tagged w/ Clean Coal is an Oxymoron
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"Tuesday, January 25, 2011
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Friends of the Earth President Erich Pica had the following response to President Obama’s comments about energy policy in tonight’s State of the Union address as prepared for delivery:
“President Obama says he wants to lead the country in clean energy innovation. Unfortunately, requiring more coal, nuclear power, and natural gas production is not leadership and is not innovation. Coal, nuclear power, biofuels, and natural gas are inherently dirty. Telling Americans anything else is just misleading.
“President Obama should explain to families in Appalachia who are drinking unsafe, polluted water how he can call coal clean. He should tell the people in Nevada and South Carolina whose states could become radioactive waste dumps how he can say the same thing about nuclear.
“Friends of the Earth will aggressively oppose any efforts to use regulatory mechanisms or taxpayer dollars to prop up these or other polluting industries.”"Tuesday, January 25, 2011
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Friends of the Earth... more
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In southwest Virginia, where hollowed and stripped mountains rise abruptly from creek beds, coal is deeply entwined with the Clinch River.
From its headwaters in Tazewell, the Clinch winds south through the coalfields, feeding mines, preparation facilities, and power plants. It drains the region’s most polluted tributaries before meeting the Tennessee, Ohio, and Mississippi.
One tributary, Dumps Creek, joins the river near this quiet mountain valley town. Most days, the creek runs opaque and brown; some days it runs orange. In 2003, the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality drew attention to the acidity, sedimentation, and high concentration of heavy metals in Dumps Creek, but didn’t name the source. Trace the creek to its headwaters, and the source is evident.
Within Dumps Creek’s 20,000-acre watershed there are two active and two abandoned deep mines. There’s also a scraped off mountaintop, fully one-fifth of the watershed, where miners blasted away the topsoil and bedrock to get at the coal. Dumps Creek is critical to these operations—hundreds of thousands of gallons of water are used daily to cool and lubricate mining machinery, wash haul roads and truck wheels to reign in airborne particulates and to suppress underground dust that otherwise could ignite.
The Start of Coal’s Troubled Path
These production practices are only the first stages of an economically essential and ecologically damaging accord between coal and water. Water is critical to every stage of the mining, processing, shipping, and burning of coal. In the era of climate change, swift population growth, and increasing energy demand, the result is a fierce and complex competition between the two resources that has become much more difficult to resolve.
Thirty years ago, high levels of pollution from coal mining and combustion prompted state action and two 1970s national statutes. The Clean Water Act and the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act were designed to limit damage to fresh water resources. Though they made a difference, both laws have never been enforced strictly enough to keep the coal industry from polluting.
More recently, the country’s relationship with coal has come under close scrutiny again because of its environmental costs. Coal companies, seeking greater production efficiencies, use mining techniques that level mountaintops and bury the streams below them. Coal combustion, meanwhile, produces the nation’s largest share of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that are accelerating global climate change and diminishing the nation’s freshwater reserves.
The U.S. withdraws 410 billion gallons of both fresh and saline water a day from its rivers, lakes as well as aquifers. Roughly 85 percent is fresh water. About half is used to cool thermoelectric power plants, and most of that cools coal-powered plants.
– USGSThe Energy Information Administration, a research unit of the federal Department of Energy, forecasts that by 2050 the demand for energy in the U.S. will be 40 percent higher than it is today. As the nation considers what it will take to cool the planet and serve the country’s steadily increasing energy appetite, federal scientists and policy makers are taking a fresh look at how long the coal era will persist, and by necessity the tumultuous space where water and coal intersect.
Little about what they see is reassuring. Scientists define water use by two basic measurements. One is how much water is “withdrawn” from America’s rivers, lakes, and aquifers for domestic, farm, business, and industrial use, most of which is returned to those same sources. The second is how much water is actually “consumed” in products, by livestock, plants and people, or evaporates in industrial processes. In both measurements of withdrawal and consumption coal is at the top of the charts.
