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Coal — The Other Alt Fuel
This Wired piece is really a round-up about Coal: The Other Alt Fuel. One of the main stories is about an initiative to convert low-grade coal to other uses — like diesel fuel and so forth, but of course that nasty issue of carbon production comes up again.
English, motherfucker! Do you speak it?!
The issue is whether we can sustain our usage at current levels indefinitely. The answer is of course, no. Can we then sustain current usage until a substitute energy source comes along? Possibly.
In the meantime, coal will have to do, but we need to keep an eye on the clock because the longer we push off the transition to sustainable fuel sources, the sooner we'll hit the limits of our environment.
Seriously, is this how the energy companies are spending their windfall profits? Campaign style fantasies, and 'facts', I just can't wait for the negative advertising, like how wind farms slow down the earth's rotation.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
I recall reading years ago about generating electricity from coal using magnetohydrodynamics. Supposedly the efficiency was far higher than a carnot cycle (boil water / spin turbine) generator. What prevented MHD from ever reaching production?
[Insert pithy quote here]
"Clean Coal" is a bunch of BS; the coal industry lobbies as much for relaxed pollution restrictions as they spend time implementing the air-quality mandates -- Even going to the point of flying in entire state legislatures for a meet-and-greet.
I can appreciate the impact the coal industry can have on areas with depressed economies, but development must be done in an environmentally responsible manner; once the coal's gone, it's gone, but pollution damage can last a long time.
(It's never too late to join the Renaissance)
... since the experts say that the next cycle of glaciation is already overdue.
;-)
We're at the end of the current 20,000-year interglacial, so it's back down to the brrrrr of another 80,000 years of ice in the 100,000-year cycle any time now.
Pouring CO2 into the atmosphere may soon be our only way of keeping the US free of glaciers!
To name a few of the really, really serious biproducts of Coal usage. Hg precipitates out from exhaust at an alarming rate (*those states with coal-fired power plants all have massive Hg and CH2-Hg contamination: see, http://www.dnr.mo.gov/pubs/pub2100.pdf/ and, http://www.moenviron.org/airqualitymercury.asp/ for one central US state's Hg warnings). Sulphur fom coal burning is the primary source of H2SO4 in acid rain that has decimated the lakes in the Northeast US and etched limestone (Cleopatra's Needle http://members.aol.com/Sokamoto31/ny.htm/ has been in NYC since 1881 and the two sides facing the prevailing wind have been etched free of inscription (perfect on all four sides when it was put it into place) due to acid rain) building materials. Nitrates (NOx) are the secondary sources of acid (HNO3 Nitric Acid being the most common) and a product of incomplete combustion of coal. About 75% of the coal-fired power plants scrub NOx out of the exhaust - but there appear to be no small-scale scrubbers consistent with vehicle use.
Releasing more Carbon from the carbon sink is just one more addition to the ever-increasing load of greenhouse gasses on the planet.
Iron - in its various forms will "poison" any catalytic converter small enough to fit on a vehicle.
The cost of scrubbing or converting Coal into a cleaner-burning fuel is problematic and the energy used to scrub may well exceed the energy realized from the converted coal.
Sasol has been doing this for years.
I don't see how this could be new
Spin 'em, slize 'em, dice 'em, burn 'em......
Isn't the Fisher-Trops 65 years old already? Germans used it in WWII for aux fuel, and so did South Africa during the boycott (SASOL).
The Club of Rome also named this as possibility in 1980 (I never read the first report, only the revised one)
Sounds suspiciously like Fischer-Tropsch synthesis, which - I believe - has been used extensively for nearly a century. Anyway, I'd hardly call coal an "alternative" fuel. Coal fuels cooking fires, trains, and power plants. Coal is the primary source of Petrolium and Diesol in certain areas, and has been fuelling millions of cars for decades. By comparison, gasoline is an "alternative fuel".
Venners acknowledges that the gasification process produces four times as much carbon dioxide as simply burning the coal.
yeah, that's green all right.
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Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
If we're going to jump backward as far as coal, we may as well go all the way. I say, dinosaur-powered Flinstones appliances for all!
