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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."
In the 1960s, Rocky Mountain Arsenal tried to get rid of waste by pumping it into the ground. When they started doing that, there was an increase in seismic activity in the region, including several earthquakes that caused significant damage. When they finally stopped doing it, the seismic activity tapered off.
I live near the site Futuregen was to be built. There was fierce competition between Illinois and Texas for the location of the plant. Illinois was chosen based on science not politics. I have heard that Bush was furious that Texas was not chosen, pulled a few strings and the project was cancelled. From what I have read this was a technology that would work and let us take advantage of the abundant coal supplies without damaging the environment.
If there were guarantees of future success, it wouldn't be much of an experiment. It's worth our pouring a lot of money (but still microscopic compared to our overall energy expenditures) into ambitious experiments just so that we learn the full range of options and their implications - if we learned, we example, from this experiment that "low Co2 coal" is much more dangerous and expensive (for whatever reason) than the coal industry would like us to believe, wouldn't that be worth a mere couple billion dollars?
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
there's no "probably" about nuclear being safer, it's a simple fact.
there's always 2 things greenies try to call on nuclear - cost and life span. firstly while nuclear costs more initally, it's running costs see it break even with coal in 5 years. life span they will try tell you we only have 5 years of fissionable material - i make it clear right now they got that figure from the fact we have 5 years IF we all swapped to nuclear TODAY and relied totally on STOCKPILES. that means we didn't dig another ton out of the ground and didn't look for more. we also have breeder reactors which extend a plants life indefinately.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
If it weren't for risk takers, there'd be no pure silicon, no transistors, no fabs, no chips and our industry wouldn't be around.
When I take a risk and kill someone, I go to jail for manslaughter.
When Big Business takes a risk and kills 1000 someones, the CEO gets a bonus.
Because of the risk of punishment in return for misjudging risk, I take the time to research what I'm doing and implement safeguards and backups in order to reduce the risk as much as possible. History demonstrates that corporations cannot be bothered. They can't be bothered to do the research or create safeguards, and since the government is there to back them up, they rarely bother to insure themselves to a level matching the risk they're undertaking. After all, it's profitable to simply allow the corporation to go bankrupt, reform the board at ShellCorp Mk. II and buy back the original corporation's assets at firesale prices.
But go ahead, cheer on your unfettered capitalism as it refuses to learn from history and repeat the same fatal mistakes over and over. I'll be buying scuba gear and CO2 detectors for when the giant underground ballon of CO2 pops.
Don't be too concerned about the loss of funding. Australia's Eastern seaboard is sitting on mountains of coal and the current gov. is pushing research into clean coal. So is China (the biggest user), so if the USA doesn't do it, then someone else will.
As for the comments I've read so far, it's not the CO2 only that is worrisome, but the fact that the waste heat generated from power plants (should read all heat exchange type power plants) is directly warming the Earth.
Not only should there be no CO2 from power plants, but there should also be no waste heat either.
So solar power/geothermal/hydro and to some extent, nuclear technologies have the clear edge.
Ideally, the model for future energy creation and use would be:
* non-heat producing energy creation and storage
* non-heat producing energy consumption
One system currently in focus by the Australian gov. are 1.5kw domestic solar roof installations feeding directly into the grid. If you have every house (excluding high rise) with an installation from Hobart (far South) towards the equator, then that would make a significant impact on all fossil fuel use. Currently, such an installation costs approx $15,000/household and the gov. pays for half.
Every country or geophysical region will have their own solutions, so I doubt that there will be a single technology that would be the panacea for everyone.
http://www.greenhouse.gov.au/rebates/index.html
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Vattenfall is working on it.
"Can a coal-fired power plant completely eliminate carbon-dioxide emissions? That's what Swedish energy company Vattenfall is hoping to prove with a pilot project under construction in Germany that promises to be the world's first emissions-free carbon power-generating plant.
The $62 million, 30-megawatt facility, scheduled to go into operation by mid-2008, makes use of oxyfuel technology, in which coal is burned in pure oxygen instead of air. That leaves the resulting emissions nitrogen-free and easier to clean and store. Once the plant in Schwarze Pumpe, south of Berlin, is fully operational, the plan is to compress the CO2 into liquid and inject it into porous rock about a kilometer below ground."
Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think. --Niels Bohr
Recently released statistics on the infant mortality rate in the Western hemisphere yielded an odd conclusions -- Cuba's infant mortality rate, 16 6.0 per 1,000, is now lower than the U.S. infant mortality rate, at 7.2 per 1,000. Given Cuba's poverty level, its 6.0 rate is very impressive, but is it accurate to say that Cuba now has an infant mortality rate lower than the United States? No.
...
The primary reason Cuba has a lower infant mortality rate than the United States is that the United States is a world leader in an odd category -- the percentage of infants who die on their birthday. In any given year in the United States anywhere from 30-40 percent of infants die before they are even a day old. [ed: typo. what they meant to say is "30-40 percent of infants who die, die before they are a day old"]
Why? Because the United States also easily has the most intensive system of emergency intervention to keep low birth weight and premature infants alive in the world.
