07.30.08
Posted in Energy, Society at 14:48 by RjZ
Oil consuming nations failed to impress the Saudi king during a recent Global Summit on Oil in Jedda, Saudi Arabia.
The consumers expressed that the current high price situation is unsustainable. That’s easy to see when you live in the United States and see the spread out development and number enormous cars traveling from their homes in the distant suburbs to their jobs. High fuel prices increase the price of everything and leave less for the commuting masses to spend.
Meanwhile, the developing world is buying more cars. India’s Tata is releasing cute $2000 car for the masses (and we’re talking India here, so masses is a whole bunch). China and India don’t see any reason why they shouldn’t live like the rest of the developed world and who can blame them. I just wonder how they’re going to afford it.
Neither China nor India are fuel producing nations. As demand increases and supply doesn’t, gas isn’t getting any cheaper for them than it is in the United States. (Strictly speaking, Chinese gas prices are controlled by the Chinese government, but there’s a limit to how they can reasonably subsidize the price).
As the world races toward (or past) peak oil the pressure will grow to develop alternative forms of energy and transportation. Actually, we may already have a few practical choices, we just can’t afford them. Standard of living improvement is strongly correlated to energy consumption. The better a society lives, the more energy it uses. There are nations that have a great way of life with less energy, and some, like the United States, that use more than seems to be necessary to support their lifestyle, but all of the rich nations are alike in that they are consumers of things like televisions and, now, cars, and they use more energy than those countries whose populace mostly lives by subsistence farming.
What’s good about expensive gas? Not much. Putting the breaks on development will hurt these up-and-coming nations even more than Europe and the United States, but maybe, just maybe, they’ll have a chance to slow their development and make some better choices.
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07.01.08
Posted in Energy, Society at 16:58 by RjZ
Car sales are down in the United States. I don’t think we should be surprised. If you’re only a few years into payments on your SUV it’s unlikely that, with the extra pinch of gas prices, you have enough extra money just lying around to simply get rid of the car you’ve got and get another one. You could go a little deeper in debt, but then credit’s a little tighter these days.
Suppose you’ve got the money and you’re really more interested in saving the environment. The question is, should you trade in that guzzler for a hybrid? Hybrids burn much less gas and produce fewer green house gases (GHGs), right?
Imagine you’ve got another 10 years at 12,000 miles per year on your car. I’m guessing that’d be around 200,000 miles, give or take, which, with some care, I think most cars from the last few decades will pull off. Say you’re getting 21 miles per gallon. A hybrid will get around 46. So that’s 25 miles per gallon for 120,000 miles or a savings of 4,800 gallons of gas! Not bad, at $4, that’s $19,200 over the next ten years. This is great news, from a cost standpoint. The five year cost of ownership of a Prius is only around double that, so, with today’s prices, it’s not such a bad deal!
The question I am asking though, is should you trade in your still working car for the environment’s sake? A gallon of gas creates about 20 lbs of CO2, so buying that Prius will save the environment at least 96,000 lbs of CO2. Except, how much CO2 and other GHGs are produced in the manufacture of a hybrid? Alas, I couldn’t find this data quickly on the web, but I’ll hazard a guess. A Prius weighs almost 4000 lbs. It’s a pretty fair assumption that producing all those machined parts, mining and smelting all the metal for the body, engine, battery, suspension etc., four tires, foam and carpet filled interior, and not least, transporting all the various pieces half way around the world, probably works out to quite a bit more than another 90,000 lbs of CO2. Without doing the math, I wouldn’t be surprised at 900,000 lbs of GHGs. Anyone have a real reference here? A couple of papers on the web were available at charge.
If it’s time to buy a new car, consider a hybrid, I am sure it’ll help. Just don’t buy something you really don’t need just to spare the environment. Reduce first, as the saying goes: reduce, reuse, recycle. I’ll be driving my 130,000 mile car for a few more years, even if there are cleaner cars out there.
