Guest Post by Ira Glickstein
The December 2010 issue of the Atlantic shows an amazing turn-around by some of the Global Warming warmists! Yes, they are still tuned in to the CAGW crowd predicting imminent climate change disaster, but … BUT, some have reversed themselves on their previous ‘ol devil coal! Turns out we need coal to generate Watts of electricity for our electric cars and, they say, we can do it in a way that is environmentally correct.
The cover story, by respected author James Fallows, is titled Why the Future of Clean Energy is Dirty Coal. {Click the link to read it free online.}
Recall that, only last year, a leading alarmist, NASA’s James Hansen, one of the key science advisors on Al Gore’s The Inconvenient Truth movie, wrote:
“..coal is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet. … The dirtiest trick that governments play on their citizens is the pretense that they are working on ‘clean coal’… The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death.”
Fallows writes:
“To environmentalists, ‘clean coal’ is an insulting oxymoron. But for now, the only way to meet the world’s energy needs, and to arrest climate change before it produces irreversible cataclysm, is to use coal—dirty, sooty, toxic coal— …”
Amazingly, while atmospheric CO2 is still the bogeyman of what alarmists say is an imminent Global Warming disaster, coal, which is nearly all carbon and generates CO2 when burned as intended, is part of the solution! Fallows writes:
Before James Watt invented the steam engine in the late 1700s—that is, before human societies had much incentive to burn coal and later oil in large quantities—the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was around 280 parts per million, or ppm … By 1900, as Europe and North America were industrializing, it had reached about 300 ppm.
Now the carbon-dioxide concentration is at or above 390 ppm, which is probably the highest level in many millions of years. “We know that the last time CO2 was sustained at this level, much of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets were not there,” Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State, told me. Because of the 37 billion annual tons of carbon-dioxide emissions, the atmospheric carbon-dioxide level continues to go up by about two ppm a year. For perspective: by the time today’s sixth-graders finish high school, the world carbon-dioxide level will probably have passed 400 ppm, and by the time most of them are starting families, it will have entered the 420s. …
Michael Mann told me. “What we have with rising CO2 levels in general is a dramatically increasing probability of serious and deleterious change in our climate.” He went down the list: more frequent, severe, and sustained heat waves, like those that affected Russia and the United States this summer; more frequent and destructive hurricanes and floods; more frequent droughts, like the “thousand-year drought” that has devastated Australian agriculture; and altered patterns of the El Niño phenomenon, which will change rainfall patterns in the Americas. …
You should recognize Michael Mann as the creator of the deceptive “hockey stick curve” at the center of many of the Climategate emails. (See this and this and this and this.) Note also the standard line that, whatever happens to the weather: hotter, colder, dryer, wetter, stormy, calm, sunny, cloudy, … whatever, it is all due to high CO2 levels (even if they don’t plow your streets after a blizzard :^)
So, what is the solution? Fallows writes:
Isn’t “clean energy” the answer? Of course—because everything is the answer. The people I spoke with and reports I read differed in emphasis, sometimes significantly. Some urged greater stress on efficiency and conservation; some, a faster move toward nuclear power or natural gas; some, an all-out push for solar power and other renewable sources …
Note the mention of nuclear, also a bogeyman of the green crowd until a few years ago. In this regard much of the world is ahead of us. When I bicycled in France a few years ago, you could see nuclear power plant cooling towers in much of the countryside (except near Paris – I guess that is where the professional environmentalists live) and France generates most of its electricity using nuclear energy. It will take the US quite a while to catch up, but it is good to see a mainstream liberal literary magazine starting to lead the way. The above paragraph also mentions natural gas, a fossil fuel, ahead of “solar power and other renewable sources” stuck in at the end. It seems they finally realize that we need energy and, at least for the next decades, it will continue to be coal, burned in a cleaner way, plus nuclear and natural gas.
