Prediction – greens still won’t be able to get past the word “coal”.
Researchers at MIT have shown the benefits of a new approach toward eliminating carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions at coal-burning power plants.
Their system, called pressurized oxy-fuel combustion, provides a way of separating all of the carbon-dioxide emissions produced by the burning of coal, in the form of a concentrated, pressurized liquid stream. This allows for carbon dioxide sequestration: the liquid CO2 stream can be injected into geological formations deep enough to prevent their escape into the atmosphere.
Finding a practical way to sequester carbon emissions is considered critical to the mitigation of climate change while continuing to use fossil fuels, which currently account for more than 80 percent of energy production in the United States and more than 90 percent worldwide. CO2 emissions from fossil fuels are projected to rise by more than 50 percent worldwide by 2030.
It might seem paradoxical to reduce the carbon footprint of a coal plant by making its emissions into a more concentrated stream of carbon dioxide. But Ahmed Ghoniem, the Ronald C. Crane (1972) Professor of Mechanical Engineering and leader of the MIT team analyzing this new technology, explains: “this is the first step. Before you sequester, you have to concentrate and pressurize” the greenhouse gases. “You have to redesign the power plant so that it produces a pure stream of pressurized liquid carbon dioxide, to make it sequestration ready.”
There are various approaches to carbon capture and sequestration being developed and tested, and the oxy-fuel combustion system “is one of the technologies that should be looked at,” says Barbara Freese, lead author of a report on coal power by the environmental group Union of Concerned Scientists. Ghoniem says that of the approaches to oxy-fuel combustion, he and his MIT colleagues are the only academic team examining a pressurized combustion system for carbon dioxide capture.
A paper describing the approach appeared in August in the journal Energy. The Italian energy company ENEL, the sponsor of the research, plans to build a pilot plant in Italy using the technology in the next few years.
Ghoniem explains that any system for separating and concentrating the carbon dioxide from a power plant reduces the efficiency of the plant by about a third. That means that it takes more fuel to provide the same amount of electricity. Therefore, finding ways to minimize that loss of efficiency is key to making carbon-sequestration systems commercially viable.
Reducing the penalty
There will always be some energy penalty to such capture-enabled systems, because it requires some energy to separate gases that are mixed together, such as separating carbon dioxide from the combustion gases emerging from an air-based combustion chamber or oxygen from air for oxy-fuel combustion. As an analogy, “mixing salt and pepper is very easy, but separating them takes energy,” he says. “Nobody in their right mind will jump into this and do it unless we can reduce the energy penalty and the extra cost, and only if it is mandated to reduce CO2 emissions” he says. And that’s what the new process is designed to do.
Other groups have been looking into oxy-fuel combustion, in which pure oxygen is fed into the combustion chamber to produce a cleaner and more concentrated emissions stream (a mixture of oxygen and CO2 replaces ordinary air for combustion, which is nearly 79 percent nitrogen and 21 percent oxygen, thus eliminating more than three-quarters of the resulting flue gases). The focus of their studies is a system that adds one more element, putting the whole combustion chamber under pressure, which results in a more concentrated, pressurized emissions output.
Ghoniem says even though this process uses more energy at the beginning of the combustion cycle because of the need to separate oxygen from air and pressurize it, the increased efficiency of the power cycle raises the net output of the plant and reduces the compression work needed to deliver CO2 at the requisite state for sequestration, as compared to the unpressurized carbon-capture systems; in other words, the overall energy penalty is reduced. “You have to deliver carbon dioxide at high pressure for sequestration,” he points out. The system simply introduces some pressurization earlier in the process, so the output stream requires less compression at the end of the process while extracting more energy from the combustion gases.
The pressurization of the combustion system also reduces the size of the components and hence the plant, which could “reduce the footprint of needed real estate, and potentially the price of components,” he says. It is expected to lead to an overall improvement of about 3 percent in net efficiency compared to an unpressurized system, and with further research and development this can probably be improved to about a 10 to 15 percent net gain from the current values, he says.
That could be key to gaining acceptance for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) as a way to allow the continued growth of coal power while curtailing its emissions. The Union of Concerned Scientists report last year, “Coal Power in a Warming World,” said: “CCS is still an emerging technology. It has the potential to substantially reduce CO2 emissions from coal plants, but it also faces many challenges.”
Freese says that “the potential of this technology is there, but it needs to be demonstrated” whether it can work as expected and be economically viable. “We want to see what these actual results are before committing” to implementing such systems. Also, she added, all carbon-sequestration plans “don’t solve all the other fuel-cycle problems — all the problems associated with mining.” In fact, because all such plants are inherently less efficient, “you’d need to mine more coal” for a given energy output.
The new MIT research has the potential to help narrow that gap, if it really does prove capable of reducing the efficiency penalty enough to make such plants competitive, and if the planned ENEL pilot plant in Italy based on this technology is successfully built and tested to confirm the practicality of the concept.
Ghoniem concedes that much more research is still needed for CCS technology. The three areas that need study most, he says, are systems’ integration to determine the operating conditions at which the different components work together for highest efficiency; component-level research to optimize of the design of individual parts of the new system, especially the combustion chamber; and process analysis to examine the details of the physics and chemistry involved. His group has been concentrating on detailed computer simulations of the process to aid in the design of better systems.
Other team members include graduate students James Hong and G. Chaudhry, Prof John Brisson, Randall Field from MITEI and Marco Gazzino from ENEL.
How about cleaning the toxic heavy metals in the emissions from coal plants before worrying about the dangerous CO2.
Isnt technology wonderful?
Of course the whole concept of portraying carbon dioxide as a pollutant has been a huge success, the campaign to use a harmless trace gas as a scapegoat and whipping boy is a corner stone of the campaign to de industrialise the planet.
What if the atmospheric carbon dioxide produced by human activities is NOT harmful?
What if more atmospheric CO2 is what the planet needs to produce more crops for a growing population?
What if the concerted effort to reduce CO2 emmissions is actually the wrong thing to do at the very time we enter a cooling phase that none of the original computer models saw coming, those same models that the IPCC and governments based their entire policies on BTW.