Update 9 July 2008:
Slate’s Green Lantern takes the opposite view to my point using BTU data. Honestly, I am not really in a position to dispute this much but the calculation there doesn’t take into account the waste of producing more cars, more frequently than necessary (although he does touch upon this.) Worse, we have little knowledge of just how much of a Prius is reusable or recyclable (let alone reused or recycled). Finally by stretching the use of the car out to 11.5 years, a good idea, but certainly not usually what happens, the scales tip in favor of the Prius. Cost of ownership and cost to the environment continue to drop the longer something is used. That, after all, is the point I concluded with above: reduce, reuse, recycle–in that order!
Thanks to one of my faithful readers for the tip. I am interested in other data on this subject if folks come up with any.
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06.18.08
Posted in Energy at 20:10 by RjZ
Over the last few years I’ve written now and again about energy. A little before the first post on energy I started working in the power industry and it’s been a fascinating adventure. My instincts for understanding things stem from my physics training and that usually means reductionism. Reduce interactions to as few rules as possible and understanding falls out. When I try to understand businesses my instinct is to apply the rules of capitalism and expect understanding to fall out. But the power industry just refuses to be so simple.
Since I’ve noticed all those posts on energy piling up, it seemed liked they needed their very own category for your reading convenience. Now, all you power industry professionals can sort through book reviews, news comments, political rambling, and travel stories and go right to the powerful stuff. I hope you like it.
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Posted in 2¢, Energy at 17:05 by RjZ
While discussing the the benefits of offshore wind instead of oil,
In One Ear… Out the other writes “This means the decommissioning of many harmful coal plants along the coast who have the added problem of having to ship in coal.”
Would that that were true. Planting off shore wind turbines doesn’t mean we get to shut down coal–unless everyone agrees to finally turn off extra lights, keep the air conditioner off, and maybe stop having children. Power requirements are increasing and while wind is going to play a part in our future energy mix, hopefully a growing part, it won’t be as simple as the author hopes.
While we’re at it, have an aerial look at Rawhide Power Plant in Fort Collins, Colorado.
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In the center of that scene you can make out their boiler and pollution control equipment (look for the shadow of the stack). There’s the cooling lake, and then the coal yard on the top. In the upper right are four gas-fired combustion turbines used to meet peak load requirements. The power station is rated at 270 MW and can put out up to 285 or more. It’s a middle size power plant. Almost half of the 1400 north American plants are this size or smaller and the rest range to as much as 1300 MW or more.
Now let’s compare to Solar Two.
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This is one of the largest solar thermal plants in the world. It’s inactive now but the technology is being commercialized at Solar Tres in Spain. Nice looking set of concentrator mirrors and, this is on the same scale, you can see that it takes up a bit less space. Unfortunately Solar Two is only rated at 10.5 MW of power (back when it was in service). You’d need nearly 30 of them to do what average ol’ Rawhide does.
Wind is more powerful off shore than it is inland. Still, Texas has some of the best wind in the nation. And it’s home to the worlds largest wind farm Horse Hollow Energy Station.
View Larger Map
Horse Hollow puts out considerably more power than Solar two and almost three times the juice of Rawhide at 735 MW; but only when the wind is blowing full speed. Rawhide runs all day–and all night, of course, but Horse Hollow is admirable just the same. Horse Hollow also occupies 47,000 acres. The portion I’ve linked to is the same scale as the other two pictures, but only a tiny section of the farm. Then there’s the distribution lines to get that power to some place useful.
To be fair, we’d really have to include the size of the mine that feeds coal to Rawhide, and maybe even the train tracks that feed it, but, as I’ve mentioned before, coal is pretty energy dense and the result is, even with all the infrastructure included, fossil fuel plants don’t take up as much room as wind and solar, and while many say we’ve got plenty of space, they always clam up when it’s their back yard we’re talking about.
The point of this exercise isn’t to say wind and solar are bad, but rather to make people aware that there are other trade offs; some as simple as where are we’re going to find all the land. I think Out the Other Ear may have a great question for McCain and others about thinking further outside the box than simply repealing off-shore drilling prohibition, but, alas, it doesn’t mean we’re likely to get to turn off those coal plants any time soon.