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Before you decide to get warm fuzzy feelings about coal, go examine the issue of mountain top removal, and the consequences to the environment of the tailings that are left behind.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Alt fuel? Isn't coal the primary source of energy throughout the world... still?
Shouldn't we be trying to get away from this? Looking back, it was cute when coal was running steam engines 200 years ago, but let's move on already. Especially now that we can see, feel and even taste the result of a 6 billion people relying on a largely coal-fired planet.
Barring serious economic recession (always a possibility), nuclear isn't really an option anymore. It takes awhile to get the plants online, and there would have to be a very large number of them built in a very short period of time. As an engineer, that'd be great news.
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Unfortunately, coal is about the only buffer fuel left that would take us over that hump that depleting oil supplies will leave. The hump gets worse every single day we wait
People should have demanded Manhattan Project style investment into nuclear fusion after the last energy crisis. We'll have another chance soon.
..don't panic
And has been here for the last 20 years.
A modern coal based power plant doesn't polute, unless you count CO2 as a polutant. Older coal based power plants were quite messy though.
If you combine power generation with a community heating system, the energy use efficiency is also very high.
It's the completely neglected fact that you somehow have to dig the coal out of the earth. I'm sure that the coal industry is perfectly fine with destroying the lives of people and natural beauty in Appalachia by literally blowing up mountains to get at their coal (who cares about the debris that ends up in the rivers -- those people are poor), but some of us like the wilderness and appreciate that there are people who live there, too. It's the little factor that somehow gets missed in all of those "clean coal" commercials that have those annoying little kids on them.
Regards, Ian
The "clean coal" industry must be rather pleased with this article. It reads almost like a press release - It's clean! It's efficient! It uses coal we already have! It's good for our military! It's cheap! And what a name, "green fuel". How can it possibly be bad, "green" is in the name!
It's not until the 16th paragraph when then happen to mention that, oh yeah, this "green fuel" process will release "massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere" - four times as much. But don't worry, they'll be able to use a carbon-catching technology that doesn't even exist yet to make sure none of that CO2 actually escapes the factory. Right. There are dozens (if not hundreds) of coal plants operating in the US that aren't using the emissions reduction technology that's available now.
We will almost certainly be needing to modify out world such that the glaciers stay back, and it is my pick that elevated CO2 levels will be an important tool; but, right now, (& quite possibly with some degree of emergency) we need to introduce controls, both technological and political, that will then enable us to effectively terraform. Without the information, as yet, we are just gambling that we are not about to trigger any critical enviromential tipping points [this is where hope plays its role].
No. You can't look at my Sig; it's mine, and I'm not showing you.
Most current coal plants are frankly dreadful in terms of efficiency and emissions. It's entirely possible to double their efficiency and reduce emissions by a similar margin. The costs of implementing such a system are another matter.
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"Clean Coal" is a bunch of BS;
That's actually what the coal industry lobbiest are saying.
Clean coal burning power plants can be made. Gasification, scrubbers, hydrocarbon eating algees, these are technologies that exist. The problem is that they are expencive! And grand father clauses. The EPA ratchets down limits every year so that NEW coal burning plants must be cleaner. The problem is that it is so much more expensive to build a clean efficient plant than to repair and continue in the old plant, that most companies just keep pushing more and more coal through the old plants.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
That none of our power stations (including nuclear, fission and fusion) are going to get much above 40% efficient until we stop treating waste heat as waste. Overall efficiency can be doubled to the 80%-90% region by selling the heat for industrial processes, domestic water, space heating and to power chillers which can distribute cold water in hot regions.
Most of our electricity is used to create or move heat from one place to another. It's highly ironic that power stations produce more energy as heat than they do as electricity. With District Heating and District Cooling it's possible to distribute heat and cold such that the requirement for space heating and air conditioning is massively reduced.