It could be that as we enter a cool phase or mini ice age the levels of CO2 will drop to dangerous levels affecting our food crops, if this is the case then instead of reducing CO2 output we should be going all out to increase our output of CO2.
Is it possible that we are doing the wrong thing for the wrong reasons at the wrong time, coud it be that the war on CO2 emmissions is a political ploy to alter our society to suit political ends, could it be that the political class is lying to us and they know that a cool phase is heading our way and they are in fact trying to sabotage our industrial society right at the point when a fossil fuel based expansion of our society is what we need?
I hope that I am wrong, I fear that I am not. The BBC is reporting that the decline of our industrial society due to the recession and the reductions in carbon dioxide is a “silver lining” and “great news”! isnt it a complete tragedy that a giant media group is actually gleeful about the tragedy of industrial decline and the heartbreaking poverty that always accompanies such declines, its an added tragedy because the decline has been in large part assisted by the political classes and their fellow travellers.
One problem with carbon sequestration that hardly anyone mentions is that it requires relocation of coal power stations to geologically suitable locations or a new pipeline network to transport the CO2. The first is politically a non-starter and the second very expensive.
It sounds a promising technology (assuming you think sequestration is a good idea in the first place) but at least 20 years in the future before significant power is generated from it.
And the 1/3 reduction in efficiency and the consequent increase in costs would be excluding CO2 transport or power plant relocation.
Otherwise an informative press release devoid of exaggerated claims. A pleasant change from climate science press releases.
I don’t want anyone sequestrating a dangerous, planet killing pollutant anywhere near my backyard… :-).
Madness.
I guess they can sell the CO2 to greenhouses. Many greenhouses use CO2 generators to enrich the CO2 content. Plants grow much better with enriched CO2, and with much higher yields.
http://homeharvest.com/carbondioxideenrichgeneratorGEN.htm
CO2 generators burn natural gas or propane to get the additional CO2 that is needed. Go figure!
You put your left foot in, you put your left foot out, you put your left foot in and shake yourself about . . . that’s how you do the liberal hokey-pokey.
It resembles me Mao´s Great Leap in China: once, sparrows were accused of destroying crops and all billion of Chinese were hunting them on Mao´s order. The net result was overpopulation of insect, who – destroyed the crops..
Does sound like a waste of good brain power, doesn’t it?
As an analogy, “mixing salt and pepper is very easy, but separating them takes energy,” he says.
Or do it the easy way – run your comb through your dry hair enough to get a static charge, then hold the comb over the mixture. The pepper will leap to the comb.
It’s not clear what they have actually done. They describe this combustion and collection process with words and some invented numbers.
Have they gone to the next stage yet and maybe drawn … a picture ?
We will be able to tap into the sequestered CO2 as and when required to warm the world and allow trees to grow. It will be our own little lever for temperature control.
For the first time in human history we are nearing the end game in our fight against nature. Soon humanity will control the natural world – climate and all!
Philip_B (23:09:09) :
“One problem with carbon sequestration that hardly anyone mentions is that it requires” … extra time, material, cost, and energy to sequester the carbon.
All of which is wasted. None of which is productive. None of which is needed.
Scientists are always great at finding out how to do something.
They are not always so good at deciding whether or not it SHOULD be done.
Usually that’s due to self-interest. Grants come when a decision to try to do something has already been taken.
So it’s good to know that the potential is there in the toolkit to do something new.
The tricky question is how one introduces such technology in a way which evaluates whether it is really needed?
I work at a coal power station, and from my experience here, I think a pressurized furnace is a lot like AGW. It works on a computer, but not in the real world.
Just how many acres of industrial greenhouses would one need to ‘sequester’ a 1000MW power station’s CO2?
The Dutch use tomatoes, what other fast growing crops would work?
No not marijuana, no matter how fast it grows!
I’ve wondered about the unintended consequences of filling deep geological features with pressurized CO2. Are such features really so well mapped that this is sensible? Are there readily available features near any existing power plants? Does that really sound like a smart idea?
And what have the plants to say about this?
Philip_B (23:09:09) : One problem with carbon sequestration that hardly anyone mentions is that it requires relocation of coal power stations to geologically suitable locations or a new pipeline network to transport the CO2. The first is politically a non-starter and the second very expensive.
Yes, expensive, but far cheaper than building the pipeline AND buying CO2. Liquid CO2 is a very effective “oil stripping agent” for use in enhanced oil recovery from old oil fields. Exxon has just reached the limit of it’s own CO2 production (from refineries) and now is looking at needing to BUY CO2 to keep old oil fields productive.
Now you know why “Big Oil” is all in favor of CO2 “sequestration”. They will be paid to take the “Evil CO2” and get oil by pumping it into their old oil fields…. Much better than needing to pay someone else to provide CO2…
And the 1/3 reduction in efficiency and the consequent increase in costs would be excluding CO2 transport or power plant relocation.
That is one of the major problems with all the ‘pollution control’ mandates. It ignores the energy cost. Your car would be much more fuel efficient with no smog gear on it. (No, I’m not advocating dirty air. Just pointing out a cost that is ignored.) So we as a nation throw away about 1/4 to 1/3 of the oil we burn due to “smog control”. Now we want to throw away about 1/3 of the coal too? This helps future generations have fuel how? It is reducing energy dependence how? It is conserving how?
That is one heck of a lot of cash going up in non-smoke…
I don’t understand – how are they going to get all those “black balloons” into the ground and keep them there???? Won’t they just pop out again…
I sort of imagine “black balloons” oozing out of the ground…
/parody.
Since cost is no object, it would be better to convert the CO2 to synthetic fuel. Either natural gas, gasoline, diesel, etc. Since we’d need more CO2 than a coal fired plant could generate let’s build a nuke power plant beside the coal plant and just freeze CO2 out of the air. The technology has existed for some time and, again, cost is not an issue. After all the CO2 out of the air they can devise another plant to put it back into the air.
Thank goodness for our CO2 geniuses.
You know, that asteroid theory and the dinosaur extinction may be way off base. Could have been the these folks going back in their time machine to test all this.