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06.02.08
Posted in Energy, Society at 13:39 by RjZ
General Motors has spent piles of money on it’s questionable advertising campaign “Live Green, Go Yellow” to promote the use of renewable bio-fuels. When I ‘go yellow’ it’s usually a hint that I am not drinking enough water, but whatever. My real question is does using bio-fuel help reduce carbon?
Coal, oil, and other fossil fuels are really just stored solar energy. Hydrocarbon bonds built up in plants with the help of the sun and photosynthesis are dried and compressed into coal, or eaten by dinosaurs first, then compressed into oil. We dig it up and burn it, breaking down those hydrocarbons into CO2 and water, for energy. We get so much energy to fuel our economy and way of life simply because so many years of solar energy is stored in that compressed fossil fuel.
Bio-fuels, meanwhile, are considered renewable because while growing they were busy absorbing CO2 and when we burn them, it’s simply released again—net zero CO2, or so the marketing hype goes. It comes down to this: as long as we don’t burn these bio-fuels any faster than it takes to grow them, we’ll have a completely renewable, and carbon neutral source of energy. An energy source that, by the way, is essentially just solar power stored in hydrocarbons by the plants.
It’s ridiculous to imagine that we can suddenly get by with the solar energy stored in plants (or even algae) when we’ve been burning through our compressed, energy dense fossil fuels like there’s no tomorrow! Actually, it takes quite a bit of fossil fuel to grow a plant these days, whether it’s a tree or switch grass as President Bush recommended, there are fertilizers, tractor fuel, and diesel fuel to carry it to the point of use (whether that’s your home or a centralized power plant.)
I’d be unfair if I said there were no advantages to renewables. There is, for example, energy independence and reduced CO2. Using ethanol to supplant oil gives the United States (or any other nation) more political independence to negotiate with countries whose behavior they may not agree with but from whom we’re currently buying critical energy. Using renewables certainly does reduce the amount of CO2 released from all that coal and oil (it was all previously stored, as opposed to being stored slowly over the last season it took to grow the crop—it’s just too bad it will only last a few minutes to extract the energy stored there). Plants are also remarkably efficient at turning solar energy into hydrocarbons, so long as they’re allowed their sweet time to do it.
Unless we can figure out a way to use energy as slowly as the plants did, we’d better keep looking for a real solution, and I’ll leave the going yellow to the bathroom.
Update: It’s worse than I thought. This article sites three folks from three different disciplines; an economist, scientist and environmentalist. They’re not so up on the bio-fuel idea either. I agree with the idea that locally, if it’s sustainable; for example if you’re burning all your bio-waste that would just go into a landfill (which by the way is a form of carbon sequestration!) there might be some point to burning bio-fuels. Aside from that, I am scared of people cutting down forests just to plant switch grass.
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03.28.08
Posted in Energy, Society at 13:53 by RjZ
Have you heard about Earth Hour? Started by the World Wildlife Fund (a charity I actually donate to; and by ‘actually’ here I want to emphasize that I don’t donate to many charities), the idea is that this Saturday, 29th of March, people, businesses, organizations, and governments will turn off the lights from 8:00 to 9:00 in the evening.
I get the leadership and solidarity this is intended to show. Everyone who turns out the lights and joins the WWF will be telling governments and policy makers at businesses and civic organizations that we care about the effects of our energy consumption and we acknowledge we can do something about it.
It’s too bad most people won’t get that.
Many, and for all I know the designers of this action, might be fooled into believing that this has some other purpose. Say, showing how much power can be saved if we all just turned off the lights, for example. A horrible plan. Power plant operators are already concerned that extremist environmentalists want us to crawl back in caves and live by candle light. Even if Earth Hour action could show savings (it won’t!), they’re doing more to justify the fears of people who actually keep our lights on then they are to become agents for change.