Fallows continues:
“Emotionally, we would all like to think that wind, solar, and conservation will solve the problem for us,” David Mohler of Duke Energy told me. “Nothing will change, our comfort and convenience will be the same, and we can avoid that nasty coal. Unfortunately, the math doesn’t work that way.”…
Coal will be with us because it is abundant: any projected “peak coal” stage would come many decades after the world reaches “peak oil.” It will be with us because of where it’s located: the top four coal-reserve countries are the United States, Russia, China, and India, which together have about 40 percent of the world’s population and more than 60 percent of its coal. …
“I know this is a theological issue for some people,” Julio Friedmann of Lawrence Livermore said. “Solar and wind power are going to be important, but it is really hard to get them beyond 10 percent of total power supply.” …
What would progress on coal entail? The proposals are variations on two approaches: ways to capture carbon dioxide before it can escape into the air and ways to reduce the carbon dioxide that coal produces when burned. In “post-combustion” systems, the coal is burned normally, but then chemical or physical processes separate carbon dioxide from the plume of hot flue gas that comes out of the smokestack. Once “captured” as a relatively pure stream of carbon dioxide, this part of the exhaust is pressurized into liquid form and then sold or stored. …
“Pre-combustion” systems are fundamentally more efficient. In them, the coal is treated chemically to produce a flammable gas with lower carbon content than untreated coal. This means less carbon dioxide going up the smokestack to be separated and stored.
Either way, pre- or post-, the final step in dealing with carbon is “sequestration”—doing something with the carbon dioxide that has been isolated at such cost and effort, so it doesn’t just escape into the air. … All larger-scale, longer-term proposals for storing carbon involve injecting it deep underground, into porous rock that will trap it indefinitely. In the right geological circumstances, the captured carbon dioxide can even be used for “enhanced oil recovery,” forcing oil out of the porous rock into which it is introduced and up into wells.
According to Fallows, China is in the lead on this clean coal technology, with help from American and other western corporations. While it is good that at least some of the Global Warming alarmists are warming up to coal as a necessary part of the solution, it would be better IMHO, if they were also more realistic about the actual dangers of climate change and the likelihood (again IMHO) that most of the warming of the past century is due to natural cycles not under human control and that we are likely already in a multi-decade period of stable temperatures, and perhaps a bit of cooling.
Yes, I think we need to do something about the unprecedented steady rise in CO2 levels, but we have to do it is a way that will not destroy our economies or force us to drastically reduce our lifestyles. One thing I agree with James Hansen about is that an across-the-board carbon tax, assessed equally against all sequestered fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) and collected at the mine, well, or port, is the best solution, far more suitable to the task than the “cap and trade” political scam, and more likely to work.
Rather than have governments pick winners (and mess up as they did with corn ethanol subsidies that raised food prices and reduced gas mileage without doing much to control CO2 emissions) I prefer to tax carbon progressively a bit more each year and let industry and other users decide for themselves how to adapt to the higher prices. Nothing stimulates action and invention like saving your own money. Nothing wastes money like government taking money from “Mr. A” and giving it to “Mr. B” for the “good of society”.
I’m working on a future posting that will propose use of gassified coal along with enhanced CO2 farming as a clean coal implementation that may make sense in a decade or so. I hope to post it next week.
***************************
Another story in the same issue of the Atlantic is about famed physicist Freeman Dyson and The Danger of Cosmic Genius.{Click the link to read it free online.}
They write:
In the range of his genius, Freeman Dyson is heir to Einstein—a visionary who has reshaped thinking in fields from math to astrophysics to medicine, and who has conceived nuclear-propelled spaceships designed to transport human colonists to distant planets. And yet on the matter of global warming he is, as an outspoken skeptic, dead wrong: wrong on the facts, wrong on the science. How could someone as smart as Dyson be so dumb about the environment?
Does it occur to them that the CAGW warmists and alarmists may be the ones who are wrong?
Coal is green.
Once all the warming science fog has cleared, CO2 will be seen as the universal fertiliser with no whatsoever effect on Earth’s temperature.
It so happens that coal contains 100% of the bodies and minerals of the plants that decayed to make it. Thus burning CO2 from coal is accompanied with emissions of the most perfect and balanced fertiliser to let nature sequester CO2 in the form of bigger harvests over larger areas.
Worst green energy is natural gas because it has no fertiliser left in it, but oil fares a little better.
The only problem remaining is that coal electricity is produced at point-sources which are too large, thus producing hindrance from sulphur emissions. If exhausts could be spread more evenly around, coal would be the greenest fuel without serious complications.
Ira wrote: “That is why I favor a modest carbon tax.”
We already have one. It’s called the Federal Excise Tax, and it’s collected on nearly all carbon-based fuels:
coal – $.55 – $1.10/ton
gasoline – 18.4 cpg
diesel – 24 cpg
aviation fuel – 7.5% of the retail price
natural gas, home heating oil, LPG, etc.
As usual there is a lot of off hand dismissal of alternate energy potential. As it stands right now most of that attitude is right, but entrepreneurs and engineers tend to make progress.
Solar PV right now sucks. Nanosolar has a novel approach that should make solar PV more practical. They may be getting sidetracked with the utility scale collectors, but the light weight, printing press style manufacture solar cells have a lot of realistic potential.
