxide that spews from coal-burning power plants and pump it back into the ground.
President Bush is for it, and indeed has spent years talking up the virtues of “clean coal.” All three candidates to succeed him favor the approach. So do many other members of Congress. Coal companies are for it. Many environmentalists favor it. Utility executives are practically begging for the technology.
But it has become clear in recent months that the nation’s effort to develop the technique is lagging badly.www.nytimes.com/2008/05/30/business/30coal.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin
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Post by Cactus Jack on May 30, 2008 9:22:01 GMT -6
Coal for decades has been getting bad publicity from the MSM and environmentalists who look at it thru the eyes of people at the turn of 19th Century birth of the Industrial Revolution, when burning coal to power industrialization spewed billions of black soot clouds into the atmosphere.
Its this vision that gives most Americans a bad taste in their mouths. Unfortunately for them, coal use today isn't the boogie man that the environmentalists make it out to be.
In these times of increasing energy costs, mostly from overseas suppliers -- despite the richness of petroleum located beneath the surface of many federally controlled lands (another issue) -- the United States has more coal than the rest of the world has oil. There is still enuff coal underground in this country to provide energy for the next 200 to 300 years, at the current rate of usage; and enuff to meet most of our energy needs, if use is maximized to greatest potential, while the development of alternative energy sources comes about.
Because of coal's negative environmental image and its hot-button environmental (climate change/global warming) issue, the future of coal power has major political implications. From mandatory emissions caps to carbon trading markets to subsidies of alternative, clean, and renewable energy sources, these legislative regulations are putting pressure on coal by forcing companies to limit coal power production or by making coal expensive relative to other power sources.
As Americans face growing energy costs, at the pumps and for generation of electricity, the U.S is continuing to mine coal in record amounts for export, to emerging industrialized nations, particularly China (which also has huge natural resources of this solid black gold) and India -- that world global warming leaders have conveniently exempted from policies enacted under the Kyoto Protocol ..how convenient is this to excuse the two most populus countries in the world, that pump out as much air pollutants and carbon dioxide as they do?
Rather than ship our natural offshore, we need to use them to power our own energy needs. THAT'S THE ONLY TRUE WAY TO REDUCE OUR DEPENDENCY ON FOREIGN SUPPLIERS & DRIVE DOWN THE INFLATED ENERGY PRICES WE ARE SEEING TODAY.
Unfortunately, too many Americans are listening to uninformed politicans (dependent upon lobbying groups who feed millions into their re-election treasure chests) and truly uniformed celebrities or recent Nobel prize recepients who rely upon hype, animated computer graphics, skewed climate change models, and junk sciences to push an agenda bent more toward global utopian socialism than commonsense.
Coal, today, is not the bad guy here, tho it was during the early 1800s when industrialization began. To avoid a return to that era, coal used in industrialization today is best accomplished using a technique known as gasification but years ahead of the methods employed by Nazi Germany to fuel its war machines in the final days of WWII.
Instead of burning coal directly, gasification breaks down coal - or virtually any carbon-based feedstock - into its basic chemical constituents. In a modern gasifier, coal is typically exposed to hot steam and carefully controlled amounts of air or oxygen under high temperatures and pressures. Under these conditions, carbon molecules in coal break apart, setting into motion chemical reactions that typically produce a mixture of carbon monoxide, hydrogen and other gaseous compounds.
Hydrogen and other coal gases can also be used to fuel power-generating turbines or as the chemical "building blocks" for a wide range of commercial products, including plastics, and fertilizers for agriculture which currently come from petroleum. Sulfur in coal, for example, emerges as hydrogen sulfide and can be captured by processes used today in the chemical industry. In some methods, the sulfur can be extracted in a form that can be sold commercially. Likewise, nitrogen typically exits as ammonia and can be scrubbed from the coal gas by processes that produce fertilizers or other ammonia-based chemicals.
In fact, gasification of coal may be one of the best ways to produce clean-burning hydrogen for tomorrow's automobiles and power-generating fuel cells.
Carbon dioxide (being blamed as a major contributor to global warming) is typically sequestered into underground caverns or trucked (in liquid form) to petroleum producers for use to recover oil from deep wells, and recovery of heavy oil sands, found in a variety of locations including those former abandoned wells in the U.S, and other places like those under control of Hugo "the thug" Chavez of Venezuela.
