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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. "
With the US being one of the leading producers of coal, they should be the biggest proponent of such technology. This is in light of US industry/Economy going to the crap yard.
http://www.worldcoal.org/pages/content/index.asp?PageID=188
What is the problem with putting the putting the emissions back in the ground?
I smoked pot once. But I DID NOT inhale. Will you hire me?
30 MW is tiny. A baseload powerplant in the US runs about 1000MW. So, if this process can scale up 30x, AND we can figure out what to do with 30x the CO2, then I'll get excited.
Nuke plants had many of the same issues - a 1000MW powerplant is NOT simply a Navy aircraft carrier scaled up, although it looks that way in the Visitor's center.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
The separated carbon dioxide will be cooled down to -28 C and liquefied.
And exactly how much energy are you spending on liquefying the CO2?
Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.
This reminds me of a cynical old analogy about nuclear power, it's clean in the sense that all its harmful wastes are contained. If we could grab all the emissions and bury them underground, then coal would be just as clean as nuclear! Suddenly the analogy doesn't seem as cynical. (Yes, I realise the analogy's not all that sound.)
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
"What is the problem with putting the putting the emissions back in the ground?"
Because that would be a technological solution to the problem. One of reasons that there is still a lot of resistance to the Global Climate Change crowd is that there seems to be a "hair shirt" mentality about it - they aren't yelling because the Earth is going to melt down. Rather, they really want us using fewer resources because we are BAD for doing so. It is a behavior change they are looking for, not really a change in the percentage of CO2 put into the atmosphere. So a technological solution that allows the world to continue using energy like a drunken sailor uses his paycheck is unacceptable.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Ask the folks in Lake Nyos. Natural CO2 escaped from a lake and killed something like 2,000 people. That CO2 needs to be stored very securely and away from centers of population.
Nonaggression works!
Uhh? Why not just use nuclear power, store it into Yucca Mountain (as was planned, until people complained) opposed to storing the nuclear waste in the nuclear plant itself.
SAME concept as the article...
Disclaimer: I am not god.
We may not be created equal
But we can be treated equal.
Huh, I thought it was because the earth has a funny way of shifting around and things don't always stay buried for very long which could be problematic for pressurized gasses, but I guess it's because of anti-technology ecofascists.
Thank goodness coal is a renewable resource! Oh wait...
While this is an ok stopgap, and we should make all of our current coal plants clean coal plants (after all if we can make them clean why would want to breath that crap), it doesn't solve the problem that with ever increasing energy needs we need renewable forms of energy or we're going to quickly run out.
Then again, we should think whether the hydrogen is. Don't want to sound like an asshole, but that water vapor those hydrogen-fueled cars produce is not going to vanish either.
Since that hydrogen was probably produced by electrolysis of water, it's pretty much a zero-sum game. But water isn't to be worried about, since rain is a pretty good way of regulating the water vapor in the atmosphere.
There's certainly that, PLUS:
It does not reduce our dependence on a limited resource. We're gonna run out eventually and the sooner we find an alternative the better.
It just so happens that most, if not all of the truly "renewable" energy cycles we've found are also very eco-friendly. Kind of like a double-win.
=Smidge=
Why not pipe (some of) the waste CO2 into a sealed greenhouse/biosphere system. Plants (the green biological kind) like that stuff and grow a lot faster when it is available in higher concentrations. Then pipe the oxygen they produce back to the coal burning power plant.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
That is the good thing about vitrified storage. It is GLASS. Glass doesn't get into drinking water. Also people forget that seawater already contains Thorium and Uranium.
We shouldn't be storing that stuff in Yucca mountain anyway. We should be reprocessing it and make more fuel out of it. What we can not make into fuel we should "burn" in special reactors in to short half life isotopes that decay to ore levels in just around 100 years and use vitrified storage for that.
So the real answer to the question of to why people fear nuclear power is.
They are ignorant, scared, and they have been lied to by the people that use them as their base of political power.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
When CO2 leaks into the water table, people's children don't start growing a third arm.
CO2 leaking into the water table would be just as serious as radioactive material leaking into the water table, unless you like drinking carbolic acid.
On the other hand, with CO2 being a soluble fluid, it seems more likely that it might leak than a solid, vitrified material.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
What we need to do is switch to CARBON NEUTRAL sources like living trees. The trees absorb the CO2. We burn the trees. The CO2 is released and absorbed by the next generation of trees. (Same with biofuels like soybean-diesel.)
