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Can Coal Be Green?
wap writes "A coal-industry sponsored group, Americans for Balanced Energy Choices thinks coal is green, and has been running television ads to make its point. The ad shows an eagle unable to fly because of smog, and then talks about how much cleaner coal is now and will be in the future, with a sub-title saying that this is because of EPA regulation. Coal burning is much cleaner now than it was due to new scrubbing technologies, but it still emits just as much carbon dioxide as ever. Carbon emissions can be reduced by increased efficiency through gasification, but the only way to stop coal from emitting carbon dioxide is carbon sequestration. Everyone agrees that sequestration is expensive, but not everyone agrees that it's even effective in the long term. Should we instead follow the suggestion of James Lovelock and go nuclear as has been discussed here before?"
This is an astroturfing-free zone, people. Move along, nothing to see here...
Hate me!
GlobalWarming.org is a site dedicated to educating people about what is really going on and who is pulling the strings.
Gee, lets skim through some of the headlines at GlobalWarming.org:
Kyoto protocol will cool the global economy
The uberhysteria over climate change
Why the United States should remove its signature from the Kyoto Protocol
The site is a one sided beast. To present it simply as an objective Educational site" is like saying Democrats.org or RNC.com are un-biased sites.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
React the CO2 with alkali derived from silicates, producing carbonates. Not only are the resulting materials stable over extremely long periods of time, but the reaction is exothermic, so one can get (in principle) extra energy.
It's not practical yet, but the theory is there.
I remember doing the maths once and figuring out that your typical coal power plant emits more radiation per megawatt than an equvalent Gas cooled reactor. Of course the reactor has more radiation locked inside it and in its fuel, but the coal plant is venting it into the air, of course, if the reactor goes wrong then more nasty radiation gets out.
Anyway, with appropriate scrubbing coal can be greener, but I don't really see it as being an option for the future. Then again, Oil and gas are fossil fuels which have many uses outside of power generation and we should be working to preserve those, so given the shoice between a coal fired station and an Oil/Gas station it's probably a better long term idea to go for the coal. I don't think coal has so many uses in comparison, except maybe as raw materials for Superman cornering the Diamond cartels.
Junk Science (djunk si-ens)
n.:
1. The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena which results in a conclusion that contradicts the writer's beliefs.
2. A system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through the scientific method and concerned with the physical world and its phenomena, yet persists in presenting facts that the writer dislikes.
Example: "If it limits my ability to squander resources, it's obviously junk science."
Sorry, that term is just annoying. The only place it's ever used is in anti-global-warming-theory screeds. A recent global warming trend is a demonstrable, verifiable fact. Sure, we can dispute the causes. But let's argue on the merit of the research, not engage in school-yard name-calling.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
I have heard that you can make biodiesel, and it burns cleaner than diesel. I'm sure that rather than burning coal, we could use biodiesel instead. Of course this would mean plant conversions. Not sure what else. Coal is a limited thing and once it is gone its gone. Biodiesel well from dictionary.com http://cancerweb.ncl.ac.uk/cgi-bin/omd?query=biodi esel&action=Search+OMD
I don't see why it couldn't be used instead. Give some farmers something to grow.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
Head down the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky and ask the people who live there. Coal mining has done substantial damage to the environment, and to people's lives.
Coal mining today is not about underground mines - it is about strip mines and mountain top removal. Instead of digging holes underground you blast the top few hundred feet off of a mountain and dig straight down. Of course the blast debris - thousands of tons of it - has to go somewhere. Usually into the neighbouring valley, destroying homes and watersheds.
The Industry says that today's coal burns cleaner. Do they tell you how?
That's because the coal is washed before being trucked to users. Where do you think the solvent laden waste water goes? Into large holding ponds, dozens of which are known to be on the brink of collapsing.
One such pond broke in 2002. The Martin County slurry spill, at over 300 million gallons, was the largest disaster of its kind ever in the southeastern United States. The spill released nearly 30 times more liquid than the Exxon Valdez.
You also need to factor in the coal company's history of just abandoning mines, leaving them for local and state governments to clean up. And the ongoing damage and injuries caused by coal trucks hauling grossly overwieght loads - by ten or twenty tons - on narrow highways.