One problem with CO2 sequestration is the NIMBY complaint of “what happens if I get asphyxiated by an unplanned release of CO2 from where it is stored?”
In such a case CO2 really is a dangerous gas.
http://geochange.er.usgs.gov/data/volcanoes/OFR_97-262/
Look for Cameroon in the text.
How can attempting to reduce 0.0314% of the composition of air make the slightest difference in the Earth’s climate?
After seeing photos of how well plants grow in various levels of CO2 and the cutoff point for plant growth of around 150ppm.. I’m of the mind now that we should be pumping CO2 into the atmosphere at will, it only does us good.
These carbon sequestering plans actually scare me, more so not because of the potential cost, but because of the mind set that reducing CO2 is supposedly good. Even though it has a massively larger chance of causing world wide famine than does global warming. Of course, they always seem to ignore the fact that during warm periods, civilizations thrive..
Then they bring up ocean acidification, i’m sorry, I thought water holds less co2 when its warmer??? So if the oceans warm up, how in they are they absorbing more co2 to become acidic?
I woke up from the AGW haze 2 years ago when the logic just didn’t add up.. I work in logic all day as a career, so maybe it comes easier to me. But this is just getting out of hand. I expect these engineers designing these systems to have a bit more diligence in all things science. sigh.. ok thats my rant for the day. Thanks for all you do Anthony, without sites likes this, I would truly being going insane.
Why worry about land sequestration. The liquid CO2 can be piped into the deep ocean where it will sink and forever be held in the liquid or solid phase by the ocean temperature and pressure. Think I could get a study grant? Oh wait, this option was already studied and rejected because the author was worried about detrimental effects of an undersea CO2 lake. (I kid you not.)
I wonder , if you did an honest risk assessment, which would pose a greater threat to human life, the possibility that CO2 would cause catastrophic climate problems for humanity in the future or the possibility that, if we require carbon sequestration schemes for all the coal fueled power plants in the world, some number of those schemes would suffer catastrophic loss of sequestration events over their lifetime. If you think a release event would be just a harmless gas cloud, I suggest you check Google or Wiki for Lake Nyos Disaster. You may well say, but they’ll carefully select the sites so that such a thing is not possible, but they spent years picking out that spot out in Nevada to build the storage facility for nuclear waste and the enviros still decided it wasn’t safe enough. I would suspect NIMBY will be out in full force on these as well, though in the case of these boondoggles, some of the fears may actually be justified.
Joachim (22:30:20) :
“How about cleaning the toxic heavy metals in the emissions from coal plants before worrying about the dangerous CO2.”
And after removing the toxic heavy metals they can work on capturing the radioactive elements in the coal before they start trying to sequester that important life sustaining trace gas CO2.
Graeme Rodaughan (23:15:45) :
“I don’t want anyone sequestrating a dangerous, planet killing pollutant anywhere near my backyard… :-).”
Well said sir! I am at this very moment organising a new environ-mentalist group, called “Carbon Risk Against People”! We will talk & protest about C.R.A.P. until something is done about it. We will eat, drink, & sleep C.R.A.P. until the politicans listen to us & they start talking C.R.A.P. no kidding! We will start picketting all the local agencies until they talk C.R.A.P. too, & lobbying other environ-mentalist groups for their support, (I have already applied for a multi-million £ grant thro’ the EU, & the UN, Oh & I have found a loophole in the US legal system that means I can extort – err -be granted from US taxpayers dosh too! ). We will not rest until this filthy, dirty, toxic, poisonous substance, is stopped from being buried anywhere near me. N.I.M.B.Y & C.R.A.P forever! Let us all have a Global hug & believe in C.R.A.P.
Then again I suppose the easiest thing to do with this terrible substance is to simply allow it to disperse into the atmosphere where it will be reduced to nothing more than a harmless & slightly beneficial trace gas making up around 0.04% of the air. What do you think, anyone?
Do I smell a rat here? Say we need 100 units of coal to produce amount 100E of electricity. If I say “increases coal usage by 1/3” I would mean it now uses 133 units of coal, would I not? But what does “reduces efficiency by 1/3” mean? Does it mean 100 units of coal now only produce 66E? In other words, 100E needs 150 units of coal?
The article goes a very long way, talking about improvements of so many percent, etc., that I smell a serious disinclination to state the real cost of this technology (beyond the trifling matter of starving plants of their essential nutrient and thence starving wildlife and the poor).
By the time this pointless technology works the consensus will be that we need to *increase* the atmospheric CO2….
Chris
What we need from Realist scientists is conclusive, irrefutable proof that CO2 cannot cause any significant amount of atmospheric warming.
Is it possible to design an experiment which will clearly falsify the CO2 -> warming hypothesis?
Ideally it should be something dramatic, simple enough to be indisputable, and easily grasped by the media and the public.
That would kill the insane rush to shut down world energy production and manufacturing by simply making people wake up and exclaim, “It was all based on a mistake! There is no problem!”
Surely there is enough scientific brainpower on this site to come up with a demonstration.
/Mr Lynn
If I may follow up:
How about a PRIZE for the person or team who can come up with, and execute, a demonstration experiment proving that CO2 is not a problem?
I’ll bet there are a few folks with deep pockets who could endow such a prize. My pockets are shallow, but I’ll pledge a couple hundred bucks, at least.
/Mr Lynn
As long as people like this continue to look on CO2 as a pollutant, and not what it is, a valuable trace gas that literallly breathes life into the planet, then we’ll continue to hear more and more about more sledgehammers to crack more nuts !
Larry Oldtimer is right about the use of CO2 for commercial growing, and I’ve supplied a link to another web site which gives some interesting info about the variable concentration of CO2 throughout each and every day ( http://www.gas-plants.com/co2-generator.html ).
There would be an extra penalty, but the CO2 could be frozen to dry ice by using more of the electricity produced. At a further penalty, it could be shipped to the South Pole and kept refrigerated under the ice by electricity from windmills.
The point is, there is a stage at which the penalties become overbearing. The problem is, that point was reached even before carbon sequestration was fully costed.
Dreamin’.
Re Mike McMillan at 00.25.43
“Or do it the easy way – run your comb through your dry hair enough to get a static charge, then hold the comb over the mixture. The pepper will leap to the comb.”