Utility owners and policy makers are exactly the ones WWF are trying to convince, but unless extremist environmentalists, who apparently really do think we should return to a pre-industrial agrarian state, are willing to live that way; that is, go off the grid, give up their cars, computers, airplane rides, and all other advancements, like, say, healthcare, they come off as a bit disingenuous.
In fact, it’s terribly easy for the rest of us to turn the light switch off for an hour. During that time of honorable sacrifice we know we can just turn it right back on; we’re not giving up on anything. Meanwhlie, India, China, and the rest of the developing world are getting fed up with the attitude in the West. They want a chance to grow, with the same access to cheap energy, and by cheap, we often mean polluting, that we got to use and all we can do is tell people to turn of their lights.
Sadly, the hour of savings will hardly amount to more than a few megawatts and that people might think otherwise shows a lack of understanding of one of the world’s most incredible industrial inventions—the grid. Let’s have a look. What will happen when everyone turns off the lights at the same time? Unfortunately all the solar plants will already be idle as it’ll be night time. Wind is most steady at dawn and dusk (but this is dependent on many factors) and will not likely have a significant effect (as if we got any significant power from wind and solar today anyway….) Base-load power like nuclear and coal will keep burning away during this lack of demand. That, folks, is how the grid works. You can’t just turn off the overwhelming majority of power in a few minutes. Extra power just flows into the grid and if it’s not used then it will end up heating up transformers and being wasted anyway. There are no giant batteries to store up the extra power. The majority of power doesn’t cycle with demand; fortunately the grid is large enough to simply soak up the extra energy of most short-term changes in demand.
If enough people actually turn off their lights to have a significant demand effect, the power providers will have to respond in some way. Their first choice will be to turn off peaking power sources like oil and gas. Except, most of these will already be off because this isn’t peak demand time anyway, but there could be some actual savings there. Much of the hoped for energy savings will be lost due to inefficiencies of ramping them off and then back up again when demand returns, but these peak power sources are at least intended to respond to changes in demand so it’s not too big a deal.
If WWF gets a huge turn-out and demand really drops, then maybe a coal plant will actually go off-line. That would be really bad news. For that hour of CO2 saved during the coal plant outage, it will take it hours to even days to turn back on. During which all those peaking power sources will be running to take up the slack, drinking foreign oil the whole time.
In the 70s, the peak power season used to be December. Today the peak is during summer. What’s the difference? Air-conditioning units. Before AC on every home, power providers could actually measure the spike in power demand from all the Christmas lights. Now, in spite of the extra lights (have you seen the Joneses keeping up with the Smiths on who can put up the most lights? I sure have) Christmas barely registers above the noise for demand. Come summer, though, and all those AC units raise demand to pay for new power plants. The point is, turning off the lights for an hour won’t even rise above the noise.
At least we’ll have the solidarity. And maybe a romantic candle light dinner or two.
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02.15.08
Posted in Energy, Society at 13:05 by RjZ
Yesterday’s post was supposed to be about the changes in budget travel, but it was really about what happens when the developing world develops. The simple fact is that it’s usually great for individuals to have more cars and cellphones and food and fashion choices, but we’ve got to face that it’s not necessarily so great for trees and bunnies and the earth. As we humans take up more and more space, use more and more resources, and consume more and more energy, we’ll surely race towards a point where our status quo of cars and coal-plants will take too great a toll.
It doesn’t seem too far-fetch to suggest that we’re seeing the results today. And so, we sit in our comfortable homes wondering how the Chinese are going to fix the pollution in Beijing before the Olympics start. In this article a diplomat laments that as a Chinese he is being asked to give up what Europeans and U.S. Americans were never asked to give up. He’s asked to somehow develop his economy without coal and oil. How can we reasonably expect him to make do with a quarter of the CO2 output that we enjoy but still have enough power to produce the wealth and comfort we enjoy?
