• 1183 Days Ago
• 11/18/2008

CO2 storing

I know some want to do this but I think it's far
from clear that CO2 is any significant problem.

Before anything is done in this area emotions must
be removed and cold hard science conclusions followed, not someones WAG, some uninformed famous person's crying and screaming,  a committee voted, a hypothetical movie or some assumption filled computer simulation.

I would say we are a long ways from being at that point.

• 1183 Days Ago
• 11/18/2008

show all variables

When comparing coal to solar, are you including the cost of batteries and battery disposal?
You must have something to get you through the night.  If you want ZERO foot print, show it all.
Greenies worry about nuclear waste disposal, CO2 disposal, but miss Lithium.
Are we expected to user less, like Jimmy Carter said. (LOSER)  Do you expect China and India to leave its people in neolithic villages?  Who are you to say you deserve better than they?
A solution has to include a better quality of life for the whole world.  Not just a lower one for americans.

• 1183 Days Ago
• 11/18/2008

old king coal

By the US Department of Energy's last calculations, there are an estimated 998 billion tons of known recoverable coal deposits around the world. And, as repulsive as the thought of using it is to a growing majority of people worried about the noxious emissions it produces in the combustion process, and the immediate effects that those emissions have on global warming, approximately 40% of the worlds electrical energy production still comes from its use. A perfect example is that 68.7% of China's electricity, which it is using to transform itself from an ancient agrarian society into an industrialized nation, as England once did, comes from burning it. The DOE's figures also reveal that there are anywhere from 147 to 300 years worth of retrievable coal reserves available versus the estimated 40 to 60 years worth of the known accessible oil and gas fields which can be developed. I'd say, that given those sort of numbers, and as repulsive as the thought of using coal to empower the worlds machinery is to an old Luddite like me, the odds are that as long as we can still dig COAL out of the ground, we will be using COAL to supply our energy needs for some time to come.

• 1183 Days Ago
• 11/18/2008

Clean Coal

I would be among the first to agree that the world can not continue increasing the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration for the next hundred years or longer.  Call it Global Warming, an Ice Age, Climate Change, or whatever – significantly altering nature will have an impact and the odds favor a disruptive change more than a beneficial one. 

That said it is only fair to tell people what carbon management or limiting CO2 emission might cost if mitigating actions begin soon and advance on a timely path forward. 

While the possibility of an abrupt negative event can not be eliminated, the odds again do seem to favor longer-term, slow shifts in atmospheric, ocean and terrestrial environments. I would suggest that we need to act now to manage our carbon emissions and that there is time to spread the costs and avoid damage to the US and world economy.

The “cost per ton” (be it CO2 or carbon, metric or English) is the primary value widely published and I hazard to say that the number has zero meaning to 99% of the readers. 
Cost estimates to remove and geologically store a ton of CO2 from coal or natural gas combustion range from $50 to $150 and up, with optimists pursuing targets of $10 to $20 per ton.  The US emits some 6 billion tons per year from all sources.  These types of numbers do nothing to explain carbon management impacts on individuals.

To simplify, let’s limit the remaining discussion to electric power generation, which accounts for about half of the US total emission and where large plants are tempting carbon management targets.

Be it CO2 capture and storage, substitution with renewable or nuclear energy, or other options, reducing power plant emission will, as a minimum, roughly double the cost of power generation.  That does not mean a doubling of cost for the consumer since generation is only about half of the total electricity cost with distribution and taxes being the rest.  So if your electricity bill is $100 without carbon management, it increases to $150 with carbon management.  That’s easiest impact to estimate and understand. 

Similar to recent petroleum market events, rising electricity costs will also inflate the costs and prices for a loaf of bread or an automobile.  Unfortunately, things get terribly complicated attempting to estimate the full costs for an individual.  Even avoiding discussions of good versus evil environmental issues, it is hard to arrive at a number without a lot of work and computer time.  That said, let’s go ahead and make a case and hope it is a useful example.  The numbers in the case are mostly from 2002 Census Bureau data, liberally rounded in the calculations.

To start, take a car priced at $30,000.  Manufacturing costs are about half of this, and materials (steel, copper, aluminum, plastics, glass and such) account for 80% of manufacturing with 20% for labor.  (The other half of the $30,000 is overhead, sales and profit.)  In 2002 the auto industry spent about $60 billion on materials, including $200 million for electric power.  About 4.5 million cars were produced so the unit cost for all materials is $13,300 and electricity would be $45 per car.   With carbon management the cost for electricity per car would be $67.

The costs for the materials will increase as their suppliers’ electric power bill rises.  Steel is an example; the iron and steel mill industry used some $30 billion of materials and about $2 billion of purchased electric power, making electricity 7% of their material cost.  After the mills, the steel needs to be formed into sheets, rods, etc.  For the automobile case let’s say the steel material cost increases 10% with carbon management resulting in an 8% total steel cost increase. 

Then with a consultant’s “all else equal” leap of faith, suppose the other material costs follow this trend and go up by 8% or $4.8 billion from the $60 billion automobile base. The increase is $1,070 per car, or with the added $22 power cost about $1,100 per car.  Return to our $30,000 car; if the non-material costs do not change, the total carbon management effect from increased power generation costs is less than 4%. 

Yes, there are still difficult issues of global competition and implementing carbon management for world-wide sources, and yes there will be winners and losers.  But if the power generation example is close to reality, even with the expensive and inefficient carbon management technologies available to us, the move to near zero CO2 from power generation will not bankrupt the industry, the country or individuals.

As a sanity-check, if the carbon management cost impact is tripled, then the car price increases by 11%.  As any change to the power generation system incorporating carbon management is going to take tens of years, the impact still seems to fit nicely into a small or medium breadbox.

• 1181 Days Ago
• 11/20/2008

Profitable Sequestration

The extraction of CO2 in coal-fired industrial settings and its sequestration for agricultural applications, processes which are essentially mature and profitable without calling on new technologies, make profitable use of CO2 emissions while assisting in restoring depleted soils.

MIT, Cornell, University of Georgia and the U of Maryland are all in varying degrees pursuing the commercial application of biochar techniques, some of which are shown to enhance the synthesis of biochar products while simultaneously acting as efficient industrial emissions scrubbers.

Tech Review has done its own reporting on the subject area, but these authors, to say nothing of the speakers at various symposia, seem not to be aware of one another.