The U.S. withdraws 410 billion gallons of water a day from its rivers, lakes and freshwater aquifers. About half is used to cool thermoelectric power plants, and most of that cools coal-powered plants, according to the most recent assessment by the United States Geological Survey (USGS).
Similarly, the U.S. consumes about 100 billion gallons of water a day; nearly 85 percent is used for crop and livestock production. Of the 16.1 billion gallons that remain: industrial, mining and power plants use nearly 8 billion gallons a day, most of that for mining, processing and burning coal, according to the Department of Energy.
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The EPA said it wants to regulate the technique, but it’s still issuing permits to remove mountaintops. Federal and state regulators, and even coal industry executives themselves understand the ropes of ecology, economy and efficiency that are tightening around the nation’s energy sector. Climate change is leading to decreased supplies of rain, snowmelt and fresh water. Energy demand is increasing even as pressure steadily grows to limit greenhouse emissions and reduce water consumption.
To keep coal in the energy mix, industry representatives have readied a fix for climate change—an unproven technology to snare carbon emissions at coal-fired plants and store them deep underground—called “carbon capture and sequestration” or CCS.
But there’s a big problem there, too. Scientists with Sandia National Laboratories who’ve studied carbon capture and storage say CCS will increase water withdrawal and use by 25 percent to 40 percent. In other words, without significant advances in a technology that is only now being tested in a handful of applications, the path to a low-carbon economy that still burns coal will put enormous new pressure on America’s declining supply of fresh water.
“The generation of electricity is inextricably tied to water availability,” said Jeff C. Wright, Director of the Office of Energy Projects at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, during a federal conference on energy and water in April.
“Carbon capture may reduce greenhouse gases going to the air. But it will increase the amount of water needed in thermoelectric plants, coal plants especially.”
continuedIn southwest Virginia, where hollowed and stripped mountains rise abruptly from creek... more
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cOalbama’s clean energy plan
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U.S. power generating companies would get free pollution permits, at least initially, as part of a compromise climate change bill being written in the Senate that also would give the coal industry $10 billion to develop "clean" technology, sources said on Friday.
Democratic Senator John Kerry is trying to push a bill through a skeptical Senate this year that would address global warming by reducing the 6.4 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions the U.S. puts into the atmosphere annually, mostly by burning fossil fuels.
While the bill is not yet ready to be introduced in the Senate, Kerry has held a series of briefings for lawmakers, industry groups and environmentalists to preview the proposal.
Power companies, which emit 40 percent of U.S. greenhouse gases, would be the first to face pollution limits. In return, the industry has demanded breaks claiming that otherwise it would have to shut down plants.
Those breaks include some free permits to pollute and "offsets" that give them the option to invest in clean energy projects that preserve lands and forests in the United States and abroad.
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According to trade industry sources, the power companies would initially be given many of the required pollution permits for free, similar to the bill passed last June by the House of Representatives. But the House bill calls for an economy-wide cap-and-trade program starting in 2012, not just utilities.
When he ran for president in 2008, Barack Obama called for selling all of those permits to industry under cap-and-trade, in which carbon dioxide emissions fall as fewer and fewer permits are allowed over 40 years. Once companies obtain the permits, they could be traded on a regulated market.
The House's cap-and-trade provision has been reduced to apply only to utilities at first in the compromise bill. In 2016, factories would begin to be covered as well. Other elements likely to be in the bill, according to industry and environmental sources, are:
-- $1 billion a year over 10 years from the federal government to help the coal industry develop green technology such as "carbon capture and sequestration" of emissions. Such a provision could be crucial to West Virginia Senator John Rockefeller and others from states that mine and use coal.
-- A new carbon tax on oil, possibly at the refinery level, which would filter down to consumers. The taxes would be linked to the price of carbon stemming from the utility industry cap and trade program. The goal is to encourage consumers to buy more fuel- efficient cars. Some of the revenues could go back to consumers.