Wind power (and wave power) have limited utility as it stands connected to the grid. Stand alone, they can be productive producing stored energy, aka hydrogen, if fell cells were embraced. I like fuel cell technology. It kicks butt.
I think biofuels from food stocks or grown on land displacing food production is stupid. There are biomass options suited for non-arable land. Those aren’t so stupid.
Clean coal is doable and as mentioned more attractive with higher oil costs per barrel. Clean coal would help stabilize energy costs. Power generation with coal gasification is limited economically, but the products that can be produced, gasoline, diesel and various feed stocks for other industries is where its real value is.
Co-generation, nuclear/coal gasification can improve thermal efficiency of both processes. There are a lot of interesting ideas to expand co-generation.
Sequestered carbon dioxide has limited utility. I cannot see just pumping a perfectly useful product in the dirt without some return on the effort. Carbon dioxide fertilization of biomass (Algae has a good bit of research done on this subject) has potential.
All of these can and are being started without carbon tax money. Tax breaks, guaranteed loans and some subsidies are better motivators until the market can take over. For example: A two Billion dollar investment is enough to build a basic gaseous fuel infrastructure. Start on the West coast so all the celebs, tree huggers and techno millionaires can put their money where their mouth is. Then let the market decide. That two billion is a fraction of what it took to bailout AIG. Then let somebody “Pimp My FCV Ride.”
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/141165/pimp_my_fcv_ride.html?cat=15
🙂
Ira comments on my post December 31, 2010 at 7:24 am
Myrrh says “I am not an historian, all dates should be checked for flow of events..” I (Ira) have high regard for PM Thatcher and wish to disassociate myself from what appears to me to be somewhat confused political spin. Ira]
Well Ira, as Chilli noted at 3:27 am,
A very confused article that gives far too much ground to scare-mongering alarmists and climate profiteers. You’ve bolded Mann’s statements as if to ridicule them, but later you seem to accept what he says fully and agree we need to “act on CO2”. Sorry, it’s time to stop complementing the emperor on his new clothes and instead shout from the snow-covered rooftops that he’s naked.
Perhaps Chilli is being charitable. I have my doubts that your piece is confused. It can as easily be read as very clear well-thought out example of the propoganda technique I outlined in my post re the oil industry – deflecting criticism of outright support by appearing to castigate the subject.
Here in your post the subject is Hansen, and in my post the example is the oil industry in general whose involvement in demonising its cheap rival coal by driving the AGW agenda is well known to few. (By setting up and controlling CRU in the 70’s, who sent Salinger to corrupt NZ temp records and further became involved in IPCC, etc. Oil and Nuclear continue to fund and control CRU).
Cleverly using the the Green environmental movement to deflect from knowledge of this involvement by getting criticism directed against itself is using a well known propoganda technique. How to ostensibly seem to be ridiculing or villifying the subject all the while actually promoting its aims, the weaving in of the desired end result, support for the ‘we must act now on CO2’ mantra. The message continues.
I’m making no judgement whatsoever as to which scenario is the truth here, I don’t know you or anything about you. Chilli could well be right, you’re simply presenting a confused message. Perhaps because the anti-CO2 campaign is now in process even longer than Moses took to indoctrinate a new generation, taught in schools to our children as if the norm and fact, confusion is rife.
My post was tracing the line of interaction from the early environmentalists and how the big oil business, and nuclear and natural gas) hand in glove with political interests used green energy to fuel this scaremongering to protect its own capitalist interests. (And brilliantly profitting from all associated projects, taxing CO2 the best scam of all, built on what you’re promoting here.)
Margaret Thatcher sold the people’s assets to cheap fuel and now even water to the benefit of the few. The bankers continue to be well renumerated while the people are put into further tax slavery to pay their gambling debts. Oh how all agree that it is for our own good that we take further pay and benefit cuts and pay more for fuel and pay higher taxes, and destroy the national health service by turning it as electicity and water, into a business for others to profit from – we have to pull in our belts to make Britain strong again, we’re all in it together..
You may have a high regard for Maggie, I voted for her.. I’ve never voted in England since, digusted with myself for my naivety re politics when I saw how she was actually against real people. I was a lot younger then. Now, I see how easy she was to manipulate. In her last book she denounces all the AGW claims, a total about face to the speech she gave when she opened the Hadley centre in the early 90’s and making nonsense of her involvement in setting up the IPCC. Whose current head is oil interests.