Does dandruff taste like pepper?
“Or do it the easy way – run your comb through your dry hair enough to get a static charge, then hold the comb over the mixture. The pepper will leap to the comb.”
“Does dandruff taste like pepper?”
Now that’s just nasty.
“Bobby, if I’ve told you once I’ve told you a million times, Don’t comb your food!!!”
“E.M.Smith (01:30:13) :
Now you know why “Big Oil” is all in favor of CO2 “sequestration”. They will be paid to take the “Evil CO2″ and get oil by pumping it into their old oil fields…. Much better than needing to pay someone else to provide CO2…”
You’ve said this several times, I wonder why people don’t get it. I guess with the “peak oil” scare, people don’t realise that up to 40% oil is still in the well. All those capped wells in the US just waiting to be filled with nasty CO2, and, Oh what’s this? Oil, as a by product of sequestration. Who’d of thought of that (Exxon, Enron etc etc).
Mr Lynn (04:05:33) :
What we need from Realist scientists is conclusive, irrefutable proof that CO2 cannot cause any significant amount of atmospheric warming.
It has never been proven in any way that C02 can, or ever has caused significant warming; just a very vague correlation which when examined, even that falls apart.
There is plenty of evidence that C02 doesn’t provide much warming, particularly once it reaches a certain minimal level.
The biggest problem isn’t actually a scientific one, but a political and sociological one.
But, AGW/CC alarmism carries the seeds of its own destruction anyway.
I do think that the CO2 waste disposal problems will dwarf those of the nuclear. The S of CCS stands for storage, but only the capture costs are discussed. One estimate for bore holes in the US is that 100,000 will need to be drilled, at a cost of $10m each – 1 trillion dollars.
This is almost an order of magnitude greater than the estimated cost of the capture in the first place. Who’s going drill these? The utilities? I doubt it. They will have to pay somebody else, and those costs will be added on to the costs of generation, on top of the capture costs.
Imagine full scale CCS, generating a billion of tons of liquid CO2 each year. Can anyone even imagine such a vast quantity? Well, try and picture 5 thousand of the worlds largest cargo ships, and that will be pretty close. Now imagine this huge mass being stored, not only for 1 year, but year after year, decade after decade.
Call me cynical, but it’ll never catch on!
Remind me again why the ‘Green’ people are wanting to starve the trees & plants?!?! What hypocritical idiots…
Tom S. (01:50:43) :
I woke up from the AGW haze 2 years ago when the logic just didn’t add up.. I work in logic all day as a career, so maybe it comes easier to me. But this is just getting out of hand. I expect these engineers designing these systems to have a bit more diligence in all things science. sigh.. ok thats my rant for the day. Thanks for all you do Anthony, without sites likes this, I would truly being going insane.
Amen Tom S. I feel the same. Two folks I consider good friends are MSME holders and rabid AGW supporters. When asked why the fixation with CO2, I get no believable answers just standard AGW party line rubbish.
It’s not a Carbon storage but rather carbon with oxygen storage, twice as much oxygen as carbon actually.
Scientists never think about and cannot possibly factor in all possible effects of their “solutions to problems”. Cane toad introduction to Australia is a classic example of “unexpected results”, ok science has improved since the 1930’s, but have we heard this before? Something t do with oceans and and iron particles (I think it was). Scientists have solutions, like unleaded fuel (Because the oil companies didn’t want to bear the cost of making purer fuel (Which they did before anyway), and passed that on to the consumer – catalytic converters and unleaded fuel).
Well I speek for the plants… For millions of years we have been providing you with free food and oxygen and asking nothing in return; and now you plan to betray us bye taking away our life giving “CO2”. Believe me if this madness doesn’t stop with our dying breath we will have our revenge.
CO2 sequestration and storage is absolute madness.
We will consume our coal stocks much quicker, it will use up huge amounts of water
and it will drive up electricity prices.
It will not effect our climate for one bit.
We risk our development, our economy, our jobs and in the end our freedom.
We have to stop the loons behind the scam and talk some sense into our politicians or vote them out.
We have to isolate the Green Fanatics and the charletans and fight the doctrine because it is causing more harm to our societies and the developing world and it’s populations than all terror organizations put together.
There is no other solution.
History is our witness and if we study our past we will know what we have to do.
“Vincent (04:56:39) :
Imagine full scale CCS, generating a billion of tons of liquid CO2 each year. Can anyone even imagine such a vast quantity? Well, try and picture 5 thousand of the worlds largest cargo ships, and that will be pretty close. Now imagine this huge mass being stored, not only for 1 year, but year after year, decade after decade.
Call me cynical, but it’ll never catch on!”
As E. M. Smith elludes to, there are interested parties for vast quantities of “free” liquid CO2 pumped into “the gound” (Read old oil wells, even new ones I guess).
John Podesta was on CNBC, Squawk Box, this morning pushing CO2 Cap and Tax.
The big guns will be on CNBC, Squawk Box, tomarrow pushing for CO2 Cap and Tax.
Oops: Speak for the plants!
Cassandra King (23:04:26) :
The BBC is reporting that the decline of our industrial society due to the recession and the reductions in carbon dioxide is a “silver lining” and “great news”!
—-
Who is John Galt?
This is all true, but that “very vague correlation” has been enough for the Alarmists to persuade a very large number of intelligent people that CO2 presents a dire threat to the future of the Earth, and that drastic measures to contain CO2 are called for.
A very bright, technically literate undergraduate wrote to me recently,
This is what kids are being taught. I think we need something dramatic, a definitive test that will slap bright but acquiescent people in the face with the realization that the assumption which underlies this teaching is simply wrong.
If it could be shown definitively that CO2 simply cannotcreate significant amounts of atmospheric warming, then the Alarmists would find themselves out on a limb that is breaking off.
/Mr Lynn
Mr Lynn,
Another poster [A. Giurffa, IIRC] posted this a while back:
Seems like a simple experiment to falsify the greenhouse effect.