-- $54 billion in new loan guarantees to encourage an expansion of the domestic nuclear power industry, whose plants do not emit greenhouse gases, but face big problems with storage of waste and the cost of building new plants. There would be new tax breaks for the nuclear industry too. It's unclear how the bill would fix the nuclear waste problem or speed up regulatory review of new construction permits.
-- The establishment of a "clean energy standard" that would expand a Senate Energy Committee "renewable energy standard" to allow more fuels to participate, including nuclear. The committee plan focuses on wind, solar and other renewable sources. While it's nearly emissions-free, nuclear is technically not a renewable power source.
-- New incentives to encourage heavy-duty trucks to transition from diesel fuel to natural gas.
Other elements of the bill previously reported include:
-- A price collar to protect against fluctuations in the price of carbon traded under the power company cap-and-trade. It would keep prices in the range of $10-$30 per ton.
-- The legislation would aim to bring carbon emissions down by 17 percent by 2020, from 2005 levels.
-- Firms with smokestack emissions below 25,000 tons would not face new pollution restrictions.
-- Controls on smokestack emissions from factories, including steel, chemical, paper and cement, would be phased in beginning in 2016 under a cap and trade program.
-- The EPA would be prohibited from regulating factory greenhouse gas emissions.
-- A border tax to be triggered in future years to protect U.S. manufacturers from cheaper goods from countries that do not have as strict environmental controls in place. Ohio Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown has been insisting on this. It could offend some "free-trade" senators though.
-- New incentives for offshore oil drilling.U.S. power generating companies would get free pollution permits, at least initially,... more
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The past two years have witnessed the emergence of a powerful movement opposing the construction of new coal-fired power plants in the United States," says Lester R. Brown, President of the Earth Policy Institute, in a recent release, "Coal-Fired Power On the Way Out?" "Initially led by environmental groups, both national and local, it has since been joined by prominent national political leaders and many state governors. The principal reason for opposing coal plants is that they are changing the earth's climate. There is also the effect of mercury emissions on health and the 23,600 U.S. deaths each year from power plant air pollution."
Over the last few years the coal industry has suffered one setback after another. The Sierra Club, which has kept a tally of proposed coal-fired power plants and their fates since 2000, reports that 123 plants have been defeated, with another 51 facing opposition in the courts. Of the 231 plants being tracked, only 25 currently have a chance at gaining the permits necessary to begin construction and eventually come online. Building a coal plant may soon be impossible.
What began as a few local ripples of resistance to coal-fired power quickly evolved into a national tidal wave of grassroots opposition from environmental, health, farm, and community organizations. Despite a heavily funded ad campaign to promote so-called clean coal (one reminiscent of the tobacco industry's earlier efforts to convince people that cigarettes were not unhealthy), the American public is turning against coal.The past two years have witnessed the emergence of a powerful movement opposing the... more
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Corn ethanol? Just how much do they owe the corn industry and Monsanto? Do they realize there is a food crisis going on? And yet, they support MORE corn ethanol that has already been proven to contribute to climate change? And they are still supporting "clean coal!" There is no such thing as "clean coal." This proves they are totally out of touch with the true urgency of cutting Co2 emissions. To say they will have carbon sequestration up and running by 2016 is misleading. We spew 70 plus million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere EVERY DAY. Do they even comprehend what that will amount to by 2016? So what good are their "green jobs" making solar panels if people will still be able to get dirty coal energy cheaper? Where is the aggressive stance on movng us to cleaner energy? All I see are the same markers being paid to campaign contributors over caring about the environmental and health effects of burning fossil fuels and also in clearing land to grow corn for fuel instead of food!,0,6179879.story
Corn ethanol? Just how much do they owe the corn industry and... more
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Coal is not now and never will be clean. It kills.
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An estimated one in 10 Americans have been exposed to drinking water that contains dangerous chemicals, parasites, bacteria or viruses, or fails to meet federal health standards. Part of the problem, says journalist Charles Duhigg, is that water-pollution laws are not being enforced.An estimated one in 10 Americans have been exposed to drinking water that contains... more
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The Obama administration announced the winners of the first phase of "clean coal" dollars from the economic stimulus package, with the largest sums going to oil firms.