Manipulated by whom? Ah, there’s the rub. Is it simply a battle by some big business interests against its cheap and abundant rival? Blair’s New Labour was no different in political aims to the Tories, but with the added strange twist of desiring complete control over everyone in a Big (Surveillance) Society. Crime rate in England is very low, but we wouldn’t know it by all the scares and proliferation of cctv cameras. So what’s really going on? Is it big business controlling the political parties and using the environmentalists, or the environmentalists controlling the political parties? Who are the environmentalists? They’re a weird lot, claiming they stand for protection of the natural environment and yet against people as if we’re not part and parcel of the natural world. Here’s one view of them.
http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2007/2007_10-19/2007-13/pdf/51_713_glowarm.pdf
But anyway, Ira, surely there’s no reason to support the continuing demonisation of CO2 as a danger and a problem to be solved without actual scientific, and not using corrupted data, proof? I ditto Chilli’s conclusion.
[above URL not working for me ~ac]
Mankind requires four basic needs to survive.
1 / Water; he cannot survive more than a few days without water.
2 / Food; He cannot survive for more than a few weeks without food.
3 / Shelter; Be it in the form of personal protection such as clothes or in the form of physical cover be it anything from a cave to a mansion, he will at some time need shelter from the elements and in the more extreme environments, he will need shelter / personal protection from the elements of some sort all the time.
4 / Energy; the ability to use and control energy is the fundamental difference between mankind and animals.
Even a cow dung fire, possibly the lowest and poorest form of energy that mankind can usefully use, is a fundamental basis that differentiates mankind from animals.
Anybody knowing the history of the development of our modern industrial civilisation will know that the development of very cheap, very reliable and very useable energy using the newly invented coal fired steam engines first developed by Thomas Savery in 1698 and then by advances in efficiency by James Watt [ there must be something unique in that “Watt” lineage!! ] in Britain in the 1700’s became the base on which the world’s entire modern industrial civilisation has been developed and built.
And this industrial civilisation has been most successful in the countries where energy historically has been abundantly and cheaply available enabling the users and consumers to put their available resources towards developing the technologies that are a feature of our industrial society.
The mining and production of cheap coal is in every case the base upon which the modern civilisation has built out industrial society.
The use of oil came later and gas as an energy source only very recently.
Coal is still our major, most useable and cheapest energy source and will continue to be so for many decades to come.
Now it seems that for some totally unproven but ideological and dogma based beliefs from what is seen increasingly as an earth worshipping environmental cult, energy is to be made more expensive through taxing and thereby the rationing of energy.
All because of some unproven and unsupported belief by a western based environmental cult’s belief in some future catastrophic climate change of unknown and unforecastable time frames and unknown and unforecastable extent from a miniscule increase in a minor but essential to all life atmospheric gas, CO2.
So more of [ western ? ] mankind’s limited resources are going to be forced, for ideological reasons only, to be put into purchasing energy for every purpose.
And that then places limits on the availability of resources that can be used to create further developments that will take our civilisation to new levels and a better and more prosperous global society which would lift an ever greater portion of our global population out of the poverty mire and provide a better life for all.
Cheap, very cheap and abundant and readily available energy for all is the key to mankind advancing further up civilisation’s ladder.
To limit energy and therefore our civilisation’s advances through the taxing of the main sources of energy, coal, oil and gas because of some ideologically based and totally unproven dogma about the dangers of a miniscule rise in the levels of a minor greenhouse gas is stupidity beyond belief.
bananabender says:
December 31, 2010 at 2:23 am
The entire AGW scam is an attempt by the natural gas industry to destroy the coal industry. The CRU was founded by Shell and BP to provide a “scientific” case for closing the British coal industry to sell more North Sea gas.
I’ve been in the natural gas transmission business for over 25 years. The consensus among my peers is that using NG for electrical generation, other than peak-shaving, is just totally nuts. It might be different for a distributed (neighborhood) type of infrastructure, but generation facilities have always tended to be the larger centralized plants, presumably for efficiencies of scale.
So, at least here in North America, there’s no push that I’m aware of by the NG industry to use political pressure to force the building of gas-fired generation plants. The push is entirely from the regulatory end, as far as I can determine. Electrical generation forces my industry to invest in facilities a lot for very little financial gain, given the rate structures imposed by (again) regulators. This in turn causes our rates for residential and commercial use to be higher than they would otherwise be.
We’re a very conservative industry and are in it for the very long term. Wasting our product on something better served by coal or nukes, at great expense to us, isn’t something we’re actively promoting.