....
How does this skew the statistics? Because in the United States if an infant is born weighing only 400 grams and not breathing, a doctor will likely spend lot of time and money trying to revive that infant. If the infant does not survive -- and the mortality rate for such infants is in excess of 50 percent -- that sequence of events will be recorded as a live birth and then a death.
In many countries, however, (including many European countries) such severe medical intervention would not be attempted and, moreover, regardless of whether or not it was, this would be recorded as a fetal death rather than a live birth. That unfortunate infant would never show up in infant mortality statistics.
This is clearly what is happening in Cuba. In the United States about 1.3 percent of all live births are very low birth weight -- less than 1,500 grams. In Cuba, on the other hand, only about 0.4 percent of all births are less than 1,500 grams. This is despite the fact that the United States and Cuba have very similar low birth rates (births where the infant weighs less than 2500g). The United States actually has a much better low birth rate than Cuba if you control for multiple births -- i.e. the growing number of multiple births in the United States due to technological interventions has resulted in a marked increase in the number of births under 2,500 g.
So, after I decimated your initial claim, you responded with yet another inaccurate statistic. You are, in short, a blind fool. Get your head out of your ass and start actually researching these claims instead of spitting them out without a second thought.
With the timeframe we've got to ward off the feedback loop that will come with the melting of the permafrost, there is really no time left to invest in new technologies. Fifteen years ago I was an Earth Firster protesting proposed new nuclear plants. Now I'm all for building two of them in my backyard starting yesterday.
We've got two options. Mass transition to nuclear power ASAP or our great great grandkids living under domes. We can still work towards a post-nuclear future were everything is renewable, but nuclear is going to a necessary stopgap measure.
Two Illinois towns and two Texas towns were bidding on the plant. The day after an Illinois town won they started talking about the budget and the possibility of pulling the plug. Bush wanted the money to go to Texas and when it didn't his cronies pulled the plug saying it cost too much. Simple as that. This is how Bush has governed since the beginning and is how he will govern until the end. It is a bit amazing that that national media isn't calling out there were no funding questions until after Bush's home state lost the bid.
Pal, I have been looking into this issue for years. I recently had an article published on the topic. I've got money invested in renewable energy companies. A mate of mine runs a magazine (not the one I was published in) on renewable power. So, yeah, I reckon I've done my research, and, yeah, I reckon the "distributed energy" crowd are full of crap - a combination of dreamers, snake-oil salespeople and closet medievalists. Sorry if that's not particularly civil.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Gases do exist underground naturally. A friend of mine is a research scientist for this technology. He assures me it is technically feasible, and safe too (provided you find the right spot underground to do it (I'm not convinced personally). The major problem with it is cost. Basically, it ends up being cheaper to run solar panels.
Of course, the reason Australia has been investing so heavily in this tech is that Australia has a crap-load of coal, which is propping up it's economy. If international demand for coal drops because people get serious about climate change, Australia's economy goes down the crapper (unless, of course, it goes ahead and tries something different).
"I think it would be a good idea" Gandhi, on Western Civilisation
Statoil has been pumping CO2 underground in the Sleipner field off the coast of Norway for a few years now. You have to keep in mind that, at those pressures, CO2 becomes a liquid; but, even as a gas, you are putting CO2 in underground pockets that have a proven record of holding gas and hydrocarbons for millions of years: that's the safest place on earth.
As an energy engineer with a specialization in petroleum, my opinion is that of course we should pursue better and cleaner energy sources (be it wind, solar, or the best of them all energy conservation—yes it's an energy source) but as long as we are stuck with the present system we have to live with it, and the best thing we can do with the excess carbon is to put it where it came from in the first place.
Of course, if earthquakes could fracture reservoirs so that gas would escape to the surface they would have done it already in the past millions of years. If we find gas or oil (which almost always has a gas cap anyway) in a reservoir, it means it could not escape for geological times. That's a storage as safe as they come.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
MIT estimates there is enough power from geothermal sources around the world to cheaply provide all of the energy for humanity for thousands of years. With deep drilling techniques developed for oil wells we can find scalding hot rock anywhere in the world. And they also estimate it would take approximately $1 billion in research to get the project underway to make the technology viable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power
I don't know about you, but that sounds pretty awesome. It has none of the ecological disadvantages of wind and hydroelectric. It is more efficient than solar. And it provides the same amount of power no matter the weather, time of year, or time of day. Oh yeah, and no toxic waste that takes thousands of years to decay or the excessively expensive operational costs that comes with nuclear power.
Bring it.
:) C02 is no big deal to hold underground. It can be done easily.
I have valves installed that hold a 10,000 psi well down in Venezuela right now. Many of them.
Trust me, we have valves and instrumentation that can handle CO2 underground. We already do this with underground natural gas storage and CO2 isn't a giant change.
And yes, I sell valves. Relief valves, control valves, block valves, cryogenic valves, high temperature valves, steam valves. All kinds of valves. All kinds of materials.