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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?)
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.
Don't click the above link, it's got some nasty javascript in there. Tries to open a load of popups, kills Firefox (even on linux). Save yourself the hassle and don't click....
this is my sig
If you're pumping the CO2 into a depleted gas field, that gas field captured natural gas for many millions of years. Another type of disposal site that's been proposed is deep saline acquifers, in which case the CO2 will dissolve in the water, which has also stayed where it is for millions of years.
Finally, if you're really paranoid there's mineral sequestration, where you react the CO2 with various types of rock to form carbonates, which are very stable compounds (they're rocks, basically).
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.
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.
You should indeed. Nuclear power is well understood and bringing a new reactor online can be done with technology which is already available.
The objection that I have to this program was that it was an experiment, a costly one, with no guarantees of future success. Nuclear energy isn't a panacea or necessarily the best of ideas, but the risks and challenges are well known and it can already be used to produce energy in a cost effective manner.
Most of the complaints people have about the current Fission reactors is that they are unsafe and the waste is toxic and hard to handle. But the reality is that it is really hard to get a nuclear reactor to reach a meltdown. Even the plant in Chernobyl which was being run in the least competent manner imaginable, was able to keep from reaching the really serious point where there's a sustained uncontrolled nuclear reaction. 3-mile island, the nuclear material was completely unable to make it past the huge amount of concrete that the facility was made of.
The amount of waste from a reactor tends to be exaggerated, it is significantly less material than is created by coal plants, with the ability to reprocess the majority of the radioactive material for another plant. The amount of waste that is created in the US would be reduced significantly if it were subjected to the sort of reprocessing that happens in other parts of the world.
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.
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
Everyone knows it will stay underground, whey we're worried about is when it comes back up. Ever heard of Lake Nyos?
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.
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.
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
Thank God the goverment had the foresight to cancel this project. Although it may have helped stop climate change, it would have flooded the underground with CO2, causing angry mole-men to declare war on us surface dwellers. I am thankful to delay the welcoming of our mole-men overloards.
That's right, since Iraq is costing us orders of magnitude more than almost anything else. We really should be using more reasonable units like milliIraqs.
My understanding is that reprocessing spent fuel rods creates fissionable material suitable for creating atomic weapons. My guess is that we can't 100% guarantee these reprocessed fuel rods won't end up being used as weapons and that's the reason the US doesn't do this.
Peace, or Not?
For example?
\u262D = \u5350
CO2 is commonly pumped underground to help retrieve hard-to-get oil from underground oil deposits. Unfortunately, they typcially manufacture the CO2 nearby, so it doesn't reduce greenhouse gases at all. If they could use flue gases from coal fired plants for this, it might be worth it. But the hard part is getting the CO2 to the right location, so I don't hold out promise for that.
And as far as the fact that it may someday come up, methane (natural gas) is a much more powerful greenhouse gas and we go to great lengths to get it out of the ground. If we put the CO2 in those deep geological formations, we would be no worse off than we were previously.
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
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.
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!
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)
If the USA wanted cleaner coal technology, they could have it right now, simply by forcing all coal plants to meet modern standards.
As the laws now stand, you could drive a flotilla of aircraft carriers through the loopholes. For starters, pre-1970 coal burning powerplants were effectively grandfathered in under the Bush era laws. Those powerplants don't have to be upgraded to meet current regs as long as the owner only performs "routine maintanence".
The EPA defines "routine maintanence" as anything that doesn't exceed 20% of the powerplant's value.
In 5 years you could rebuild that powerplant doing nothing more than EPA approved routine maintanence.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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
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
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.
That's right, since Iraq is costing us orders of magnitude more than almost anything else. We really should be using more reasonable units like milliIraqs.
Close, but a miliIraq is a ridiculously small unit, much like measuring the U.S. military budget in pennies (or pesos), a more appropriate unit would be the kiloIraq. pronounced as "Kill-O-Iraq," of course.
Yes, it should be obvious to all patriotic Americans that the real solution is to pump the excess CO2 into water. In fact, many of the refreshing soft beverages currently available on your grocer's shelves, including the entire flavor line of Coca-Cola brand beverage products, contain significantly more carbonation than most sparkling water. When you drink beverages that contain still/non-sparkling water, the terrorists win. Have a Coke and a smile.
Breakfast served all day!
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.
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.
Warren Anderson is considered a fugitive by Indian law, he has been charged with manslaughter there. The US did not grant extradition though, I do not know why. The case is a bit more complicated than you make it look.
Other than that I agree, some big corporations can get away with crime more easily than individuals as they have leverage on governments. It's no surprise that a monopoly a justice produces justice that sucks.
\u262D = \u5350
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
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.