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Zero-emission Power Plants Proposed
ckbreckenridge writes "Supercompact, superfast, superpowerful turbines called ZEPPS (zero-emission power plants), designed to combat global warming, could help produce the electrical power needed to keep up with 21st century demand. They would consume methane and oxygen and produce liquid carbon dioxide, which could be sequestered underground. The current electricity grid would need to be replaced by a 'supergrid' across the USA, says Jesse H. Ausubel in The Industrial Physicist. Work on such a system should start as soon as possible, since CO2 levels leaped up 2 ppm in the past two years as global warming becomes more of a reality."
How is this diffrent then toxic waste from nuclear plants being stored under ground.... if we continue storring all this wouldn't eventually run out of place to put it?
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Finally an unlimited source of dry ice for Omaha Steaks. I'm going to buy some stock....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
And where exactly is all of this methane going to come from?
You can convert coal and oil to methane, but it isn't a clean process by any stretch of the imagination.
I doubt existing natural gas supplies would last long under this proposed plan.
It produces less radioactive waste then coal-fired plants, but could we please sink more into solar energy sources? By some estimates, we'll begin the end of primary production in the persian gulf within the next decade. Venezualia and the Ukraine may stretch the world's oil supplies by a few years, but the sooner we can get alternatives up and running, the less it's gonna suck when we run out of the cheap oil.
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It's all about the cash
Sequestering CO2 underground is tantamount to screwing our kids over -- again! Burying liquid CO2 will only result in it's boiling at a later point in time, at which point those that live above it will suffocate (this has already happened in Africa, I believe) and we'll get a really killer (as in bad) positive feedback mechanism with respect to climate change. Warm that area, warm it's contained CO2. That CO2 then boils, enters the atmosphere, and adds to the problem.
What we need is real solutions, not some half-assed band-aid effort. This is not a solution, but a cop-out.
Per Square Mile, a blog about density
Have a safe planet and a smile.
* Don't you just love that phrase? It's like 'solutions'. My waste solution is to sequester my used food wrappers and banana peels in the city dump. Hey, that does sound better than stinking up the environment with trash, doesn't it? OTOH the next time I serve jury duty, now that I know what 'sequestered' means I'll fight 'em tooth an nail.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The problem with all of these is you have to worry about the re-emergence of the CO2. Limestone seems like a good option because you just have to keep it dry. The downside is that limestone is heavy and even though the production is exothermic, producing lime has not been worked out. Pressurizing CO2 and storing it underground works, unless it leaks out. Then you have the same problem. Liquid bubbles are good if you have a very high pressure place to store them (the ocean), but the long term effect is acidification of the ocean and exhaustion of the carrying capacity (estimated to be around 1000-1500Gtons, we produce around 3Gtons/year).
There aren't any easy answers. However long term, since coal is about 57% of current electricity in the U.S., it's not going away. What carbon sequestration will do is allow us to bridge the gap economically and technologically between high and low carbon fuel sources.
I'm a big fan of wind, but there are still lots of hurdles.
-- Bird in the Bush: The Renewable Energy Blog http://www.birdinthebush.org
If those chambers are capable of holding oil and natural gas for millions of years, they are certainly capable of holding CO2 as well.
In fact, newer drilling operations often inject CO2 into the well in order to pressurize the chamber and assist in extracting the last drops of oil from a dried out oil chamber.
The idea of storing CO2 underground might sound crazy to you, but that's only because you've never done any serious research into the problem of carbon sequestration.
I'm not certain that this is the best possible solution -- I think we need to be looking at nuclear fuels instead of better ways to control CO2 emissions from petroleum -- but it's not crazy.
http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/proceedings /01/vision21/v211-5.PDF
Chris Williams clw7500nc@gmail.com
I know this isn't a popular option, but there is only one way left to combat CO2 emissions without winding the planet back to the stone age.
It's nuclear power. There is no other technology available that has sufficient output, whilst not outputting CO2 that will put the Florida Quays any further underwater.
The common argument in return is saving CO2 isn't much use if you make the planet uninhabitable due to reactors melting down. Well, the Chinese, with some help from the Germans, have very kindly solved this problem for us. Go check the link out - it's to wired.com - they have developed a nuclear reactor that doesn't go critical when the coolant system is switched off.
We can save the planet, if we're willing to get over the Cold War era stereotypes.
Iran has endorsed
A friend who worked in the Hazardous Waste disposal industry lamented the ignorance of many protesters who came out to his site and harrassed the workers. They didn't know the difference between Hazardous and Toxic waste. CO2 is not toxic. In high concentrations it can be harmful (depending on the lifeform), but that is the definition of Hazardous. Toxic means it does harm even in small concentrations.