Shale Gas – harrywr2 – “lets do the math” Or rather, lets look at the math as it was done. Over the last 100 years. Concerning oil reserves. Proven reserves grow and grow and grow. “peak oil” just keeps slipping away. This is the same ol’ song.
I will take back, “virtually unlimited” if you will acknowledge that EIA’s estimates are bound to be only a small, small fraction of what we can extract. The size and potential of these shale formations just boggles the mind. The United States is to shale what nobody else is to oil. The middle east is just a piker.
And we haven’t even talked about the methane hydrates in shale.
Now about wind…. If I ran a power company, I would be nuts to “invest” in wind. It’s inherently intermittent. I need to count on my capacity to hit my peaks. Who needs more unreliable base load? And besides the nightmare wind poses for transmission is no mere bad dream! Really high capital costs too! If I ran the power company, I would want to build distributed gas peaking stations. Build stations where I need them, run them as needed. Gas is clean, its cheap, its reliable, its where it needs to be. There is so much of it. Gas is a beautiful thing!
In a couple hours here in central Florida it will be HAPPY NEW YEAR. This topic has been more controversial than my previous topics due to my support for a carbon tax, the only controversial issue where I agree with James Hansen (pardon the expression :-). I thank all for being relatively courteous despite that fact. I hope this thread continues actively into the NEW YEAR, but, even if it does not, this has been an awesome learning experience for me and I thank all of you, including those who do not (yet :^) see eye to eye with me. It was especially instructive to have several active commenters who know more about coal gassification and liquidization and other topics than I ever will.
Thanks especially to Anthony Watt and all his helpers on WUWT for providing an invaluable forum for serious discussion, with a bit of friendly humor to spice it all up.
>>Abott
>>And besides the nightmare wind poses for transmission is no mere
>>bad dream! Really high capital costs too!
And really high maintenence too, from what I see. I fly over these things daily, and there always seems to be 10-15% that are facing the wrong way and idle.
.
Brad says:
December 31, 2010 at 10:20 am
I’m not sure why you think my citation of common facts about capacity factors are “rants”, and after all, it was you that claimed your lights stay on because of the windmills, so maybe you ought to be giving me the generation numbers. But since I don’t think you’re up to it, here are your generation numbers from MidAmerican for 2008.
http://puc.sd.gov/commission/Events/EnergyConfPresentations/BrentGale.pdf
See slide 8
About 95% of the power came from fossil fuels and nuclear.
If you think we’re “playing”, then you better raise your game.
rats, screwed up the blockquotes again.
Too close to midnight. Happy New Year everyone.
[ Fixed it for ya. Sip, sip 😉 – MODe ]
Brad, why are you shouting?
Your “evidence” is a link to the schedule for a two-day course that was offered by Iowa State University. Just clicking on the Home link I found out:
Doesn’t sound like your definitive proclamation “…will be 20% by 2030…” at all.
From your original link, I can see many pie-in-the-sky concepts floated in the presentation descriptions, of perhaps marginal technical feasibility if not anywhere near economic feasibility. My favorite:
Underground high-voltage electrical cables? All over Iowa? Yeah, that’s feasible. Sure…
You better have some other evidence to back up that “will be 20% by 2030” claim. What you have provided tells me it’s unlikely without STRONG government intervention, which would include financing, and even with it there is no guarantee.
Which would be dependable base load capacity, not “peaking” generation as wind is, thus MidAmerican is looking into building a new nuclear plant.
Besides what Doug Badgero said, I’ll point out that many utilities can afford the plants, and would like them. But there are endless regulatory hurdles like innumerable “Environmental Impact Statements,” never-ending lawsuits by organized Green groups of “concerned individuals,” many other problems. Included in the US is the headache of a lack of a permanent long-term nuclear waste storage facility, which is exacerbated by not having reprocessing of spent fuel.
Which is why I really wish we’d start using the proven Canadian-designed CANDU reactor, which is comfortably capable of using “spent” fuel from our pressurized water reactors. Designed originally for low-grade uranium, it can use many different fuels, would drastically reduce any need for reprocessing, and reduce the need for long-term waste storage. Indeed, we have such a stockpile of “spent” fuel from our light water reactors, we could fuel many CANDU reactors for a century or more without extracting one more bit of uranium from the ground. The design has been exported to China and elsewhere. We should have them in the US as well. Any resulting explosion of Green heads from the shifting of the paradigms about what the Greens absolutely “knew” about nuclear power will be an added beneficial side effect.