Just a comment on some of the “BIg Oil” comments – it may surprise many to know that so-called “big oil” (companies such as Exxon and Chevron) don’t have a production presence inside the continental US anymore – their operations have all been moved either offshore or overseas over the last 20 years. Yes, it shocks most people to hear this, but I am involved in the industry here in Texas, and they’ve left. The independants, much smaller and more nimble companies, are all we still have here. (The majors still have refineries, but that’s a very different business) The rights to the old fields they used to control have all been sold off – I know investors and speculators who have bought some of them.
Do note that I am referring to lower 48 land projects, not offshore, not Alaska – although the independants are doing an impressive amount of the offshore work now as well, I think the majority of it, but I don’t have the data to confirm that.
But when people talk about “Big OIl’s” view on US energy policy, I have to shake my head. “BIg Oil” doesn’t give a damn what this country does anymore – they’ve left. And no one noticed while it was happening.
The corollary of this – and possibly the reason they’ve made this move – is that they are now essentially immune to any burdens the US government could try to place on them. They are not American companies anymore, even though they may present that corporate face to the world for PR purposes.
John Podesta is the man who hired “Green Jobs Czar” Van Jones a few days after he was forced to resign.
No word on what Van is actually going to do, other then continue milking the scam, of course.
It is a very common view amongst those who get paid from taxes (BBC being one). Unless a recession were very deep and continued for an extended period their income 9and pension) is secure. Their only view of the recession comes to them second hand. “What recession?” is a fair question if you are paid the same each month regardless. Even if the Government has to borrow the money it still appears in your Bank at the end of the month.
In my experience they are also a lot happier than the general population to punish “industry”. There is just no direct connection to their world.
This basic disconnect from industry and even economics 101 leads to this kind of thinking (from a different thread)
The belief seems to be that there is some kind of separation between “us” and the “fossil fuel industries”. Worse is the naive belief that “they” will suffer a “loss of income”. No concept of passing the increased production costs onto customers or of the results of those increased prices. Total disconnect, they are paid regardless and as far as they are concerned any disparity between their pay and rising prices will just have to be rectified somehow.
Perhaps something along these lines will get them re-connected? (sorry)
Smokey (06:22:52)
Thanks for the reminder. Why isn’t this taught in every relevant class?
Maybe it’s time for someone to repeat R. W. Wood’s experiment on a larger scale, with some variations (e.g. fill one rock-salt house with pure CO2, one with no CO2), and publicize it in advance and as conclusions come in.
I’m sure there are folks here who could design experiments that would anticipate any amount of nit-picking by Alarmists, and that would be dramatic enough to appeal to the media.
/Mr Lynn
This is not new. Pressurized combustion systems for large power plants were taught when I was in college in the early 1970’s. It sounds great in theory – but the practical problems are immense.
One of the greatest problems is injecting a solid fuel – coal – into the pressurized combustion chamber. For large coal lump sizes, one uses lock hoppers with pressure seals. Not a reliable design as these are plagued with failures. For finely ground coal powder, one could fluidize the powder with high pressure air (or in this case, oxygen) but run the risk of fire. A third alternative is to form a slurry of coal powder and a liquid then pump the slurry into the combustion chamber. None of these alternatives are cheap.
What they also do not mention is that the high-pressure CO2 exiting the combustion chamber is not pure, but has water vapor, sulfur oxides, and particulate matter. The stream of gases would be cooled to condense the water vapor into water. The resulting water would contain dissolved CO2 which would release when the pressure on the water is reduced – yielding a great fizzing of CO2 into the atmosphere.
This process needs a lot of development work, just like it did in the 1970’s.
There is no way such a plant can compete on cost or reliability with a combined cycle gas turbine plant using cheap, abundant, clean-burning natural gas.
No one is mentioning that when we sequester CO2 we actually sequester twice
as much Oxygen as Carbon; I guess that is ok, no one needs the Oxygen, right?
What a waste of money, effort, time and resources. Taking free aerial fertilizer for plants out of the air and burying it. With the implicit assumption that this trace-gas fertilizer controls the climate?
The post-modern age is well under way.
Ghoniem explains that any system for separating and concentrating the carbon dioxide from a power plant reduces the efficiency of the plant by about a third.
So we will need a thirty three percent increase in energy output to make up for it. Mind numbing stupidity by The Union of Concerned Scientists.
RE: Wood and greenhouses.
Water and ventilation (assisted for quick results) combined being probably the fastest (practical) way to cool things back down again and keep them that way.
Why it is almost as though that water cycle stuff has some purpose after all. Who knew?
No form of power generation is acceptable to the Greens.
They don’t want fossil fueled power because of CO2.
They don’t want nuclear power because of concerns over waste storage and possible radioactive leaks. ( Even though US nuclear power plants have an outstanding safety record.)
They don’t want windmills because they kill birds and spoil the view.
They don’t want solar because it would cover vast tracts of desert and and presumably destroy the habitat for desert dwelling critters.
We need a national debate on power generation. I propose we have it in January and that we shut off all forms of energy for one week; no gasoline, no coal fired power, no nuclear power, no natural gas. At the end of the week the nature of the debate will have improved dramatically and the green meanies will be shown the door.
Big oil is in America, Offshore. Kinda hard to carry picket signs and get on cameras in water
good point on sequestering O2 when we pump CO2 and the other point:
Plants that receive excess CO2 consume less water.
RE: MartinGAtkins (07:42:41) :
Ghoniem explains that any system for separating and concentrating the carbon dioxide from a power plant reduces the efficiency of the plant by about a third.
So we will need a thirty three percent increase in energy output to make up for it. Mind numbing stupidity by The Union of Concerned Scientists.
– No – we need a 50% increase in energy output to make up for it
– i.e. a 50% increase in energy costs…..
I don’t care how accurate that is, he’s going to have to find phrasing which sounds less dangerous. 🙂
And to the person that was worried about the heavy metals emissions, modern plants already try to stop that. That’s why they have piles of radioactive fly ash to dispose of, rather than the simpler disposal of belching black smoke.
Incidentally, I think a traditional coal fired plant should include belching black smoke. So the photo with white water vapor trickling out of the exhaust pipes (“smokestack” is not descriptive), and all the emissions equipment clustered between the boilers and exhaust, is of a modern plant rather than a traditional one. I wonder how hard it is for greens to find photos of U.S. smokestacks belching black smoke for their web sites; probably not hard if they steal them from each other.