No more global warming.
Another solution is to have fewer human beings (like China does with its one-child per family to shrink population). Not a popular solution, but we never heard the Roman Empire or ancient C'hin Empire worry about fuel shortages or melting ice caps. That's because there were only 1/2 billion people..... lots of room and fuel for everybody. Nature wasn't impacted.
Most of today's fuel and global warming issues are simply a byproduct of overpopulation: Too many people gobbling-up too many resources. If we continue down this road, the next major problem won't be "How do we fuel our cars?" but "How do we fuel our bodies" as food shortages run rampant in the U.S. and E.U. (Sorry I don't buy the Asimovian future of an Earth sustaining 50 billion people.)
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
All these posts about farting planets are very amusing, but should be moderated "funny," not informative.
Companies in the United States currently have billions of cubic feet of natural gas and other gases into long-term underground storage facilities. In fact, anyone familiar with the working end of the natural gas business will be happy to spend hours explaining how it works. The Department of Energy -- http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/natural_gas/analysis_publications/ngcapacity/ngcapacity.pdf has some info on the practice.
Put simply: gas underground moves very, very slowly. The diffusion rate can be measured, and while some gas will inevitably escape, the amount lost can be measured very precisely (and accurately).
Unless we as a society are willing to suffer blackouts, coal and other fossil fuel power plants will be around for years. Heck, even Al Gore says a minimum of 10 years, and I personally (as an energy industry guy) think it's going to be a lot longer than that.
If you accept that there is a man-made climate crisis coming, then storage of CO2 is an excellent short term fix to reducing emissions as we move away from a carbon-based economy. Whether you think of this as "short term" storage or "long-term" storage depends on your outlook. Is 100 years long or short? Seen from a geological timeline, it's laughably short. Looked at as a means of reducing the CO2 in the atmosphere starting today -- it's a great first step.
Well, then we'd be burning trees much, much faster than they could replenish. That's why they aren't really renewable.
Nuclear is really the only way to go. Reprocess and re-use the fuel in breeder reactors, and we'll have enough energy for a long time, and little dangerous waste.
somehow natural gas has stayed underground for millions of years.
love is just extroverted narcissism
How about we stop using retarded 50 year old nuclear technology that only extracts 10% of the usable energy from nuclear fuel and throwing the rest away?
We could feed all our energy needs for centuries on feeder-breeder reactors. Not only this, but the final waste products of this process remain radioactive for only a few centuries vs thousands of years that conventional nuclear "waste" lasts. That makes the issue of disposing of nuclear waste vastly more simple.
I don't really promote 100% nuclear, closer to 50/50 feeder reactors and solar thermal power production. We don't really need to use any coal, gas or oil to power the grid at all. Hell we could even rid ourselves of fossil fuels for most transport as well if we invested in grid powered train tracks and charging rails for electric vehicles on the interstates and major highways.
This is all available on current technology, and it would cost vastly less than the mining, pumping, refining and foreign entanglement costs associated with limited fossil fuels. Why not take this step now? Instead of a hundred years from now when there will not be enough fossil fuels left to fight over. America and Europe were some of the first nations to go through the industrial revolution. Its time to pass the torch to the third world. Its time for us to move beyond industrialization. Its not just good for America, or Europe, its good for the entire world.
IIRC the reason for burying the waste CO2 is that it gets absorbed by the surrounding rocks and converted into harmless minerals.... Someone with more geological expertise than I have will have to explain that, though.
Geological? Try alchemical. Carbon doesn't transmute to other elements to form new non-carbon minerals. Mineralize carbon and you get slate, coal, or diamond.
Better to have a living process rebind that carbon with hydrogen into useful biochemicals and free up the oxygen for later recombustion.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Same concept? Situation 1: "Sorry, folks, the storage facility leaked into the local groundwater. You'll find a little bit of carbonation in your water supply." Situation 2: "Sorry, folks, the storage facility leaked into the local groundwater. You'll find a little bit of Cesium-137 [wikipedia.org] in your water supply."
More like... "Sorry, folks, its in fucking Yucca Mountain underneath layers of concrete, where no seismic activity occurs, deep underground , nowhere near civilization.
Whereas, people push against storing underground are currently forcing them to store nuclear waste on site at the power plants which are near civilization.
Disclaimer: I am not god.