In Chennai, India, I saw window mounted air-conditioners blocking the view of nearly every apartment dweller, and who can blame them…it’s hot there! But those a/c units also consume plenty of electricity, supplied in Chennai, the same way we get it in the U.S., by burning things in power plants and producing CO2. A/C units are a bit like cars; how low their price can go is limited by the chunks of metal it takes to make them, not simply by the market’s ability to afford them. Despite the high cost, they’re popular in Chennai because the standard of living has increased so much in the past decade.
The correlation is obvious: high standard of living means high levels of energy consumption and since we don’t have many ways to produce large amounts of energy that don’t also make abundant amounts of CO2, expect the problem to get worse before it get’s better. Note: before everyone starts commenting about solar and wind, I said ‘large amounts of energy.’ Also note: comment anyway!
There may be a way out though, although probably no one knows what it is yet. If we’re lucky, along with all the new cars and cellphones that the better standard of living is bringing India, China and the developing world, people will have greater access to communication, information and education. All it takes is one really smart person to come up with the technological break-through that’s escaped us so far. It’s likely that such genius is one in a billion, but very soon, perhaps we’ll have a billion people working on it.
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07.22.07
Posted in Energy, Reviews at 17:16 by RjZ
I’ve only just begun reading a book handed to me: Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan but it looks like such promising blog fodder that I figured I’d start writing about it even before I finished. (I’m on page 47 now–I’ve got a little while.)
——
Today’s news; the Federal Reserve Chairman, Berneke released today that inflation would remain at bay with the exception of food and fuel prices which are rising. Are these connected? In more ways than we realize. Only a century ago, yield for an acre of corn was nearly 20 times less than it is today. To what do we owe this increase in production? In part it’s due to scientific advancement and hybridization which has enabled corn to be harvested more easily and be grown in tighter and tighter spaces. But even rich Iowa soil wouldn’t be able to support such an increase in natural production without a little help.
Naturally, energy to grow corn comes from the sun. The sun powers the photosynthesis that produces the stalk, leaves, silk, cob and kernels. The sun powers the the bacteria that live on the soybean roots and combine nitrogen in the air with water in complex chemical reaction to make amino acids. Bacteria don’t live long though so their nitrogen enriches the soil that the corn to grow in the next time it’s planted. Unfortunately, soybeans can only foster so many bacteria per area of soil and only so much nitrogen is removed from the air, combined with hydrogen and made useful to the plants.
That’s where fossil fuels come in. Fossil fuels are essentially old dead plants and animals. Millenia long, dinosaurs and ferns lived and died and were buried and crushed by the weight of new soil, ferns and dinosaurs. Today we uncover these remnants as coal, oil and natural gas, but really, it’s stored up solar energy. And this stored up energy, for example as natural gas, can be used to create high temperatures and pressures that create usable nitrogen, which we usually just call fertilizer. Bacteria use enzymes and biological processes to create this fertilizer at lower temperatures and pressures, but our method is quicker.
Unfortunately, our method may be quicker, but there is loads of demand for that fuel, so it isn’t cheap. And as it get’s scarcer it won’t be getting any cheaper. Even Iowa soil can only provide so much nourishment for Iowa corn on its own. Add some super concentrated sun in the form of natural gas to create fertilizer and suddenly 2 million subsidized farmers can feed a nation of 250 million.
The beauty of physics is that one really only need to memorize a few laws and everything else follows. In this case, it’s conservation of energy. We can grow more food per acre, but the energy to do so has to come from somewhere. According to Pollen it takes about 50 gallons of oil per acre of corn, or about two calories of fuel for every calorie of food. Doesn’t it seem ironic, then, that we’re considering growing corn 50 gallons per acre, to plant, grow, harvest and deliver, in order to make ethanol to power our cars?
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07.31.06
Posted in 2¢, Energy, Society at 10:09 by RjZ
The United Kingdom has just noticed that it doesn’t have a satisfactory plan for dealing with nuclear waste. For over 30 years they have been producing this deadly poisonous hazardous waste from power plants with no effective way to keep it out of harm’s way. It’s about time they started doing something about it!
