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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.
"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)
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.
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)
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!
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
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.
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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