Re: Wood and Greenhouses,
He did say then, that there was a temperature difference of 1C, but didn’t specify which was the warmest. Brilliant.
The problem with extrapolating this experiment is that we don’t know what happens to the absorbed (by glass) IR. Does it re-radiate back to the ground or does it just warm the glass? If it doesn’t reradiate, then it can’t be analogous to CO2. And if it does re-radiate, then it must add some warming. So I don’t think this is very helpful either. In any case, there are plenty of sealed flask type experiments that measure the re-radiation of CO2 very accurately, and it is real.
IMO, skeptic arguments that deny the reality that CO2 has a greenhouse forcing, or somehow violates the second law of thermodynamics, just exposes us to ridicule.
More exasperation for practical engineers. So most of the coal is burned in the northeastern quarter of the country (some in the west) and natural gas and oil are produced in the south and west – the reservoirs are a little separated. A fair amount of natural gas is now produced from coal seams which reduces the reservoir availability a bit. Also, I’m trying to envision how this sequestration will work outside the lab. CO2 is liquid, the critical temp is 31C (may be close to this at depth of oil and gas) and the critical pressure is 74bars (oil well about 1km deep is about 250 bars). The reservoirs contain fluids – remaining oil and gas, salt water, H2S in communicating pores. Someone walk me through the process: You have liquid CO2, you connect it up to a reservoir, assuming one is close at hand, and then what happens?
It looks like they found a way make the combustion more efficient – almost enough to make a plant with carbon capture competitive, so they say. If they can get a 10-15% improvement in the efficiency, or even the 5% they claim to have now, then maybe there is something useful here. Throw out the carbon capture part of the project and you’re left with more efficient combustion which would make all coal-based energy cleaner and cheaper.
Another thing – since water vapor is a “greenhouse gas”, why is there no talk of capturing the water? Power plants produce enough water vapor to produce significant clouds, and I have even seen snow fall from the clouds produced from a large power plant near Indiana, PA.
RE: “Traditional coal power plant – Image from USGS”
OMG … what a terrifying image! I can SEE the evil CO2 coming out of those stacks … see that white “smoke?” BAN IT!!! BAN IT ALL!!! /sarc
RE: “At a further penalty, it could be shipped to the South Pole and kept refrigerated under the ice by electricity from windmills.”
Right next to “The Blob!” – LOL!
Well, the day is getting shorter if you’re in the N.H. There’s time for you to do some building and testing before Spring approaches and it’s time to turn on the webcam. Hmm…salt… You can’t simply put your demonstration outdoors because of that rain thing which sometimes gets in the way of the sunlight.
I wonder where one gets rock salt material for such things. I see there are opaque salt blocks being sold for kitchen use, where it’s both “considered purest” and containing dozens of “beneficial trace minerals”. Looks like halite is the key search term for raw material, while “sodium chloride infrared window” finds the high quality stuff.
Just think how long it took for those lovely blue-green algae to bestow the benefits of free clean green renewable OXYGEN on planet earth, so we homo sapiens sapiens could evolve, and revel in it.
So now we have a bunch of idiots who want to go backwards, and tie up all that free clean green renewable Oxygen in rocks again.
These busibodies have rocks in their heads; that’s what they have.
Why don’t those MIT geniuses figure out how to recycle the CO2 to extract the oxygen from it and turn the carbon into fishing rods and golf clubs.
After all, they want to recycle water or hydrocarbons to get clean green HYDROGEN for the future energy revolution, so why not Oxygen as well.
We are living on a planet run by idiots.
If I reduce the efficiency of a coal fired power plant “by about a third”; based on my extensive mathematics credentials, my model suggests that I actually net about two thirds of the energy I used to get; and then applying a well known computer modelling AlGorythm I can deduce that in future extrapolation I would need to burn 50 percent more coal in the future, to obtain the same energy that I can get now.
That would mean I would run out of coal much sooner than previous models suggested, and I would have less future time to develop free green clean non-polluting infinite thermonuclear energy from the top 1/16th of an inch of San Francisco Bay.
It is NEVER an advantage to simultaneously raise costs, reduce efficiency, and increase resource depletion all at the same time. Follow that route, and we will all end up back in the trees gathering figs, like our ancestors used to do.
George E. Smith (10:15:24) :
Thanks for your wise words George but may I add the word “dangerous” to “idiots”.
I grew up during the Cold War and served with our Air Force.
The “dangerous idiots” in our Governments, our Scientific Institutions and our Mainstream Media pose a bigger threat to us than the Russians during the Cold War.
I have seen the best minds of my generation wasted on stupid ideas like carbon sequestration. Geez.
Just to reiterate: pressurized combustion of solid fuel is not going to happen. For gaseous or liquid fuels, yes, we do that already in gas turbines. But not for solid fuel like coal. The difficulties of feeding the solid fuel into a pressurized combustion chamber make this too unreliable and too costly.
The MIT proposal is much ado about nothing.
This article is a great example of burying bad news by keeping talking.
Gas compression is very energy intensive. Compressing CO2 to 80 bars takes many Megawatts. The article is correct when it says CCS thermal efficiency will be lower by about one third.
Not to miss the point, let’s just rephrase that:
– there will need to be a CCS coal plant for every two, just to operate the three CCS processes,
– or, another way, the three CCS plants will have the same net electrical output of two “conventional” stations, but will consume the same fuel as three “conventional” stations.
Research to improve efficiency by playing around with the point of compression, and hoping reduce real estate footprint by using smaller components ….. errr, yeah, right.
Beyond the substantial cost and lost efficiency…
Is it likely that sequestration will cause an earthquake. No one has ever sequestered a significant amount of CO2. What we do know is that an earthquake can be induced by pumping water into the ground. It happened near the Rocky Mountain Arsenal back in the 60’s. In 1962 they started pumping water into a well for the disposal of chemicals. Earthquake activity in the area increased soon after. They postponed the pumping for a while and the earthquake activity decreased. When pumping resumed, so did the earthquakes. Studies showed that the earthquake activity centered around the well.