Just look at the numbers:
UK NUCLEAR WASTE - VOLUMES AS PACKAGED FOR DISPOSAL
High-level waste - 2,000 cubic metres
Intermediate-level waste - 350,000 cubic metres
Low-level waste - 30,000 cubic metres
Spent fuel - 10,000 cubic metres
Plutonium - 4,300 cubic metres
Uranium - 75,000 cubic metres
All together that’s 471,300 cubic meters of waste in 30 years. This chunk of waste has to be transferred to an, as yet not completed, underground facility that will likely cost more £10 billion to build.
Concerned yet?
This block of waste, and we’re including all of its hazardous packaging material, is 77 meters on a side. 30 years of waste would be an impressive block that would cover a Wrigley field in Chicago almost a 179 feet high (54.5 m). That’s six feet per year. The underground facility that must be built to house all this waste and whatever else produced for 65 years in the future. £10 billion ain’t cheap, but it’s about £105 million / year and that barely even shows up on budgets like the U.S. where we’ve spent more than $50 billion per year on the Iraq war (more than 250 times as much).
These aren’t tiny numbers. I don’t have an extra £105 million this year, nor a backyard with a six foot deep lake that’s the size of Wrigley field, but this is the nation’s entire nuclear output, all packaged up and ready to go. Compare this to the volumes of coal being consumed by a single coal plant (about 105 coal cars per day.) Maybe we shouldn’t be that worried about it after all.
Nuclear waste, by its sheer volume alone is vastly more manageable than fossil fuel for a nation’s energy needs. We’re spending $50 billion per year to rid Iraq of terrorism while we continue to be our own greatest threat.
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03.14.06
Posted in Energy, Society at 17:10 by RjZ
In President Bush’s 2006 State of the Union speech, he said, “To change how we power our homes and offices, we will invest more in zero-emission coal-fired plants, revolutionary solar and wind technologies, and clean, safe nuclear energy.” I thought I’d give a lay persons view of what this “zero-emission coal-fired power plant” actually is.
There may be other ways to do this, but in general, when politicians speak about zero-emission from coal, they’re talking about integrated gasification, combined cycle (IGCC) power plants. The whole process by which we get energy out of coal without any emissions at all is complex. There’s lot’s to do, and the details and infrastructure are definitely not completed. The U.S. is a leader in the commercialization of this technology, which is mostly led by GE.
Energy from coal
The first thing is to understand how we typically extract energy from coal. Coal is compressed plants, which are basically stored up solar energy from centuries and millennia. When we burn coal, we break down the hydrocarbon bonds, and the energy released in this reaction heats up steam in tubes lining the coal furnace. The steam then turns a turbine, and this rotating kinetic energy is converted to electricity and sent to the grid for you and me to power our computers and read this blog. A modern coal plant is about 40% efficient, by the way, which, it turns out, is very, very good. The very best solar cells are about 38%, and the photovoltaic kind that normal humans, who are not flying into space, can afford are around 17% (That’s from NREL, but I can’t find the original link)
The key point is that energy is stored in hydrogen-carbon bonds in coal.
Clean it before you burn it
Unfortunately, the black lumps we dig out the ground and call “coal” aren’t strictly hydrocarbons. After being buried for so long, the dried-up plants get mixed up with all manner of dirt. While we’re trying to get energy from the hydrogen-carbon bonds, these trace elements–for example, sulfur–get burnt up, and they form things like SO2 which causes smog and acid rain. There is mercury in there, and even radioactive elements too.
So one strategy, instead of just burning the coal, is to refine it first, like we do with crude oil. This refining process has been around for more than 50 years, but it’s finally becoming commercially feasible to do it for energy generation. The process, gasification, combines a slurry of coal powder with steam at high temperatures and pressures. The result is a thick slurry of everything that isn’t a hydrocarbon pouring out the bottom, and something called synthetic gas, or syngas, coming off the top. (I’m over-simplifying, but not too much…) Syngas is CO+H2. It’s very clean to burn; the result is water and CO2. An IGCC plant burns this syngas in a combustion turbine, which is essentially a jet engine, strapped to the ground. The kinetic energy from the rapidly turning jet engine turbine is converted to electricity and sent to the grid (of course, so that you can read this blog…).