Only $21.6 million of the $1.4 billion for carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies was made available in phase one. The money was awarded to 12 companies that will test ways to catch and compress CO2 from polluting plants, transport it by pipeline and pump it underground.
The biggest winners were C6 Resources, a Shell Oil affiliate; ConocoPhillips; and Shell Chemicals, another division of Shell Oil. Each nabbed $3 million to demonstrate their technologies for seven months.
In the announcement, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu recycled the 'clean coal' boilerplate of past releases: "These new technologies will not only help fight climate change, they will create jobs now," although there was no estimate of how many jobs will be generated.
He also repeated this claim:
"The investments will help position the United States to lead the world in carbon dioxide capture technologies."
America still has a long way to go, though. A few subsidy-funded R&D tests are now being carried out, but none is considered economically feasible on a large scale, or even that clean.
A massive, 1,300-MW West Virginia coal plant just became the nation's first facility to pipe a small portion of its global-warming emissions back in the Earth. For an investment of more than $100 million, about 1.5 percent of the plant's CO2 will be sequestered.
Despite his critics, Chu has stood firm on CCS, becoming one of its staunchest proponents. In a September op-ed in Science Magazine he explained why:
"... the United States, Russia, China, and India account for two-thirds of the [world's coal] reserves. Coal accounts for roughly 25% of the world energy supply and 40% of the carbon emissions. It is highly unlikely that any of these countries will turn their back on coal any time soon, and for this reason, the capture and storage of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel power plants must be aggressively pursued."
Some form of CO2 reduction technology is necessary. And while CCS has become the solution of choice for politicians, its actual implementation worldwide is all close to absent – and it's certain to be devilishly complex if and when it begins.
Research shows that returning a fraction of global emissions back into the Earth would require pumping as much compressed gas underground as all the oil being taken out. The infrastructure needed for that exceeds what is possible to build in a generation – or maybe ever.The Obama administration announced the winners of the first phase of "clean... more
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There's a growing movement to stop coal companies from flattening the Appalachian Mountains around West Virginia. Tensions are high. There has been lots on confrontation and conflict, hell, I'd even call it 'action,' but for some reason cable news isn't covering it... yet commercials for "clean burning coal" pollute their airwaves as much as Viagra. Odd, huh?
Thank God for citizen journalism, because youtube is full of this stuff.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gjc7Jg_gMy0There's a growing movement to stop coal companies from flattening the Appalachian... more
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(This will all sound very, very familiar to the peak-oil crowd. Turns out coal is a finite fossil fuel too!)
According to the EWG, global coal production will, best-case scenario, peak and begin declining about 20 years from now. Yikes.
The second fateful illusion: that carbon capture and sequestration can enable the continued expansion of coal use.
Industry insiders admit that CCS technology will not be developed, and costs reduced enough to prompt widespread adoption, until 2035 at best. By then, if CCS becomes a primary climate strategy and EWG-style analysis is correct, humanity will be in the grips of four interrelated costs and risks associated with coal. Quoting Heinberg:
• the need for substantial investment in new CCS technology;
• higher coal prices and shortages due to depletion;
• higher electricity generating costs due to the use of IGCC and CCS; and
• lower electricity generation efficiencies due to the use of CCS, requiring more coal to produce an equivalent amount of electricity.
So at a time when supplies are declining, while commodity and transportation costs are rising, we’ll need much more coal to get the same amount of electricity from a more expensive generation technology. Surely you see the wisdom of the strategy.
Another issue that doesn’t get the press it deserves is the investment necessary to produce the infrastructure for widespread CCS. It’s mind-boggling. Ultimately humanity would be burying more than twice the amount of CO2 that it digs up in coal, more than eight times the amount of yearly volume handled by the global crude oil industry (according to Vaclav Smil). Building the new-gen plants, running more railroad cars to bring the increased coal supplies necessary to run them, building and burying all the CO2 pipelines, maintaining CO2 burial fields ... it all requires not only an enormous amount of money but an enormous investment of energy, and fossil energy is a finite commodity.