Example:
1,000 gallons of horse urine if dumped on a field would probably kill the grass, but if dilluted and spread over time it would not.
1 milligram of plutonium spread on a field would kill the grass, no matter how you dilluted it and grass wouldn't grow again for a long time.
I'm sure I didn't explain this as well as he could have, but I hope you get the gist of it.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
>I thought carbon dioxide sublimates, as in goes from solid to gas with no liquid step. Or, if it has a liquid stage, its only under very specific conditions of temperature and pressure.
It's pressure that makes the difference. At atmospheric pressure CO2 doesn't have a liquid phase. At higher pressures it does. In fact, the way you make dry ice (at least used to be) taking the pressure off some liquid CO2, letting some evaporate to chill the rest into a solid.
The proposed power plants operate at high pressure including the exhaust stream. So all you need to do is cool the exhaust and you have liquid CO2.
For sake of reference, the suffocation incident was at Lake Nyos in Cameroon and is documented at http://www.snopes.com/horrors/freakish/smother.asp . 1,746 people killed in a matter of minutes... evidence of how scary Mother Nature can be. Although, to be fair, death was apparently very swift and likely painless.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
What a rosy view of the future!
NO. 300 gigatons of CO2 cycle through the environment every year. In a closed cycle.
But every year, humans add an extra 6 gigatons to that cycle that was not there the previous year. We do this by taking carbon from deep underground (in the form of oil) and burning it to release that CO2 to the atmosphere.
Natural processes do not change the global CO2 balance, at least not on the short time scales that humans are capable of changing it.
We are talking several hundred billion dollars, if not a trillion plus.
He then goes on to say it would take 100 years and 1 trillion dollars.
In other words "aint' gonna happen".
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
How is this diffrent then toxic waste from nuclear plants being stored under ground....
Much more hazardous, especially on an immediate basis.
Liquid CO2, pushed down injection wells under pressure, occasionally springs a leak. When this happens you suddenly get a giant bubble of CO2 on (and in) the ground, displacing the oxygen and killing everybody and everything (even plants if it persists in the soil long enough) for miles around.
This has happened when CO2 injection was used to pressurize oil wells to squeeze more oil out of the gound.
A similar phenomenon happens naturally (though fortunately VERY rarely) when largely CO2 volcanic gasses vent into a deep still lake (such as in a volcanic crater). The gasses disolve, carbonating the lower waters. Then suddenly something disturbs the water and some of the carbonated water comes up and starts to bubble - rapidly "turning over" and boiling out the CO2 in the rest of the lake in a matter of minutes and releasing a similar ground-hugging toxic bubble.
Think of a shaken soda can the size of Lake Tahoe.
if we continue storring all this wouldn't eventually run out of place to put it?
Nuclear, at least, takes up very little space and decays over years/centuries/millenia (depending on the isotope - generally the hotter the faster). Some of its components are also useful and can be separated out and put to work. Others can be "burned" in nuclear reactions into less hazardous and/or more useful material.
That's not to say it's safe or good stuff. Some of it is horrid. But "running out of room" isn't the problem. (Keeping it in its room until it promises to be a good little kid and MEANS it is the problem.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I keep "proposing" zero emmisions plants all the time, but as soon as I type the word "nuclear" around here, everyone gets all squirrly ...
We'd probably also have newer, more efficient nuclear power plants and decommissioning many fossil fuel plants if it weren't for "bleeding heart California liberals and environuts."
Every group seems to take turns saving us and screwing us over.
That said, you're absolutely right. Bush's Clean Air Act is like a line from Orwell's 1984 doublespeak.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
No politician? Granted, $7.2 million isn't a huge amount of money, but it was enough for Bush to bring it up during the debates. I think the fact that it would increase agriculture jobs is just as important as helping the environment.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
Using plants to reduce the atmospheric CO2 levels wouldn't work because eventually all of that carbon would end up back in the atmosphere. With plants decaying or being burnt, CO2 is let off.
But say instead the plants are eaten, by growing fruit and vegetables (which is the obvious choice vs. non-edible plants). However the carbon will still make its way back to the atmosphere by being released by the animals that ate those plants.
This shows clearly what the real problem is. We are mining carbon from underground in the form of crude oil, and have no way of getting it back down there. Therefore we will always have a positive sum of carbon.
Until we find a way to convert CO2 into straight carbon, the carbon that we have released from underground will always be with us up here.
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>But the current situation is while some countries work towards solving these problems, many others don't, instead they get exemptions because they are poor countries. ;)
Worse yet, some industrialised nations exempt themselves from the effort because they just don't give a fuck, and would rather drive a separate hummer for each member of the family
no taxation without representation!