Refining coal actually produces a lot of extra heat. This extra heat is used to produce steam which turns a steam turbine. This way, little of the energy from coal-gasification is wasted. That’s the “combined cycle” part of the process.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas!
We cleaned the coal before burning it, so there were no pollutants. We’ve got turbines turning, so we’re producing energy. Looks like everyone is happy. Not so fast. Burning syngas is clean, but as in any hydrocarbon combustion process, one of the end products is CO2. CO2 isn’t poisonous, and plants enjoy it plenty (They’ll combine it with water and solar energy to make new hydrocarbons.) but, alas, it traps more light than our atmosphere would normally do, if we’d stop fooling with it. Furthermore, loads of scientists now agree that too much CO2 in the air causes the planet to warm up like we’re in a giant greenhouse. So once we’re done commercializing IGCC, we’ve still got to figure out what to do with all the CO2.
It’s important to note here that Mr. Bush and many environmentalists have one thing in common: they all seem to think that because a fuel is renewable, like fuel from corn, that it’s good. Using bio-fuels is no answer to greenhouse gas production. Whether we get energy from burning plant products such as methanol or really old plant products such as coal, we still get CO2 as a by-product. Lots of it! The biggest difference between coal and methanol is that we don’t have to plant the coal.
What to do with the CO2
There’s really no good idea about what to do with all that CO2. Please don’t be disappointed when I tell you what the greatest minds on the planet think we should do with it. It does have a fancy name, though. Maybe that will make us feel better; it’s called CO2 sequestration. Basically we, um, bury it. We pump the CO2 into deep holes in the ground. We don’t know where all these holes are, but we know that we can use it to pump out oil, for example, and then just cap it off. We also think we can pump out huge underground cavities where there is water. We don’t actually know where all these giant aquifers are (because oil companies have spent more time looking for oil than for water, the greedy bastards), but I am sure we can find a few.
So somehow you’ve got to build your IGCC plant near one of these places to put the CO2, or you’ll have to build a pipeline to get it there. And we’ll have to be sure that these things stay tightly capped off, because if the CO2 leaks out, it won’t kill anybody right away, but the planet will warm up and bake just as sure as if we had never tried to get rid of the by-product in the first place. I’ll be honest, I am skeptical about CO2 sequestration. We can do it–we’ll have to–but we better not stop investing in other technology.
Coal-burning cars
It’s good news that we can burn coal and have zero emissions. It’s good news, because as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, we have loads of coal in the United States. Amazingly, the syngas that is made in an IGCC plant can even be turned into diesel fuel to power cars, trains and airplanes! Yes, we can even power our existing transportation fleet with coal. The U.S. would be completely independent of foreign oil if we did that! (I should mention that using syngas for transportation does produce CO2, but it still beats being held over a barrel (pun intended) by a government that hates us.)
Except for one problem: we don’t have any IGCC plants right now. (That’s not strictly true, we have a few test plants, about five or so, and nobody is really doing CO2 sequestration yet.) That means we have to build them. Building a power plant isn’t free. Furthermore, IGCC plants aren’t any more efficient than other coal-fired power plants, so not only will we have to build a lot of them, but we won’t be getting any more energy out of each one, so the cost per kilowatt is going to have to go up-up-up. I don’t recall Mr. Bush mentioning this when he said we’ll invest in research.
Research is well and good, but will we and the U.S. or even world economy be able to pay for this zero-emission coal? I think we’ll have to, because the cost of cleaning up after all the hurricanes and floods caused by continued global warming will make up for it anyway, but we should be prepared for this drag on economic growth.
GE has much more information about IGCC, as does the Energy Information Administration (EIA) Check out the EIA. It’s quite a resource. After all, it’s your tax dollars at work!
Where we’re going to get enough energy to keep the lights on is often a very complex issue. Let’s make sure that these important decisions aren’t made, well, in the dark!
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