Heinberg’s conclusion: it’s renewables or nothing.
Imagine the remaining reserves of oil and coal as a savings account. There’s a lot in the bank, but pretty soon income is going to decline and savings are going to get drawn down. The question before us is: how fast should we draw down our fossil savings, and what should we spend them on?
Spending on CCS poses a fateful opportunity cost. If scaling up renewables and efficiency (R&E) is difficult today, it will be doubly so when savings have been drained pursuing CCS infrastructure. According to the scenarios developed by Heinberg and the Post Carbon Institute, massive CCS investment would at best delay an energy crash by a decade or two. I’m dubious of these kinds of scenario exercises, but it’s inarguable that after all that fossil energy is spent on CCS, it can’t be retrieved. There’s no do-over. If it doesn’t work out, the energy needed to build out R&E infrastructure will only be more expensive.
One subject on which Heinberg strikes me as unduly pessimistic is the potential for R&E. He and the Post Carbon Institute think the best-case scenario is a massive, controlled, humane reduction in human population alongside a transition to a much lower-energy, localized form of life. For my part, I incline bright green. Worldchanging‘s Alex Steffen put it well in a recent tweet: “To be bright green is to know that a sane respect for planetary limits imposes no meaningful limits on humanity’s potential, at all.” It is possible to flourish sustainably.
But that’s an argument for another time. At minimum, a sustainable future requires the best possible understanding of available coal reserves and their likely cost. If “clean coal” turns out to be a phantom, chasing it will not only waste time, it may foreclose the only decent options we have left.(This will all sound very, very familiar to the peak-oil crowd. Turns out coal is a... more
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And yet, this administration pushes for the oxymoron 'clean coal' which is a non existant technology that will not be anywhere near functionally effective for the next twenty years, if it is even possible. This is just another scam coal companies can use to continue spewing the same amounts of CO2 while getting free credits under cap and trade for doing virtually nothing to effectively decrease carbon emissions as they must be decreased by 2020 to avoid a tipping point. And who will ultimately foot the bill? It won't be them. What a racket.
Excerpt:
Harvard University researchers have issued a new report that confirms what many experts already feared: Stopping greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants is going to cost a lot of money.
Electricity costs could double at a first-generation plant that captures and stores carbon dioxide emissions, according to the report from energy researchers at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center.
Costs would drop as the technology matures, but could still amount to an increase of 22 to 55 percent, according to the report, "Realistic Costs of Carbon Capture," issued this week.
These projections "are higher than many published estimates," but reflect capital project inflation and "greater knowledge of project costs," wrote researchers Mohammed Al-Juaied and Adam Whitmore.
Coal is the nation's largest source of global warming pollution, representing about a third of U.S. greenhouse emissions, equal to the combined output of all cars, trucks, buses, trains and boats.
In the U.S., coal provides half of the nation's electricity. Many experts believe that, because of vast supplies, coal will continue to generate much of the nation's power for many years to come.
Climate scientists, though, recommend that the nation swiftly cut carbon dioxide emissions and ultimately reduce them by at least 80 percent below 2000 levels by mid-century to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.
Industry supporters say the key is for scientists to perfect technology to capture carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants and pump those gases safely underground. But such technology has never been deployed on a commercial scale. Critics worry about the expense, safety and a host of technical hurdles.And yet, this administration pushes for the oxymoron 'clean coal' which is a... more
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Just two weeks after the federal government revived plans to build the FutureGen power plant in eastern Illinois, two of the experimental coal plant's financial backers announced Thursday they are withdrawing.
The exit of American Electric Power Co. and Southern Co. leaves the nine power and coal companies that are still part of what's known as the FutureGen Alliance searching for new partners to help cover building and start-up costs they expect to reach roughly $2.4 billion.
The Department of Energy said it would provide just over a billion dollars on June 12 when it agreed to restart the long-stalled project, aimed at proving that the pollutant carbon dioxide can be removed from coal and safely stored.