Today, in Tampa , Florida , and West Terre Haute , Indiana , there are power plants generating electricity by gasifying coal, rather than burning it. At a plant in Kingsport , Tennessee , coal gas is being used to make plastic for photographic film and to make methanol (a fuel that can be burned in automobile engines).
When employed for the generation of electricity, the hot exhaust of the gas turbine is then used to generate steam for a more conventional steam turbine-generator. This dual source of electric power, called a "combined cycle," converts much more of coal's inherent energy value into useable electricity. The fuel efficiency of a coal gasification power plant can be boosted to 50 percent or more.
Higher efficiencies translate into more economical electric power and potential savings for ratepayers. A more efficient plant also uses less fuel to generate power, meaning that less carbon dioxide is produced. In fact, coal gasification power processes under development could cut the formation of carbon dioxide by 40 percent or more compared to today's conventional coal-burning plant.
Coal gasification can be one of the most promising ways to use coal in the future to generate electricity and other valuable products. Yet, it is only one of an entirely new family of energy processes called "Clean Coal Technologies" ..but before we can begin to utilize the full potential of this abundant American resource, we need to stop looking at it thru the eyes of ppl at the turn of 19th Century birth of the Industrial Revolution like all the MSM and environmentalists demand.
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Post by graybeard on May 31, 2008 3:52:22 GMT -6
Have you tasted the air in Beijing or Saigon? Do you have any data on coal being shipped out? How much, from where, and by which ports?
How much does gasified coal cost compared to petroleum products after you strip out the subsidies for both? Please include the cost of restoring the land. Extracting hydrogen to power vehicles is a long way from being economically practical, regardless of source.
I've read, maybe here, that they are building new conventional coal power plants in Western Europe.
Do you have the personal experience to write the above, or did you copy it?
Welcome to the Forum.
GB
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Post by Cactus Jack on Jun 2, 2008 7:03:58 GMT -6
..my experience in coal gasification is about as extensive as al gore jr's expertise in global warming. I'm no authority by any stretch of the imagination, but over the years have been reading about the gasification process (aka syngas) in a variety of engineering journals i take or view at my local library. As an engineer (ret.), the interest is there but what I didn't learn, I looked up or sought from other sources.
Don't kno when the las'time you were in Sai Gon (currently HoChiMinhCity) or if you've ever been there but in Jan.'06 when was there with the wife (her homeland), air didn't reek of coal burning, but of same thing did when I passed thru the repot depot enroute to my army units in I-corps -- a trpical country of umpteen million ppl with no effective sewer system.
I've seen costs of extraction and export of coal but offhand don't recall the exact figures, except recall it being less costly to mine it than drilling for petroleum (less costly than planting, growing, and harvesting ethanol grains), and tho costs of gasifying it increases it's price, still is less than refining or refracting oil into fuels or products, and doesn't require 1.5-times the amount of fossil fuels to purify itself (the way ethanol does).
The answers to your other Qs can probably be answer'd by googling the net.
I'm no environmental wacko -- in that avoidance of our energy sources is the only way we can save the ecological being of America -- tho realize if U.S is to maintain its current standards of living and continue to be a leader on the world stage, it needs to begin utilizing the resources we have here rather than depending upon resources in other more violatile places in the world.
The resources the U.S has can be utilized smartly without destroying the environment, they can sustain many of our needs while we continue to practice responsibility (including as with timber, restoration), and they can carry us forward until the time when other resources (including alternative energy) comes into its on.
My thots are we either use them or we relearn the ways of the horse and the sail ...
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Post by jeffolie on Jul 10, 2008 12:47:39 GMT -6
China is and will continue to open one coal fired plant every week for a very long time.
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Post by rwc on Jul 10, 2008 13:59:03 GMT -6
How much does gasified coal cost compared to petroleum products after you strip out the subsidies for both? Please include the cost of restoring the land...
Thats not addressed and given that one has to dig for it means its not the panacea that its proponents make it out to be.
Nor the fact that these plants need a tremendous amount of water to function and which they pollute with arsenic and selenium and other toxic by-products. Which in many areas of the U.S. makes them a non-starter because of shortages of potable water.
Also it doesn't the deal with our ever increasing demand for energy. Not too long ago I saw ads that told me we had 600 years of coal, now we're down to 350 in less than 20 years.
Sustainable is word we need to learn along with self-restraint if we want to have a country worth living in and saving.
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Post by jeffolie on Jul 10, 2008 15:19:38 GMT -6
The way the rest of the world is adding coal fired plants, the US will reach 'peak coal' a lot faster than is predicted.
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