I know that state governments have been approached with the liability question and they flat out said no way. There is too much political risk in taking on that responsibility.
An earthquake near a sequestration field would ruin any company without government protection…even if the earthquake was not triggered by CO2. We all know that truth and logic endangered ideas in American court rooms when tons of money is involved.
There are many hurdles for carbon sequestration. Personally, I think it is all a waste of time an money. I’m sure the MIT people working on this could accomplish great things. It’s a shame to see them waste their time and brain power on such nonsense.
“”” Ron de Haan (10:52:24) :
George E. Smith (10:15:24) :
Thanks for your wise words George but may I add the word “dangerous” to “idiots”.
I grew up during the Cold War and served with our Air Force. “””
Ron my hat is off to anyone who has served our country in the services; we can’t ever repay you for that; thanks for sharing that little bit of your past. I’m old enough to have watched the cold war from start to finish; well maybe just to armistice, as it seems like we have “dangerous idiots” bent on getting back into that.
My asthma exccused me from any of those conflicts; but I can never pass up a chance to honor those who stood in for me.
Thanks Ron
Thank you Mark S. I was thinking about the liquid injection and earthquake correlation as I read the thread, but I could not remember the details. And that was from quantities small compared to the amount of CO2 being discussed.
I suggest that random and large injections of CO2 could result in a massive demonstration of unintended consequences.
Alex, I’ll take fast-growing plant-life for $10,000 … What is Kudzu?
The vine pejoratively known as the “foot-a-night vine”, “mile-a-minute vine”[1], and “the vine that ate the South”.
.
.
Pressurized oxy-fuel combustion sounds like partial oxidization (gasification) technology done halfway. Oxy-fuel combustion is a great way to reduce NOx emissions. Probably more efficient too, since it doesn’t have to heat all that nitrogen.
But, as someone mentioned, air separation units are famous energy hogs. Depending on the quantity of oxygen required, the air separation unit could use well over 100 MWh all by itself. That’s a lot of parasitic load on the power plant. Now add the electricity (or steam) needed to run the CO2 compressor, acid gas removal (yes, sulfur components still have to be removed), and other auxiliary systems and you’re talking a substantial parasitic load. I also suspect the overall cost of the facility would go up a bit.
Why not just go straight gasification technology and skip this interim step? The technology is proven and it’s more efficient than typical coal fired power plants. The gasifier produces carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrogen. The CO is subsequently converted to LOTS of hydrogen via a “water gas shift” reaction (CO + H2O = CO2 + H2). The process also converts COS to H2S and CO2. The acid gas removal system deals more with H2S than SO2 & SO3.
But I’m rambling.
Jesse
I can hardly wait for the environmental impact hearings on the first commercial power plant that proposes to give the revered “Holy Mother Earth” a CO2 enema. “Hold ‘er down boys, this is for her own good!”
Vertical algae farms have also been proposed as devices for CO2 reduction. I have no idea what percentage of the CO2 output a power plant could funnel into the algae, but at least they end up with a usable product.
No.. just suggesting that 1.3 billion cubic km of variable state water may have a vote at the table.
A presentation on uranium/nuclear energy recently had an interesting case study. I think it may have been a company like Duke (memory on the company is sketchy) that was looking to build a reactor on an old coal-fired plant site (due to the cost savings from existing infrastructure to connect to the grid).
They found they had to clean the site prior to building the nuke because the ground was too “hot” from the flyash and would set off the future sensors of the nuke plant.
Ironically the Aussies want nothing to do with nuclear plants but they are happy to have coal plants all over the place… scientifically clueless. Ignorant hypocrisy is all around you these days. This from the country that is one of the largest suppliers of uranium /boggle. The gods forbid they store the waste in our backyard either (despite being probably the most suitable place on the planet for it… geologically speaking).
“What we do know is that an earthquake can be induced by pumping water into the ground. It happened near the Rocky Mountain Arsenal back in the 60’s.”
About a week ago I read an article on geothermal power that stated that water-injection systems into hot deep rock had caused earthquakes also, meaning that such plants have to be located away from urban areas.
http://icecap.us/index.php/go/new-and-cool/an_energy_strategy_for_america1/
An Energy Strategy for America
By Allan M.R. MacRae
November 2008
The USA has two daunting problems – the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression; and President-Elect Obama’s energy policies, which will severely deepen the economic crisis. Obama stated in a San Francisco Chronicle television interview that he wants to implement an aggressive CO2 cap-and-trade system that could bankrupt coal companies. He further stated that energy prices will necessarily skyrocket. Obama believes that global warming is a critical issue, and he supports the use of solar energy, wind power and biodiesel. To his credit, Obama also supports a market approach and technological development.
In 2007, US primary energy consumption consisted of oil (40%), natural gas (25%), coal (24%), nuclear (8%) and hydroelectricity (2%). As a percentage of total proved reserves of fossil fuels, the US holds just over 2% of the world’s oil, 3% of natural gas, but almost 29% of global coal.
Energy projects have been constrained due to fears of catastrophic global warming, allegedly caused by increased atmospheric CO2 from burning fossil fuels. However, global warming is just not happening anymore. For the last decade, average global temperatures have not increased. Since January 2007 all global warming has disappeared, as average temperatures plummeted to 1979 levels – when accurate satellite measurements began.
Global cooling is now occurring and is expected to continue for the next twenty to thirty years, due to the recent shift in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation from its warm to cool phase. See here and here.
Despite shrill claims of ice cap melting, Arctic sea-ice extent is now at its highest seasonal level since modern satellite measurements began in 2002 – more evidence of global cooling. For decades, the US has experienced a huge balance of trade deficit, due primarily to high oil imports. Energy self-sufficiency has been the goal of recent US Presidents, without success. There is now an opportunity to address both these serious challenges, by rejecting global warming myths and creating an energy strategy based on true, verifiable facts. Here is the outline of a responsible and economic Energy Strategy for America:
1. Reject CO2 taxes and cap-and-trade measures used to “fight global warming”. Examine the satellite data, the only accurate global temperature measurements in existence. Climate Dyslexics please note: The Earth is cooling, not warming. Global cooling should last for twenty to thirty years and could be severe.