Both AEP and Southern, two of the country's largest utilities, cited concerns about cost.
AEP says it will leave the project by July 1, mentioning both uncertainty about its details and how much money the Columbus, Ohio-based utility would have to spend.
FIND MORE STORIES IN: Illinois | Steven Chu | American Electric Power | Consol Energy | Southern Company
"There's like a billion dollar shortfall between what the alliance originally agreed to fund and what we think it's going to cost," AEP spokeswoman Melissa McHenry said. "There's not a definitive message from the Department of Energy of what scope and scale the project" will be, she said.
In reviving the project, the Department of Energy has said FutureGen's carbon removal and storage goals might have to be scaled back.
In a weak economy, AEP is cutting its capital spending and will focus on other carbon capture projects that it is involved in, McHenry said.
Southern Co. spokesman Steve Higginbottom called the decision "definitely financial" and declined to elaborate. The Atlanta-based company will spend only on other carbon capture projects it is working on, he said.
FutureGen had already said it needed to find new partners to help share the costs of the project, spokesman Lawrence Pacheco said, and is negotiating with several companies. He declined to name them.
"The alliance," Pacheco added, "will be working with DOE to figure out the cost share of the project moving forward, and that agreement will reflect the scale of the project, as well as the cost."
The Department of Energy did not immediately return a message from The Associated Press.
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2.4 billion dollars that could be used for SOLAR energy that we already know WORKS. Just what is this administration thinking? There is no such thing as clean coal, and this is a waste of taxpayer dollars. How can anyone claim this climate bill is any good if they are going to allow projects like this? This is just another mechanism to allow coal companies to continue spewing the same amount of CO2 they always spew. It matters not if it is in the air or in the ground, it it still BEING MADE and CO2 under ground has not been definitively proven to not have longterm effects on groundwater resources. And of course, HOW that coal is gotten through mountaintop removal makes it the dirtiest source of energy regardless of what you try to tell us about "cleaning" it. I would think any Energy Secretary who was a Nobel prize winner would know that. But I suppose since this is in Illinois, it is being revived for Obama's buddies. Clean coal is ok to them if it makes their campaign contributors money.Just two weeks after the federal government revived plans to build the FutureGen power... more
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Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced on Friday plans to restart the FutureGen clean coal power project, which was scrapped by the previous Bush administration as too expensive.
An agreement was reached between the Energy Department and the FutureGen Alliance, a nonprofit global consortium of coal producers and users, for a clean coal plant in Mattoon, Illinois.
The plant would be the first U.S. commercial scale carbon capture and storage project.
"Not only does this research have the potential to reduce harmful greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., but it also could eventually result in lower emissions around the world," Chu said.
FutureGen's $1.8 billion coal-fired power plant with the technology to cut greenhouse gas emissions was scrapped by the Bush administration due to a ballooning price tag.
But a congressional report released in March revealed that the prior administration's cost estimates for the project were flawed, with the intent of killing the project.
President Barack Obama has expressed support for the project, which would be built in his home state.
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Is clean coal the right thing to do?Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced on Friday plans to restart the FutureGen clean... more
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The Department of Energy has been busy doling out funds from the Stimulus package lately, and now it's clean coal & carbon capture and storage's turn: $2.4 billion in support has just been announced. In doing so, Secretary of Energy Chu said that "to prevent the worst of climate change, we must accelerate our efforts to capture and store carbon in a safe and cost-effective way." Here's where all that money will be going:
Clean Coal Power Initiative
$800 million will be used to expand DOE’s Clean Coal Power Initiative, which provides government co-financing for new coal technologies that can help utilities cut sulfur, nitrogen and mercury pollutants from power plants. The new funding will allow researchers broader CCS commercial-scale experience by expanding the range of technologies, applications, fuels, and geologic formations that are tested.
