Slashdot Mirror
Germany Fired Up Over Clean Coal
MIT's Technology Review is reporting on the world's first coal-driven power plant designed to capture and store C02 emissions. "Vattenfall's small 30-megawatt plant burns the lignite in air from which nitrogen has been removed. Combustion in the resulting oxygen-rich atmosphere produces a waste stream of carbon dioxide and water vapor, three-quarters of which is recycled back into the boiler. By repeating this process, known as oxyfuel, it is possible to greatly concentrate the carbon dioxide. After particles and sulfur have been removed, and water vapor has been condensed out, the waste gas can be 98 percent carbon dioxide, according to Vattenfall. The separated carbon dioxide will be cooled down to -28 C and liquefied. Starting next year, the plan is to transport it by truck 150 miles northwest, to be injected 3,000 meters underground into a depleted inland gas field in Altmark. Ideally, in the future, the gas will be carried by pipeline to underground storage, says Vattenfall. "
step 1: capture emissions
step 2: store emissions
step 3: ? (put back where we found it, if we cant see it then its OKAY!)
step 4: TEh PROFIT!!1!
Good people go to bed earlier.
We MUST start accumulating vast reserves of liquid carbon dioxide NOW, so that in 50 years, when we're in the deadly throes of Global Cooling, we can release it to the atmosphere to warm the planet and save us all!
yeah, why the heck don't they convert the CO2 into something usable, like C and O2?
Maybe build another generating plant next door that supplies the energy required to break the molocules...
Don't want to sound like an asshole, but that water vapor those hydrogen-fueled cars produce is not going to vanish either.
If only there was a way of controlling the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere and pumping the excess into a vast transportation network that carries it to the ocean.
Why not put a Coca-Cola bottling plant next door. :~)
[Insert pithy quote here]
"What will exactly happen when the liquid CO2 will eventually warm up undergorund and then some future seismic event will open a crack ?
I hope this storage is somwhere in Sahara desert, not in the heart of densly populated Europe."
Future Headline:
"Earth Farts; Thousands die in Europe"
Followed by the world continuing to revolve about its axis.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Sequestering all this CO2 underground scares me to no end. Ever see what happens to a balloon filled with CO2? Drops to the ground like a brick. What happens when we fill all these natural gas voids with CO2? The Earth will get too heavy to stay in orbit and we'll drop to the very bottom of the universe! It's bad bad bad.
Iantastik's humor threshold is an extremely stable one and it would take a great deal of explaining to reach it. The amount of explaining it would take would be counter-productive to the initial problem of telling a good science joke.
...since no one is laughing, I guess you just didn't get it though.
Until we can figure out how to simulate good joke telling or just go ahead and let Monty Python do it, this just ins't the best solution available.
However, neither is beating it into your head in my opinion.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
You're right, oil fields where we know natural gas was successfully stored for millennia will only postpone the problem a few decades. This'll never work long term.
*whoosh!*
If they destroy the whole world they get more virgins. I love virgins, so it seems only natural this would appear to a terrorist as well; however they are insane... but their primary motivation is virgins, so I think the analogy might cross the barrier.
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