If there’s no need for a transmission line, then why are they saying they need one to get that new Iowa wind power to the other markets?
Ah, Chicago!
If, as you have said, that electricity will be going to Chicago, then your other post is meaningless. The electricity goes to Chicago, which is in Illinois, and Illinois has the renewable mandate.
From the esteemed Pew Center on Global Climate Change (I love their slogan: Working Together…Because Climate Change is Serious Business) comes their Renewable & Alternative Energy Portfolio Standards list, click on Illinois. From the linked press release (pdf of M$ Word doc):
The Pew Center listing says:
Unneeded wind power installed in Iowa that will receive a tax credit, using a new transmission line paid for by all users, will be sending electricity east of the Mississippi, to a market where renewable use is mandated, which you have identified as Illinois, for use in Chicago.
Which ones did you correct? I haven’t noticed any yet…
—————–
Interesting Illinois Info!
By the Renewable Energy mandates:
At 75% of the 25% renewables by 2025 having to come from wind, that’ll be 18-3/4% of all electricity coming from wind in 2025.
From Treehugger comes a report about a new solar power mandate in Illinois, taking effect in January 2011 (just a few hours from now). Through stepped increases, utilities must buy more electricity from solar, up to 6% by June 2015.
If the 6% is maintained through 2025, that leaves 0.25% to be generated by the “…other eligible electricity resources…” of “…biomass, and existing hydropower sources.” (Pew Center listing).
Yup, that’ll sure spur innovation and investment in biomass, besides helping the economy overall.
Question: Since Chicago gets 75% of their electricity from nuclear, if that stays constant to 2025, does that mean Chicago will have to get by with 75% nuclear for base load with 24.75% “as available” wind and solar?
Here comes the rolling summer blackouts…
The trouble is the IPCC are assuming our consumption of fossil fuels will keep increasing, because it MUST to keep the world economy growing. But Peak Oil, Peak Coal and Peak Gas together will produce Peak Fossils by about 2026 and after that the only way to increase energy supplies growing is to turn to less efficient sources, like Uranium. That will quickly bring about Peak Uranium. And wind and solar are so thinly dispersed and intermittent that they are even less efficient to use. We will soon reach the point (if we haven’t already) where there will not be enough energy available to rebuild the world’s entire electricity generation system, the electric cars, trucks, airplanes, ships, bulldozers, cement factories, the metals smelting industries (iron, copper, etc) AND keep the lights on at the same time.
If you factor Peak Fossils into the IPCC scenarios, then we get about 1.8°C warming, before the take-up of CO2 by the oceans starts to bring temperatures down again. The IPCC is banned from mentioning these scenarios by their paymasters, because the obvious implication is that there will be Peak Civilisation well within one human lifetime, and that would be bad for business.
In reality, the absence of taking Peak Oil seriously, will quickly lead to a collapse into war and chaos, and an economic crash from which the world will not recover.
If the real desire is to build “emission free” power plants there already exist well proven technologies that can combust coal and capture CO2, at close to zero emissions, for use in enhanced oil recovery (EOR) which at the end can be sequestered in the depleted oil well. The coal combustion technology is a technology with plants running in Sweden, Germany, and Japan and that technology combined with the Benfield CO2 capture technology that has been in operation in over 700 plants over the past 30 years. In respect to the EOR we have an already active market in US which makes economic sense compared with just sequestering the CO2 into the ground. We have a 1 MWt test facility in US that has demonstrated that already with a mix of 3% bio fuel and 97% waste coal the combination of the above technologies will result in a power plant with a negative carbon foot print at near zero emissions. I.e. with this combination of well proven existing technologies we can clean the environment from the alleged dangerous CO2 that to my knowledge not even wind turbines nor any other technologies have done so far.
However any solution that solves the alleged “problem” is not a techno-economic issue but a political why it is not genuinely supported by governments and anybody else who is blinded by the opportunity to tap into this enormous source of cash that will float around in the artificial carbon economy. The sad news is that the vilification of coal and CO2 will not benefit the environment nor the energy consumer and it will move the hundreds of millions less fortunate living in sub-human conditions, due to lack of access to affordable energy, even farther away form a chance to improve their living conditions.
“Clean coal” is a chimera, just like “green energy”. There is no such thing except in the unrealistic dreaming of romantic people. CCS (Co2 capture and sequestration) is not technically or economically feasible, and probably will never be. We will continue using coal the old way (maybe with a little improved efficiency), even if the earth will burn as a result (it won’t). Get off the anti-co2 hysteria.