Industrial Carbon Capture and Storage
$1.52 billion will be used for a two-part competitive solicitation for large-scale CCS from industrial sources. The industrial sources include, but are not limited to, cement plants, chemical plants, refineries, steel and aluminum plants, manufacturing facilities, and petroleum coke-fired and other power plants. The second part of the solicitation will include innovative concepts for beneficial CO2 reuse (CO2 mineralization, algae production, etc.) and CO2 capture from the atmosphere. In addition, two existing industrial and innovative reuse projects, previously selected via competitive solicitations, will be expanded to accelerate scale-up and field testing:
Ramgen Modification ($20 million): funding will allow the industrial-sized scale-up and testing of an existing advanced CO2 compression project with the objective of reducing time to commercialization, technology risk, and cost. Work on this project will be done in Bellevue, WA.
Arizona Public Services Modification ($70.6 million): funding will permit the existing algae-based carbon mitigation project to expand testing with a coal-based gasification system. The goal is to produce fuels from domestic resources while reducing atmospheric CO2 emissions. The overall process will minimize production of carbon dioxide in the gasification process to produce a substitute natural gas (SNG) from coal. The host facility for this project is the Cholla Power Plant located in Holbrook, AZ.
Geologic Sequestration Site Characterization
$50 million will fund a competitive solicitation to characterize a minimum of 10 geologic formations throughout the United States. Projects will be required to complement and build upon the existing characterization base created by DOE’s Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnerships, looking at broadening the range and extent of geologic basins that have been studied to date. The goal of this effort is to accelerate the determination of potential geologic storage sites.
Geologic Sequestration Training and Research
$20 million will be used to educate and train a future generation of geologists, scientists, and engineers with skills and competencies in geology, geophysics, geomechanics, geochemistry and reservoir engineering disciplines needed to staff a broad national CCS program. This program will emphasize advancing educational opportunities across a broad range of minority colleges and universities and will use DOE’s University Coal Research Program as the model for implementing the program.The Department of Energy has been busy doling out funds from the Stimulus package... more
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Climate scientists have written directly to the chiefs of the country's main coal companies and users, warning them that coal-fired power stations are doomed and that the Federal Government's carbon capture and storage plans are likely to be a waste of time and money.
"The unfortunate reality is that genuine action on climate change will mean that coal-fired power stations cease to operate in the near future," says the letter, posted yesterday to the heads of Rio Tinto, Alcoa and Delta Electricity, and more than 20 other companies and organisations.
The group of seven signatories, who include three lead authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and a former director of the World Climate Research Program, said they took the step because of misinformation being spread by the coal industry.
One signatory, Professor David Karoly of Melbourne University, said he had decided to appeal directly to company chiefs because he felt they needed to be advised that their companies were contributing to climate change, and could be exposed to any future legal action brought against heavy polluters.
"Evidence is mounting that climate change is occurring faster than previously predicted and we are perilously close to a number of tipping points which, if passed, would amplify the effects of climate change and make it much more difficult to bring further warming under control," the letter says.
"We cannot emphasise enough just how serious the situation has become."
Carbon capture and storage, in which emissions from coal-fired power stations are compressed and buried, is probably not going to help Australia make the necessary greenhouse gas cuts, the letter says.
end of excerptClimate scientists have written directly to the chiefs of the country's main coal... more
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After 500 mountains in Appalachia have been blown to bits by mountaintop removal, one peak was most likely saved today: Blair Mountain in West Virginia, the site of the largest armed insurrection in the United States since the Civil War, was officially approved by the Keeper of the National Register of Historic Places to be placed on the National Register.
This is a huge victory, as the tide continues to turn in the movement to stop mountaintop removal in Appalachia.
Some consider it the Bunker Hill of the labor movement. But the great battle in 1921, when thousands of union coal miners and World War I veterans donned their uniforms and took up arms to liberate and unionize the last coal camps in southwestern West Virginia held hostage to ruthless outside coal companies, has emerged as one of the great symbols of Appalachia's fate today. Over the past several years, the Friends of Blair Mountain--an organization of community and labor activists, historians and environmentalists--have led an even more epic battle to save the sacred mountain site from a plan by coal companies to strip mine and destroy Blair Mountain through mountaintop removal operations.
