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US Pulls Plug on Low-CO2 Powerplant Project
Geoffrey.landis writes "The administration announced plans to withdraw its support from FutureGen. FutureGen was a project to develop a low CO2-emission electrical power plant, supported by an alliance of a dozen or so coal companies and utilities from around the world. The new plant would have captured carbon dioxide produced by combustion and pumped it deep underground, to avoid releasing greenhouse-gas into the atmosphere. It had been intended as a prototype for next generation clean-coal plants worldwide. Originally budgeted at about a billion dollars, the estimated cost had "ballooned" to $1.8 billion, according to U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman."
$1.8bill isn't a lot of money when compared to the cost of nuclear power, or the money spend blowing up parts of the Middle East..
I'd like to note that $1 billion is about what the government spends on each of the new modern military aircraft that they purchase. If we just took a little out of the defense budget, the cost of something like this, which is a PROTOTYPE and expected to be expensive, wouldn't be as much of an issue.
'Clean' coal is one of the few alternative which would actually scale enough to be able to provide the energy we require. It's also something which should be possible within a reasonable timescale - certainly before oil starts to run out.
Sure, it's not a pancea - but it might be able to give us the time figure out how to exploit renewable energies cheaply and safely enough..
and it's floating over head, and requires no maintenance.
"an infinite player that has lost his finite mind" ~Infinite Play the Movie (it blends with reality)
If you can't / won't do it NOW, then the long emergency will get longer. And Darker. No, it's not the end of the world. It's just a new world we won't recognise, and one that won't likely permit 7 billion people shitting all over it.
You can buy a shit load of grid tied windmills for 1.8 billion dollars...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Please go away and actually do some research into the costs of the various energy options, and you might appreciate why research into carbon capture and storage is money well spent.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
My interpretation is that this would be a stop-gap until we can develop an efficient means of using renewable energy. Why?
Shifting reliance from oil to coal would "Make America safer!" because the US is like the Saudi Arabia of coal
China is building powerplants like crazy, and guess what they're using? COAL
Storing CO2 underground is a temporary solution, but it would buy us some more time to develop means of converting it into something in another physical state (gas or liquid). Then perhaps we could begin to fill up those oil fields we've been draining for the past hundred & some odd years.
Clean coal, fine. I'm sure there are ways to "scrub" CO2 if we think long and hard enough. Coal gasification plants for instance are said to be a lot cleaner than "conventional" coal plants, albeit not when it comes to the release of CO2 unfortunately, in fact a lot more CO2 is created. But maybe they'll find a way around that too. Pumping CO2 underground on the other hand, I'm sorry, but I have a hard time accepting that as a reasonable alternative. I'm far too afraid that this is just the same thinking as with nuclear energy. "Oh, we only have to store it for a few millenia and then it'll be perfectly safe." Yeah right, as if that stuff is actually going to stay down there, it's gas for crying out loud. What if a massive cloud of CO2 is released suddenly, due to a massive earthquake or whatnot? It's one thing to prevent CO2 from being created, it's quite another to try and "put it away" until the end of times... I'm not so sure that investing so much money into a project like this is really worth it. At best, it seems to me a temporary solution, with potentially fatal drawbacks later on. We shouldn't be thinking about how to put this stuff away, we need to think about ways of creating less of it! Alternative fuels, more fuel efficient cars (especially in the US!) and nuclear fusion, ESPECIALLY nuclear fusion.
CO2 is about 1.5 times heavier than air, so it will stay underground.
Jean-Francois Im's blog
Good idea. And since it is your idea, you go first. No gas heat or fossil-fuel-generated electricity, no fossil-fuel automobile, no snow blower, snowmobile, dirt bike, lawnmower, and no... plastics.
:o)
As of NOW.
Have a nice day.
Jean-Francois Im's blog
Yes, for example, people are always complaining about the half-life of radioactive waste.. but what exactly is the half-life of carbon-dioxide? At least the waste from fission reactors can be processed and stored easily.. the same cannot be said for CO2.
How we know is more important than what we know.
you should care because it's a clear example of government lining the pockets of the energy industry with an obviously stupid plan.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
For example?
\u262D = \u5350
And spend close to a trillion dollars on a war over fossil resources in the Middle East.
The US energy policy is fucked. Totally, completely, totally fucked. Utterly utterly mindbogglingly stupid.
sig sig sig siggy sig
I think it says much about the success of the social conditioning of the American people. After all else is said and done, one can measure the effects of mind control simply by looking at the end results. I think this was even noted somewhere in the bible using an agriculture analogy concerning fruit.
-FL
All his points were completely valid, you're just subscribing to the theory of 'out of sight, out of mind'
'Clean coal' is an oxymoron. It doesn't work. It's been touted here (Australia) by the last government as a way of keeping our coal power stations running too, but that was by a right wing, environmental hating government. When anyone looks at it seriously, it's all bunk.
Rather than investing in technologies to actually make energy without the horrendous environmental cost (solar, window, tidal etc. etc.) WHY on earth would you prefer them to invest money in continuing to use the horror that is coal, but just shove the waste underground?
How does that at all sound like a good idea to you?