This isn't going to happen any time soon, economically it simply isn't worth while, it's much cheaper to dig up coal or pipe oil or gas. That could change with the flick of a pen though. At the moment every working individual pays 30%-40% of their income as taxation, get rid of it and add the equivalent level of taxation to fuel sources, in particular the non green methods of generation. The utilities will then squeeze every Watt out of the fuel, and customers will make sure they don't waste any energy either. As a side effect, people will become much cheaper to employ.
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love the quote in your sig. Sneakers was a great movie.
I'm already trying to cut down on my Slashdot consumption, since I write for a living and all the bad prose here is killing my ear for English. Meeza kustermerz no gonna peh me iffa meeza deteriorizah furtha. My grounding in science, OTOH, is firmly based on school text books I glanced at in the 70s and lots of science fiction. It really should not be possible to get past my glazed eyes with a scientific howler, right?
Carbon production!!! Out of coal? Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!
Hint: Elsewhere in the publishing world, the word 'editor' does not mean story chooser. A really good editor fixes typos, grammar, story structure/rhythm and verifies facts.
Hm...Okay, they are extinct these days. I have now found the word combination "equally as" in a Dan Simmons novel (Olympos) and in a musicology text published by an American university press. Forget I said anything.
He's got it right here. We may have 50 years left of easily enriched uranium, but if we're willing to invest in breeder reactors, we have a near infinite supply of fission material.
The "if" is the big part. Because are closer to what can be used to produce weapons-grade materials, breeder reactors always get the boogeyman attached to them.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
I welcome the global warming - it brings warmth to the cold plains of Russia, increasing vegetation and productivity in its fields. Life will actually be better after global warming here.
>Coal is a hydrocarbon.
Coal is mostly just carbon, 92-98% in the case of anthracite. There will be some hydrocarbons left over from its organic origins but they're a minority. Asphalt is an example of a solid hydrocarbon.
>NOx is made when atmosphere nitrogen is held at too high a temperature for too long.
Thank you for setting that straight, by the way. You don't even need fuel: lightning storms generate enough nitrates to be a noticeable source of fertilizer.
Imagine a coal plant on a cold day.
The water vapor condenses.
What happens to it? Does it fall down as rain, or does it drift away in a fog of microscopic particles?
Mercury is way heavier, but if the particles are small enough then Brownian motion will keep them suspended.
Well, er, it's also about the polution. At the end of the day, as long as you're burning a carbon based fuel, you're going to produce carbon dioxide. Sure it can be done 'cleaner' but you're still up against the twin problems
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OK. First, I participated in the IPO for Peabody, one of the largest coal companies in the US, and made a killing on that, before I sold it and walked away with the profits. So, before I invested, I did a lot of research.
The US does have at least a 200 year coal supply. It is an alternative to oil.
And it does create pollution - two forms. One is sulphur (sulfur) which is in some concentration in most coal - which has bad side effects (remember acid rain?). The other is the CO2 and the gritty byproducts (think it's called ash, although it's much smaller than wood ash).
Having been to Madison, WI, where they use almost entirely coal for power and heat, I can tell you that it does get in your eyes a bit, but it's a lot cleaner than it used to be. Main problem is extraction kills people (always has) - accidents, mining trucks, explosives, digging, whatever.
On the other hand, Steam Punk is super cool
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Unless you really want to use fission for vehicle propulsion.
You could have battery-powered cars recharged from nuclear electric plants, but that wouldn't help much with air or sea transportation.
The Finland uses it in large scale for heating in cities. The overal efficiency is 80-90% of the energy of fuel gets used in heat or electricity. The overal market share for domestic heating is 50%.
Its *NOT* used for domestic water.
Oh and it HAD been used in 50's and 60s in united states according to wikipedia.
©God
That will kill your mileage and maximize air pollution.
Here's better idea start using european standards for diesels, and use the 43MPG Ford Galaxy if you need space.
Or something smaller with better fuel economy.
There is no need for driving less than 40MPG(hw) passanger car.
And get rid of any loop holes for SUV(s) and light trucks as passanger vehicles. TAX them to oblivion.
©God
I talked to one of our plasma fusion people about MHD -- it just didn't pan out in terms of electrodes: resistance at electrode-plasma boundary, erosion, and so on.