Proceeding towards low carbon economies and carbon taxation is economic madness without the global agreement of all high emitters to reduce emissions. Binding agreements on the part of the two elephants (China and India) in the room are crucial (and unlikely).
The UN projects global coal consumption to increase by 25% in the next 25 years mainly in the developing world. China is already responsible for half of global CO2 emissions from burning coal ( yes China burns 50% of world output!) and the proportion will increase. China plans to build 400GW of coal fired power plant in the next 10 years. As part of its low carbon plans the UK will close down about 10GW of coal fired plant, i.e. the Chinese will build 40 times as much as the UK plans to close. China has now become the biggest market for vehicles.
In the UK the Indian owners have closed down a major steelworks and thereby received carbon credits worth billions of dollars from the UK government and the EU. These funds will help fund a new steelworks in India. Net result – British jobs exported to India at cost of billions to the taxpayer and impact on global carbon emissions – zero.
When will governments carry out a proper cost-benefit analysis as any competent business would do. It is nonsense to claim that we must all do our bit. This approach is utterly futile without a meaningful global agreement.
AC – don’t know why the link isn’t working, maybe I put in an extra space between 51 and 713 (the empty spaces in the URL typed in by underlining _ )
Another go at it:
http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2007/2007_10-19/2007-13/pdf/51_713_glowarm.pdf
A Chronology of the Global Warming Swindle by Marcia Merry Baker
Sorry, spotted it, there’s a double set of 10-19 figures. (I don’t have a copy and paste facility at the moment on my computer so have to type in manually)
http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2007/2007_10-19/2007_10-19/2007-13/pdf/51_713_glowarm.pdf
Spen,
“In the UK the Indian owners have closed down a major steelworks and thereby received carbon credits worth billions of dollars from the UK government and the EU. These funds will help fund a new steelworks in India. Net result – British jobs exported to India at cost of billions to the taxpayer and impact on global carbon emissions – zero.”
Yes, but it helps the UK to achieve it’s co2 emission reduction targets as decreed by our masters in Brussels. Now if we could only drive the rest of our manufacturing overseas 🙂
Many folks here in Wallowa County relied on coal heat in the past. Though the ranch house originally used wood fireplaces (like everyone else in this isolated valley), it has a wall of coal-impeded soil in the back yard up next to the foundation, where the delivery was made into the basement holding stall when the family switched from all wood to a mix of wood and coal. The old-fashioned huge coal stove in the basement was eventually closed up and the large heat grate in the basement ceiling planked over. From the basement we would fill our buckets and trudge up the steep basement stairs to the main floor to fill the coal stove hoppers, and then up to the second floor to fill those. Later, the upper floor stoves were replaced with oil stoves, which were eventually tied into the oil tank out back. My grandpa finally replaced the coal stove on the main floor with an oil stove. No more filling of buckets and removing clinkers. There is still maybe 4 buckets of coal waiting to be used down in the basement and if I screened the soil out back, I could probably get another 4 buckets. By the way, today’s air tight wood stoves will burn coal. After my grandparents died, all the stoves on the second floor were removed. The main floor ceiling grates kept the second floor from Arctic temperatures. But only just that.
The house currently uses a combination of a newer diesel oil stove in the living room and an air tight wood stove in the large family parlor now used as my bedroom. I only heat the main floor and then only part of that. The closed off old entry, formal parlor, master bedroom, “Grandpa’s den”, the second floor, and the laundry room are without heat. It is an old, old mansion without any insulation, and I can’t possibly heat 4300 square feet of her.
However, we still have that old cast iron coal stove in the basement, right where it was left. It is incredibly heavy. I could hook it back up to the chimney again, uncover the ornate grate and add a short section of heating duct from the stove to the grate, and use it if push comes to shove.
If my heating bill starts to rise out of control from all these “value added” renewable taxes, by gawd push just might come to shove.
1 Smartest Pres evah approved another 2 billion for Future gen coal fired electric Illinois. Dirty dollars from Chinese debt => dirty politicians => Illinios cronies => dirty coal => and we now have clean coal and clean electric
2 Coal ash is super for an additive in concrete.
3 World Bank approved a controversial three-billion-dollar loan for a coal-fired power plant in South Africa Thursday
4 2010 I recall that UK sold a little over 50 electric cars. Like Wow. Nothing like seeing people express their faith at the cash register.
5 If a Chinese electric car has a single charge cruising range 35 miles how would that work out in a blizzard where they don’t have heaters and defrosters in the cars or the few that do, shorten their driving range? Hey 10 minutes of electric heat waiting for a tow truck is better that no heat.