The mountaintop removal war might soon be over. The Rednecks won. According to the National Registry Federal Program regulations:
"If a property contains surface coal resources and is listed in the National Register, certain provisions of the Surface Mining and Control Act of 1977 require consideration of a property's historic values in the determination on issuance of a surface coal mining permit."
"Redneck" was the name given to the progressive miners, as William Blizzard recalled in his wonderful memoir, When Miners March, as they wore red bandannas around their necks to distinguish themselves from others. As the battle raged, and even bombs dropped, President Warren Harding was forced to intervene with military troops.
President Barack Obama needs to intervene against mountaintop removal today. As three million pounds of ammonium nitrate fuel oil are detonated daily in an assault on Appalachia today, raining toxic dust on the inhabitants and devastating watersheds as part of the brutal mountaintop removal operations, it's time for the federal government to stop this egregious violation of human rights in the mountains.After 500 mountains in Appalachia have been blown to bits by mountaintop removal, one... more
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The Energy Department may proceed with a "modified" plan to build a prototype coal-burning power plant that would capture and store carbon dioxide as part of new efforts to expand international collaboration on carbon-management technologies, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said today.
His comments are the strongest indication yet that DOE might reverse a Bush administration decision to pull the plug on FutureGen, a federal-industry project that was to be built in Illinois and has faced significant cost overruns.
"We are taking, certainly, a fresh look at FutureGen, how it would fit into this expanded portfolio," Chu told reporters after his appearance at a Senate hearing on DOE research and development programs.
Chu said he has been working with foreign ministers and energy ministers to ensure greater international collaboration on what projects proceed to ensure that a range of carbon-management technologies are pursued.
A greater collaboration on deciding what projects to fund and how to "parcel out turf" would allow a FutureGen project to pursue a smaller range of missions, he said.
While the FutureGen plant was to have been a test bed for several technologies, if another nation plans to pursue one particular project, it would not have to be part of FutureGen, Chu said. This could help reduce project costs that otherwise could have been more than $2 billion, he said.
"There are many, many good things about it," Chu said. "We want to go forward in some modified way on that."
Several nations are planning carbon capture and storage demonstration projects, including 10 to 12 planned in the European Union, but greater multinational planning is needed, Chu said.
"It is being done essentially independently of one another," he said. "This does not make any sense to me. When I have been seeing a number of energy ministers, foreign ministers that have been coming through. In each instance, I said ... we know we need to explore a half-dozen technologies."
"Why not decide which ones we will explore? We could have people in various countries there on the ground participating in this," he continued, citing the prospect of "true engineering collaboration."The Energy Department may proceed with a "modified" plan to build a... more
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STEVENSON, Alabama, January 12, 2009 (ENS) - The Tennessee Valley Authority's second waste spill in three weeks at one of its coal-fired power plants has drawn demands that the federally owned and operated utility act immediately to secure the waste at its facilities.
A 10,000 gallon leak of process water from the gypsum pond at the Widows Creek Fossil Plant in Stevenson was discovered just before dawn on Friday. TVA officials say the leak has stopped.
The utility said Sunday that the spill occurred when a cap dislodged from an unused 30-inch standpipe in the gypsum pond. This allowed water and gypsum to bypass the existing system and drain into the adjacent settling pond, filling it to capacity and causing it to overflow. TVA will fill the unused pipe with concrete.
......................STEVENSON, Alabama, January 12, 2009 (ENS) - The Tennessee Valley Authority's... more
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This is outrageous and heartbreaking. The death of a river and the fish in it. And the TVA claimed they will start testing well water yesterday. Start? This happened almost a week ago and they are just going to start? Of course, they state the water is safe to drink as well. How can they state that if they haven't tested the wells? It is hard to comprehend this amount of environmental damage and try to corrolate it with what seems to be such an apathetic response. This for sure is a crime against nature.This is outrageous and heartbreaking. The death of a river and the fish in it. And the... more
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