2. Generate much more electrical energy from abundant US coal reserves. Use existing technologies to control real atmospheric pollution from SOx, NOx and particulates, but do not control CO2. In the future, if CO2 sequestration becomes economically attractive (for enhanced oil recovery) or is proved necessary (in the unlikely event that global warming becomes a real problem), retrofit the coal plants with expensive CO2 recovery equipment at that time.
3. As rechargeable battery technology continues to improve, electric and gasoline-electric light vehicles will become commonplace. The power infrastructure already exists to fuel this fleet, and refueling can be done during off-peak periods, when power plants are underutilized. This major change in the light vehicle fleet will shift energy consumption from foreign oil to domestic coal.
4. Re-examine corn ethanol and wind power, which do not work economically or effectively. Corn ethanol for motor fuel requires huge ongoing subsidies and severely distorts food prices. Wind power also requires big subsidies, and almost 100% backup with conventional power generation. Wind power can also cause critical instabilities in the electric power grid. Conduct a full-life-cycle energy balance on corn ethanol, wind power, biodiesel and solar energy, and also examine the environmental demands and pollution associated with these so-called “green” technologies.
5. Re-examine hydrogen. It is an energy medium, like electricity, but if implemented would require a huge new hydrogen infrastructure to be built at great cost, for no environmental or energy gain.
6. Avoid energy subsidies, especially ongoing operating subsidies, which distort economic decisions and create expensive industrial and environmental boondoggles. Wind power and corn ethanol may prove to be two such costly mistakes.
Instead of skyrocketing energy prices, this Energy Strategy for America will result in lower costs, improved balance of trade, and in time could even provide energy self-sufficiency for the USA.
Allan M.R. MacRae is a Professional Engineer and writer on energy and the environment. In 2002 he predicted in a newspaper article that global cooling would recur. He does not work in the coal industry, accepts no compensation for his writing and holds no coal investments
Re: Allan M R MacRae (22:55:31) :
Better check your facts, Allen; especially your report on Arctic sea ice extent (it bottomed out in 2007). Although you got some of it right, I wouldn’t give up my day job quite yet. The prognostication and energy consulting fields are quite crowded at the moment. Incidentally, the problem with hydrogen, the perfect fuel, is that it takes considerably more energy to produce the stuff than the stuff contains. That’s what we in the energy business used to call “a self-eating watermelon”.
What we need from Realist scientists is conclusive, irrefutable proof that CO2 cannot cause any significant amount of atmospheric warming.
Is it possible to design an experiment which will clearly falsify the CO2 -> warming hypothesis?
Ideally it should be something dramatic, simple enough to be indisputable, and easily grasped by the media and the public.
===
Question: Does increasing CO2 levels cause a detectable increase in the temperature of the earth over significant periods of time?
Design of experiment:
1) Obtain one (1) earth; complete with a single worldwide, stable, constant temperature with respect to time. Isolate said “earth” from all variable influences (except CO2.)
2) Measure various temperatures of the subject (earth) for various periods of time using various processes over the duration of the experience (er, experiment.)
3) At a given point in time in the experiment, begin increasing CO2 levels.
4) Determine what temperatures are valid, correctly obtained, and accurate with respect to the actual temperature of the earth when the various temperatures were recorded from the various processes.
5) Plot all (valid, correct, and accurate) temperatures of earth with respect to time of observation.
—
Various sources indicate Step 1 has begun, but is incomplete.
Steps 2 and 3 are proceeding.
We are now at step 4.
The politicians (including those who wear academic robes, are now past Steps 6 through 78 and are in full panic mode about Steps 79 through 158.
—
Wow. Does little for existing power plants, which to use this technology would have to pass through New Source Review a real regulatory never-never-land.
In addition, to have an oxy-fuel system in which pure oxygen is combusted with the fuel means having a large supply of pure oxygen on site, probably in the form of an on-site gas separation plant, and additional complexity in plant operations and day-to-day hazards. Add to that the fact that now the power plant has additional hazardous materials on-site. I’m sure communities will embrace that, too, with open arms.
Anyone know if there has been a trustworthy analysis of how much storage capacity is in the US for these projects?
Cassandra King –
I’m afraid you are right, dear. I’m not one prone to conspiracy theories, either. But how else do you explain the madness that has seized the IPCC bureaucrats and the alarmists?
Claude – don’t be a clod.
Please note the date on my article re Arctic Sea ice – you are correct, but so was I at the time of writing. Arctic sea ice does appear to be recovering from the summer low of 2007.
RE Hydrogen – I agree. It sucks. Re-read what I said.
RE my day job. I’ll compare my achievements in the energy business with yours anytime.
[snip ~ I think I’ve said it before. Modify your tone or post elsewhere ~ ctm]
This development of pressurized oxyfuel combustion is a very good thing, in my opinion, and posting this article on WUWT is the first time I can remember WUWT actually posting an article that mentions a potentially positive solution to the global warming problem, rather than simple and outright skepticism.
I don’t have time to argue with people this weekend, unfortunately.
No, CCS would not require coal fired power plants to be relocated.
Yes, it is potentially extremely useful, especially if the coal fired power plants are progressively transformed into biomass or biochar power plants.
It is also possible to retrofit an external gas turbine topping cycle to existing coal fired power plants or oxyfuel retrofitsf, and pay for the conversions and CCS with increased efficiency.
Combining an oxyfuel power plant with biomass or biochar fuel can result in a carbon negative power plant, that actually puts carbon back in the ground while generating electricity. This is a synergistic solution, that can have a huge impact on the climate problem. If we did this worldwide and immediately, we could put 6 billion tons of carbon per year back underground, and put the 300 billon tons of carbon we have put in the atmosphere back underground in about 50 years. Many coal fired power plants are located on rivers or lakes for cooling water, and rivers and lakes constitute natural biomass or biochar transport networks, to get the biomass or biochar to the power plants.
Good for MIT, and good for WUWT for posting this potentially positive solution to the climate crisis, instead of simply engaging [snip ~ ctm]