We may not be created equal
But we can be treated equal.
Don't bring logic and practical conclusions from science and real life observations into this discussion. What are you trying to do, be sane about these things?
Gosh, if there is one thing that pissed me off more then anything else is someone pointing out the obvious. If it wasn't for you, we could be completely over looking that aspect of reality and still have a reason for why this is bad.
Oh hell.. what happened, where am I? I feel like I was hit by a truck.
Apparently some plants do grow faster with increased CO2 and some don't. It varies by crop. It would probably work better to use the CO2 to grow masses of algae in tanks. You can supposedly get huge amounts of biomass per acre that way. It's a lot easier to sequester the carbon in biomass by burying it than by trying to hide the gaseous CO2 somewhere. I don't trust these schemes that have huge reservoirs of CO2 somewhere. If it blows out somehow and escapes all it once things get real nasty for anyone addicted to breathing oxygen in the neighborhood.
That's really awesome how you trivialized, misrepresented, AND over-generalized climate change arguments all in one single post! You should win an award for the best straw man of the day!
Just a few specifics on why your post was stupid:
1. There are many people in this world with an opinion about global warming. Grouping everyone together into one 'they', and calling them a 'Global Climate Change crowd' both misrepresents a position as if it is held by everyone with an opinion about global climate change (it isn't), and seeks to discredit that opinion by giving the label 'crowd' to the group, insinuating that they are just a rabble-rousing mob. Lame.
2. Many/most people who think that climate change is an important issue, and accept scientific evidence that it is caused to a large degree by human activity, want to directly address climate change itself, not press some personal philosophy of minimalism. It just so happens that reducing resource usage is the single most effective and eminently most available way to reduce the causes of climate change. You are confusing the most practical solution with a moral agenda. Lame.
In conclusion: your post is lame. And it's lame that people have given in a +5 insightful mod, which only demonstrates that your fallacious logic indeed pulled the wool over the eyes of many. Or more likely, that you have supporters in people who also don't mind using fallacious logic to advance their OWN ideological agenda.
My understanding is that both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been acting as independent, for-profit companies, which created part of the problem we have now.
I recall the power problems California had not existing until after the power companies were privatized, too.
Regardless, I believe that any utility or service that is basically required by the general populace and that uses public or government property should be maintained by the government and basic service offered to the public, while private companies can use these utilities to add extra services. This includes electricity, telephone, gas, and perhaps internet.
So the real answer to the question of to why people fear nuclear power is.
They are ignorant, scared, and they have been lied to by the people that use them as their base of political power.
Which, oddly enough, is the same reason people fear drugs, terrorism, pornography, immigrants, internet pedophiles, and just about everything else. FDR was right, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Our irrational reaction to our irrational fears has been, in almost every case, worse than the actual threat we're afraid of. America is no longer the Land of the Free, the Home of the Brave. Instead we're the land easily manipulated cowards.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
It'd be more useful to grow plants that we can use the products from. For example, assume that a ton of coal contains 1 ton of carbon. Burning it will produce about 3.6 tons of carbon dioxide. That amount of carbon dioxide therefore contains 1 ton of carbon, and about 2.6 tons of oxygen.
Consider a cotton plant. When the cotton is picked from the plant, it contains carbon that the plant absorbed from the atmosphere. Let's assume that 4 tons of cotton contains 1 ton of carbon. That means that all the carbon from burning 1 ton of coal is stored in 4 tons of cotton. If we use the 4 tons of cotton to make clothes and other things, that stores the carbon in a form where it's not in the atmosphere. If the carbon isn't in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, it can't cause global warming.
And it's not just cotton. Every plant product contains stored carbon. To get the carbon, the plant had to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or from the ocean. Since this problem is all about balance, we should in theory be able to balance the amount of carbon being dug up and burned with the amount we store by harvesting plants and using them for long-lasting things. Even products like paper are useful, as long as they aren't burned once they aren't wanted any more.
If plant products are going to be burned, they should be burned in a power plant to produce electricity. It should be possible to replace coal with waste paper, and other waste plant products. This is already being done at various places around the world.
Of course people will object and say that this can't possibly work. How can plants get us out of this mess? If the coal we're burning is made of dead plants, then plants got us into this mess, why can't they get us out? Plants were able to absorb all of the carbon dioxide needed to make the coal in the first place. Surely with all the agricultural knowledge in the world, we can grow plants and absorb it again.