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Wednesday, February 28, 2007 Zero Tolerance for Carbon-Dioxide EmissionsA Canadian government decides that coal plants must clean up their act. By Peter Fairley
Cleaner coal technologies have just received a vote of confidence from Canada, as a new provincial policy announced earlier this month would require new coal power plants in British Columbia to emit no carbon dioxide. But while British Columbia's energy minister Richard Neufeld says that the policy is only calling for "the best technology available today," some say the ambitious policy could be asking more than current technology can deliver. Some energy experts say that meeting the policy, which states that coal plants must capture and sequester their carbon dioxide, effectively mandates the use of cleaner but more costly coal gasification technology called Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC). In these power plants, coal is converted into a hydrogen-rich gas that burns clean like natural gas. Capturing carbon from these plants could be easier than capturing it from conventional coal plants. That's because the chemical processes to separate carbon dioxidefrom other gases require less energy when operating on the more concentrated gas streams found in an IGCC plant. "If you're going to do coal and capture the carbon dioxide, gasification is the least-cost alternative," says James Childress, executive director of the Gasification Technologies Council, an industry group based in Arlington, VA. Major utilities and technology providers in the United States say that IGCC technology is ready for commercial use. According to the National Energy Technology Laboratory, in Pittsburgh, IGCC is the technology selected for one-fifth of 159 new coal plants proposed since 2000. But so far, systems for capturing carbon dioxide from such power plants have not been engineered. And of the 32 proposed IGCC plants, only a handful are moving forward. What is slowing the transition away from conventional pulverized-coal technology is IGCC's higher up-front cost. General Electric, which is providing the designs for the IGCC project that is now the farthest along, estimates that the first 10 will cost at least 10 to 15 percent more to build than a pulverized-coal plant. Other experts estimate that the cost premium could be much higher. That has made IGCC a tough sell, even though it is cleaner, emitting levels of smog-producing NOx and sulfur dioxide closer to those of a natural gas-fired power plant. British Columbia's new carbon-dioxidepolicy, if adopted widely, could change the rules of the game. Adding the cost of capturing carbon would raise the price of power. But prices could go up less with IGCC technology, if it does indeed prove easier to capture carbon dioxide in such plants than in conventional plants. That could make IGCC plants the less costly alternative overall. |
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A Better Way to Capture Carbon
02/15/2008
Comments
sagema on 02/28/2007 at 5:01 AM
4
OtherDoug on 02/28/2007 at 12:18 PM
3
Ocean bed storage of CO2 is where the Lake Nyos sort of disaster would come into play. Few people are pushing ocean bed storage, thankfully.
Conversion of CO2 into some sort of useable product would be a great boon for IGCC, but so far there aren't many ideas that I've run across.
wizardB on 02/28/2007 at 9:19 AM
14
OtherDoug on 02/28/2007 at 12:20 PM
3
OtherDoug on 02/28/2007 at 12:24 PM
3
If only we could add in all the other external costs of coal. Then there'd be no economic argument against renewables at all.
kearns on 02/28/2007 at 6:16 PM
25
McMillan968 on 02/28/2007 at 11:34 PM
38
kitk on 03/01/2007 at 12:34 AM
52
But, the very terrorist nation of Iran proves that nuclear waste is not what we should be worrying about--they just mined their own Uranium. There are still calls to make small reactors for third world nations that can't possible guard them.
And, in true socialist fashion, the bloggers are calling to make all technology more, not less expensive, rather than letting technology and the market work out a solution. Putting penalties on coal plants will not make reactors more attractive since there are still all the old-school leftists and tree-huggers still do all they can to block the building of new nuclear plants. Reactors WERE an attractive financial investment before the usefull idiots were mobilized to attack them. As things are, large subsidies are required, just to combat the very people the clean power would help.
That's hard to overcome.
bmn on 03/05/2007 at 12:24 PM
25
guestnonamebob on 03/06/2007 at 6:35 PM
2
phoenix on 03/01/2007 at 1:50 PM
100
dotcommodity on 03/02/2007 at 1:04 AM
6
Nuclear power stations have always taken at least 20 years from the ok to being online.
The delays are because it always takes about 15 - 20 years to explain to its proponents that jumping out of the frying pan into the fire is not our only option here.
lowilliams on 02/18/2008 at 4:33 PM
17
There is a clear example of the proper method of curing this type of challenge. An instructive example is found in the logistics of supplying goods in New York City. In 1900 large cities depended on horses for transport of both people and goods. The horses, of course, created massive amounts of waste (a proxy for carbon dioxide). By 1900, New York had 1,250 tons of horse manure and 60,000 gallons of urine dumped on its streets every day. Each year 15,000 horses were killed in accidents and were removed. This situation was limiting the continued grow of large cities. Control was not achieved by passing laws concerning the use and/or behavior of horses (a proxy for addicting how many miles per gallon new car fleets must get), Control was achieved by replacing that horse based transportation with a new technology that was better than the old. The new transportation technology was the fossil fuel powered vehicle. Cars and trucks were built. Governments at all levels subsidized building of roads for the vehicles. Within about 10 years, the problem of horse waste was dwindling and in 30 years it was eliminated.
Large cities had to eliminate horse waste and the planet earth must eliminate the waste from the combustion of fossil fuels. Renewable energy sources are useful and should be harvested, but are unlikely to provide the quantity of energy needed. Sir David King, the chief science advisor for the United Kingdom, recommends that fusion (not uranium fission) is the answer to future energy needs (King, David, ‘Fast Forward to Fusion’ New Scientist, Issue 2442, 10 April 2004). Fusion reactors use hydrogen isotopes and/or boron as fuels and cannot be used to make bombs. A fusion reactor produced positive energy in 1992 prompting an international program titled the “International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor” (ITER) program (http://www.iter.org or, http://www.efda.org)
The deniers will proclaim that we have been examining fusion for 50 years and still do not have a reactor. This is true, but fake, there has never been an Apollo type push for success; the past projects have been treated as class rooms for training future physics PhDs and not, as Sir David King suggests, humanity’s hope for abundant clean energy.
In support of success within a decade, see the 1976 report, FUSION POWER BY MAGNETIC CONFINEMENT, ERDA-76/110/1, UC-20, Page 8. (ERDA is the United States Energy Research and Development Administration, a precursor to the current DOE). This 1976 ERDA report states that building a pilot fusion reactor would take 10 to 13 years with a Maximum Effective Effort (using 1976 computers and technology). Using what we have learned in the last 31 years combined with the improvements in computer aided design hardware and software we should be able to start the production of utility fusion reactors within a decade. Renewable energy sources and fusion energy sources can produce energy. The energy will be used to produce hydrogen. The hydrogen will be distributed to all customers by buried pipe lines. This will yield the Renewable, Fusion, Hydrogen (RFH) energy system.