What do you think of NETL and FutureGen efforts regarding clean coal-fired power plants in the near future?

Question

http://www.netl.doe.gov/technologies/coalpower/peer-review/2007/APS%20Peer%20Review%20Meeting_Panelist%20Bios%20for%20Binder_071207.pdf

http://www.netl.doe.gov/technologies/coalpower/futuregen/index.html

Gristmill waded through a 70-some page GAO report and pulled out this paragraph to express their concerns:

The "DOE and industry have not demonstrated the technological feasibility of the long-term storage of carbon dioxide captured by a large-scale, coal-based power plant," according to a December 2006 GAO report.

http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d07106.pdf

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/9/2/14286/68801

Your thoughts? I'll share some of mine a bit later.

Answer 1

If they can come up with some use for the CO2 - - agricultural, probably - - then I'd see this as being useful.

Answer 2

Good thing storing carbon dioxide is unnecessary...bring on the cheap power!

Answer 3

coal is not nor will it ever bee clean, period.

Even if they capture all of the co2 on the back end and use it to make daisies, the front end, where the coal is extracted from the ground is so dirty and polluting, that nothing on the back end will ever make up for it.

Just check out this video and you will see what i mean:

http://www.neutralexistence.com/blog/coa...

Answer 4

Clean coal is a possibility (it'd still be pretty d**n nasty but truly clean coal might be able to solve our CO2 problem).

The biggest problem with clean coal is that it is a future technology (which has not been demonstrated) about which we have high uncertainty over whether it'll even work along with how much it'd cost to do.

Even if clean coal does work there's a good chance that it'd be quite expensive (with basically no hope of undercutting nuclear fission) and you still get all the problems that come with coal mining (deaths, injuries, environmental destruction, etc) so it might not be worth doing.  From an economic point of view we should make sure that the resources we spend solving global warming do as much as possible which means that we need to be spending money on the cheapest low emissions technology (right now, that's nuclear fission, it also has the advantage of being proven capable of providing an entire country's electricity without relying on natural features that don't exist everywhere).

Then there is the other type of clean coal which should be called "slightly less dirty coal" which has economics pretty close to dirty coal but also still releases CO2 (though with much less of the other c**p that comes up the smokestack of a coal power plant).  The coal industry in their PR refers to both types of clean coal with the same term confusing people into believing that coal can still be used despite global warming without having to pay any more for electricity.  Neither type of clean coal can be retrofitted onto existing coal power plants (so they'll have to decommissioned) although slightly less dirty coal could potentially be converted to truly clean coal but at the cost of possibly halving power output from the plant).

I personally consider clean coal to be more a bunch of PR bulls*** aimed at keeping the coal industry in existence than an actual plan to deal with global warming, if I got my way only the research on carbon sequestration would continue (and not for coal power plants, but to remove excess CO2 from the air and bury it, even if I have to build a few nuclear plants to run it) but everything else to do with clean coal would lose all funding.

Of course clean coal isn't the only proposed technology for solving global warming that we can't count on, wind and ground based solar are in many respects worse off than clean coal.

Answer 5

Sure, lets cut CA off of the grid then that would free up a lot of energy and we would need far less power stations.

Answer 6

Carbon dumping has been going on for a while now. Mostly as a feasibility study with the DOE. Mainly in Kentucky, and other places that have up to a thousand years detainment values. There looking for deeper gorges in which to dump.

This is not just for coal plants, but also ethanol refinery's.

Answer 7

This initiative seems to be aimed at new coal-fired plants. IMO, we shouldn't be building new coal fired plants; even with CCS, there is still significant CO2 emission. We can avoid that almost entirely by building new nuclear plants for baseload, combined with increased use of wind and other renewables.

I do think that CCS is a viable technology for existing coal fired plants, and that's where we should be looking to implement. It makes more economic sense to capture and sequester the carbon we can instead of rebuilding those plants from scratch.

Answer 8

I don't know; and yet i wonder how NETL would rethink how the public responds when asked specific opinionated questions regarding such a complicated aspect of continuing the discussion as well as the business simultaneously. its a strong solid question im egar 2 see some positve responses, in the profit margin

Answer 9

Since we have a 300 year supply of coal right here in the USA-- we need to figure out how to use it. Coal can be converted to oil and or natural gas for instance-- Nuclear power should become the backup for wind and solar--