I forgot to add to the above post of mine that South Africa is also building a massive coal to liquids facility. I won’t bother to do the math since a previous poster shows the btus of coal and similar btu chart for liquid fuel. The net end cost of fuel is very reasonable compared to 90 dollar crude today.
@Ira
You take it as a matter of faith that high atmospheric CO2 is a bad thing. That appears to fly in the face of everything we know in the field of botany and everything we know from the geologic column. When CO2 levels were far higher than today the earth was verdant from pole to pole. Why would anyone possibly prefer barren frozen wastelands to lush greenery?
[Dave, what has the highest CO2 level been since human times on Earth? I believe that would be today at around 390 ppmv. I do not think we have any kind of crisis, nor do I think a doubling to around 800 ppmv would increase average temperatures more than a fraction of a degree C. On the other hand, as a conservative, and a system engineer, I get concerned about more than doubling any parameter without knowing all the consequesces. My support for a low, steadily rising, across the board carbon tax is as much motivated by the costs of protecting our sources of foreign petroleum, both in dollars and blood. Ira]
Re: Pamela Gray says:
January 1, 2011 at 6:15 am
Now you’ve gone a put yourself on Big Brother’s watch-list. I see a “bucket tax” in your future. Big Bro will also appreciate the detailed listing of that chamber of fossil and tree-eating horrors your ancestors squirreled away in “The Big House”.
latitude, ROM and a few others:
You say things like humans can’t control the climate, environmentalism is an ideological and dogma based cult, and future catastrophies are unknown and of unforcastable timeframe and extent. Forgive me if I’ve misrepresented anybody’s individual position by lumping that together, but the common theme seems to be that there is no reason to believe climate change is dangerous, but rather a natural process, possibly too big for humans to influence.
Natural Process:
Yes, climate is always changing, due to many driving forces. Right now, humans are the main driving force. Atmospheric CO2 is higher now than any time in recent history. We know this is due to human activity because humans add CO2 to the carbon cycle without removing a balancing amount, mainly through the burning of fossil fuels. We also observe that the ratio of two specific carbon isotopes is lower in biological matter than the atmosphere, so if burning of fossil fuels is linked to increased CO2, the atmospheric ratio of those isotopes should be dropping, which is what is actually happening.
There is also a very well-established lower bound on the sensitivity of climate to CO2 changes. There is still a lot of uncertainty in the estimate, but it has been the subject of a lot of research over the last few decades, and it is unlikely that the effect of CO2 is negligible.
So, while climate change is natural, by our best observations humans are in fact dominating the forces that drive the natural cycles.
As for the danger of climate change (and the related issue of model accuracy): as just one example, a significant sea level rise would impact millions of people living at or below sea level. At a minimum, there would be economic impacts from adapting to increased flooding, storm surges and so on. There would probably more severe effects, but I think we can agree on the economic impacts at a minimum. So, is the sea level rising? Yes, direct observations show that it is rising, and in fact on the upper end of the model predictions from 20 years ago.
In fact, today’s models accurately reproduce temperature over the last 100 years, but only when the effect of CO2 is included. Those models apparently do work, and their predecessors have, if anything, been conservative of predictions of sea level rise, arctic ice melt, and so on.
Now, I’m no climate scientist, but then again, most of us here aren’t. I could be reading the wrong research, or overlooking its flaws. However, to date in my reading, whenever I look into another aspect of climate change I find that I can get to credible primary sources, and data from direct observations, usually backed up with multiple lines of evidence.
I really hope CAGW is wrong, but I’m still looking for a model that accounts for observed changes in temperature, CO2, sea level, arctic ice, solar cycles, and human activity but provides another explanation or outcome besides CAGW.
Seriously, I’m still looking for that model. I try my best to not be dogmatic or ideological, I’m quite eager to continue the discussion and learn more.
[Christopher, I am with you that unprecedented rates of rise in atmospheric CO2 (in human times) are substantially due to human activities, and that atmospheric CO2 is partially responsible for the warming over the past century and a half. But, I cannot agree when you assert: “Right now, humans are the main driving force.” Where we differ is: How Much? and How Bad? I think only about 10% of the claimed global warming (<0.1ºC) is due to human activities (the rest due to data bias and natural cycles), and that less than half the CO2 rise is due to human burning of fossil fuels (the rest due to the temp increase slowing ocean absrbtion and increasing ocean outgassing). There is a bit of AGW, but it is not CAGW. Ira]