"you're saying that because there is a tiny, remote chance that Co2 might leak into the atmosphere, that we should just put it into the atmosphere first"
Is exactly the wrong way of thinking. The options are not pump it underground and hope it stays there, vs. pump it into the air. The options are create vast amounts of CO2 and worse, OR produce power in an ACTUAL CLEAN MANNER.
Good riddance to the plan, and it would be great if it were just stricken from the worldwide stage overall... stop building coal plants, you can make the energy in so many other ways.
So, if the soil isn't sealed perfectly, it will escape and form a nice layer on the ground (heavier than air, right), exactly where most land creatures live.
Aphorisms don't fix code. (Bart Smaalders)
It takes energy to sequester carbon dioxide, and if the energy that this takes is as great as the energy to unsequester it (that is, to release it from coal), then there is no point in burning it because the effect of burning and sequestering it yields a net energy return of zero. So far I've seen no presentations of the efficiency of sequestration. Seeing as how corn ethanol has a net energy yield of less than zero, I'm dubious about sequestration and, until I learn otherwise, will assume it's a big "kick the ball down the road" diversion, like hydrogen cars. I really wish there were more writers familiar with thermodynamics writing about these things. When it comes to energy schemes, it's not just the thought that counts.
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
This is silly, not doing reprocessing has not done anything to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. This process has been used for a long time in France, Britain, and other countries, and there has never been any material reported missing. In the case of Iran for example, it was the North Koreans that gave them access to materials and tech. Some missing material from the break up of the Soviet Union, well who knows what was going on there at the time.
The reason for the US not doing this is quite simple: there has been no new nuclear power plants built, very little if any money into research, and a general lack of interest in regards to nuclear energy aside from military use. Progress has stagnated; the amount of money required to bring everything up do date and allow reprocessing to be possible is more than what congress is willing to spend.
However, recent reports suggest there may be a renewed interest in this area. The main advantage being that the spent fuel is much less dangerous several orders of magnitude faster.
The whole point of "clean coal" is that the CO2 is stored underground where it won't go into the atmosphere and fuel global warming. The question is how long it will stay there.
OK, so let's check all these things off:
etards like you would be the first to log on from their imac down at the local starbucks, and start complaining about all the power black outs and how you can't afford your expreso enemas anymore because your power bill is $20000 a year.
I don't own a mac, hate starbucks and know how to spell espresso. Also I love how you pulled a value like $20K out of your butt.
tidal power is limited by geography and solar is a JOKE when your talking about powering a country.
Tidal may be limited by geography, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be used, you use ALL available energy collection means... which goes the same for solar, it's one of the tools to use. Oh, and I like how you've just ignored wind power... Also, you're not necessarily looking at solar in the right way at all... you're looking at it from the point of view that energy creation is still the job of large companies who make stupid amounts of money for doing so. What about if the government actually ponied up some money to subsidize solar panel installations (like, Australia does, although needs to go way further with this), so that each individual dwelling can have their own solar panels... and then also solar hot water (not using solar electricity, but rather heating water via piping on the roof, very efficient, used all over the place) to further reduce the reliance on electicity, and you're further reducing the load required on any large scale installations. SPREAD THE POWER GENERATION AROUND. If everyone has solar panels on their homes, if wind generators, tidal, etc are installed where viable, then the NEED for huge, monolithic power stations is GREATLY reduced.
and before you start calling me a right wing environmental hater, how many solar installations have you done? because i've done 3 large ones and i actually know how much solar costs.
I'm not going to call you a right winger or anything of the sort, because, well, I'm not rude like you. However I will state that based on my last paragraph you are barking up the wrong tree and still seeing it in the old terms of there needing to be centralized power generation, rather than distributed.
our realistic options for power generation as things stand in the next 5 years are : - coal, nuclear. anything else is an expensive joke.
Not if money was actually invested in it, not at all. It's the energy companies who want to keep things the way they are, as they want to keep reaping the huge rewards. It's also governments not wanting to spend a bit of money on shoring up the future. Trim just a tinsy, tiny bit off defense budgets and you could easily fund this sort of investment. To say it's expensive is just missing the point when it comes to matters like polluting the earth... if the budget on the defense force is allowed to increase by BILLIONS why the hell can't the environment get the same sort of investment... a MUCH GREATER payoff is waiting for those who do so.
Hey, here's an idea - maybe it was canceled because the costs had risen 80% before a single spade of dirt was dug? I mean, fer chrissake, look at the Big Dig.
Oh, yeah - the Illinois site wasn't the actual selection - the industry jumped the gun and announced the Illinois site prior to the DOE's final decision. All 4 sites were still under consideration when Illinois and the industry tried to present the DOE with a fait accompli by announcing the site and passing laws to make things go smoother.
Of course, none of that could possibly be true, as the current president is like some satanic octopus, with his evil tentacles manipulating everything invisibly behind the scenes. Invisible, that is, to the select few who see clearly - aren't we lucky to have people like them?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
I have heard that Bush was furious that Texas was not chosen, pulled a few strings and the project was cancelled.
Please link to the source of this fact. Or, consider the possibility that it's just a bunch of shrill nonsense being passed around by someone suffering from classic BDS. Read up a thread or two, and consider the fact that the notion of this approach has already been completely eclipsed by other developments.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.