There's more to being clean than measuring smokestack emmisions.
Three Squirrels
This research was put forward by Yang Xuexiang, a professor of geological sciences at Changchun University of Technology in China. His research showed that the ozone layer was affected by certain energetic particles striking the earth's atmosphere and breaking up the ozone layer.
(Why is it that when someone publishes something you don't like, it's "junk science", but when you like the result he's "showed" it? (As opposed to "suggesting"?)
Is this" the guy? If so, do you know anything about ozone or atmospheres? If so, why do you believe him? He says:
Yang argues the northern hemisphere is where the use of freon is concentrated and so if the freon theory was correct, the ozone hole should have appeared above the north pole instead of the south pole, Xinhua says. He says that most planets, including the earth, may lose part of their mass when they move toward the sun. This lays the foundation for the evolution of atmospheres on planets. For instance, he says, planets near the sun, such as Mercury, have very thin atmospheres, while planets far from the sun have much thicker atmospheres.
He apparently didn't check his data on the planets, since Venus has a thicker atmosphere than Earth does. (And Jupiter and Saturn have thicker atmospheres than Uranus and Neptune.) Come to think of it, without any magnetic field, Venus should really be screwed by his logic, shouldn't it?
His claim that the north pole should have more ozone depletion tells me that he hasn't even read the literature on CFCs and polar stratospheric clouds. The latter are aid in the chemistry of ozone destruction, and occur in the south pole. (Circulation patterns are different, leading to different weather patterns.)
Come to it, if his theory is valid, he should be able to correlate solar activity to the ozone hole's growth and decay. I can tell you right now that it doesn't track, so he's got an uphill battle there.
If you're going to accuse the climate researchers of "junk science" it really behooves you to be damn sure the alternatives you're putting forward are reasonable.
These regulations only apply to NEW power-plants, and plant that have been rebuilt.
The government has grandfathered in all of the old super-smog-producing monsters, and they keep giving the power companies loopholes to evade installing the new scrubbers.
This is what happened in California back in y2k... the company that owned the plants ran all of the old dirty plants at full capacity until they hit their polution quota and had to shut them down, so the small number of remaining powerplants had to support the rest of the state. It was an idiotic move by them to try and strong-arm the government and it backfired. They didn't clean up their plants, they didn't get more exemptions, they only screwed themselves and their customers. The really disgusting thing about it is while they were crying "broke", the parent corporation had a record-profit year!
Of the EXISTING powerplants, the coal plants are by far the worst polluters. Ever read about how much RADIOACTIVE material is released into the atmosphere by COAL plants? It's many thousands of times what is allowed by nuclear plants!
Please, if you think I'm wrong, post a link to something that backs up that thought.
- Coal was, is, and will be the nastiest large-scale source of energy we've got.
- The USA has no short-term alternatives to coal to supply electric power.
- Oxygen-blown IGCC systems are a way (possibly THE way) to drastically reduce the amount of nasty stuff released by coal combustion.
- The molten ash is quenched and removed as a foamy, glassy substance.
- Sulfur (as H2S) and about 30% of the carbon of the coal (as CO2) is removed by cold gas scrubbing, which allows that fraction of the carbon to be sequestered at minimal cost.
- Mercury emissions are reduced by about 50% without other measures. (AFAIK nobody has proposed activated-carbon scrubbing of the fuel gas to remove mercury; if it works under reducing conditions, it should be even more effective to scrub a small volume of fuel gas than a huge volume of combustion gas.)
- Repowering a steam plant via IGCC nearly triples the output and raises the thermal efficiency by about 20%.
- We better stabilize CO2 or we are going to seriously mess up the environment. We already have examples of difficulties; downwind of major cities the concentration hits 600 ppm, and nasty species like ragweed are "fertilized" much better than more desirable species. Now imagine the whole world being like that...
- Of course we can regulate it away. The CO2-free alternatives are there, all we have to do is make the emitter of each kg of CO2 pay enough to pay for its removal and the problem will solve itself.
- The people who make their money from coal are going to fight such measures tooth and nail, and they have the money to obstruct and delay for decades. And don't forget setting up web sites to propagandize!
That's a partial list, but it should give food for thought.Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.