CLEAN COAL: By gasifying coal, stripping it of pollution, such as globe-warming carbon dioxide, and then burying that pollution, the FutureGen power plant would make coal clean.
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Burning coal provides half the electricity in the U.S. and one third of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. Capturing that carbon dioxide and storing it will be essential if climate change induced by such pollution is to be averted, according to reports from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dubbed carbon capture and storage (or carbon sequestration), such technology will be fully demonstrated for the first time near Mattoon in southeastern Illinois, the FutureGen Alliance (a public–private partnership to build a prototype clean-coal plant) announced.
"[Mattoon] has a reliable and assured water source. It has excellent geologic structure and conditions for carbon sequestration," says Lawrence Pacheco, a spokesman for the alliance of 14 of the largest coal burners and miners in the world, including American Electric Power in Columbus, Ohio, Australia-based BHP Billiton and China Huaneng Group headquartered in Beijing. "The goal is to break ground in 2009 and be operational in 2012."
The $1.5 billion power plant is expected to produce 275 megawatts of electricity by turning coal into gas, thereby removing impurities including CO2, and burning the resulting pure gas to turn turbines to produce power. Some of the power generated would be used to compress the CO2 and pump it deep underground to be permanently stored in saline aquifers. "It will never come out," says geologist Susan Hovorka of the University of Texas at Austin, who has been conducting carbon sequestration feasibility experiments. "It's moving through the tiny pores between the sand grains and it gets smeared, like grease on a tie."
Hovorka's initial experiments at an oil field northeast of Houston have shown that the CO2 behaves as expected, remaining trapped in the geologic formation. But it does have impacts, such as leaching out minerals in the rocks and corroding well equipment. "If you put undiluted weak acid into your plumbing, it will eat holes in it," Hovorka notes. "We observed that and it's not unexpected."
But despite some commercial demonstrations of such carbon sequestration technology, largely to help recover more oil from depleted fields, none have approached anywhere near the scale necessary to significantly impact the 9.3 billion metric tons of CO2—and rising—emitted every year from burning coal. The largest such project, the Sleipner West gas field under the North Sea, injects roughly one million metric tons of CO2 per year. "The issue on the sequestration side is making sure one can do it on a very large scale," says M.I.T. physicist Ernest Moniz. "Gasification looks today to be the lowest-cost option with carbon capture [but] there is no plant that integrates gasification with capture and sequestration."
The FutureGen power plant aims to fill that hole but has struggled with delays and mounting costs as the materials to build such a power plant become more expensive. The FutureGen Alliance therefore decided to announce the siting of the proposed plant over the objections of its primary government backer, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), which concurrently announced plans to demonstrate the feasibility of carbon sequestration in the deep geology of the region by injecting one million metric tons of CO2. "As the [DOE] has discussed with the FutureGen Alliance for the past several months, projected cost overruns require a reassessment of FutureGen's design," James Slutz, DOE's acting principal deputy assistant security for fossil energy, said in a statement.
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14 Comments
Add CommentIt seems to me that this is just an approach to extenting the profitablity of fossil fuels. We should be moving very aggressively to eliminate the burning of fossil fuels and developing nuclear energy sources. And by the way. What about the lose of atmospheric Oxygen from burning and sequestering of the Carbon Dioxide?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA fair point. There's no doubt that this kind of technique will extend the profitability of burning coal. But given that countries seem to continue to want to burn coal (the U.S. is building more than 100 coal plants in the next 10 years and China builds one a week) we better do something about all the carbon dioxide they will otherwise spew.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI recently read an article about getting biodiesel from algae. The algae is grown in bags and fed carbon dioxide, the ideal situation being setting up shop next to a power plant and using their emissions.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy point being maybe instead of trying to bury our garbage (sequestration) we should be recycling it (algae).
Is it me, or are none of the people developing these technologies communicating?
I saw a special on the History channel's Modern Marvels. The algae makes OXYGEN through photosynthesis. The dead algae can be turned into biodiesel. This sounds far better than carbon sequestration technology. How smart is it to force tons of corrosives under the foundation of a power plant. TV news near Chicago keeps saying this is a non-poluting plant.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs regards to China's plan to establish a power plant using coal as a raw material which really can produce hazardous compounds to the atmospher basically carbon compounds & CO_2 mean nothing to me personally. I belive the at the earily periods in the Earth, I belive photosynthetic plants dominate over respiratory organisms & animals. However, this days the reverse has happened. In this regard I wish the content of CO_2 increased in case if it has a contribution to increase these green plants which I like most.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA different (Swedish) technology for capturing CO2 from burning coal will be used in a plant under construction in Germany: Coal will be burned with pure oxygen rather than with air. This allows isolation of 100 % CO2 at low cost for sequestration.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs I understand, gasification is a process where (approximately) half of the coal is oxidyzed to CO2 while the other half is reduced to hydrocarbons, primarily methane.
Burning methane certainly generates more energy for each unit of CO2 released when compared to burning coal, but as I read the article, there is no process planned to extract these "other 50 %" of CO2 from burning methane as well for sequestration.
By the way: Transporting CO2 deep into the earth need not be feared as a new form of pollution, in contrast to creating and storing nuclear waste.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere are mountains, whole mountain ranges made up of carbonates, for which CO2 had been sequestered by biological processes.
Vulcanoes spew huge amounts of CO2 into the athmospere.... Nothing unnatural there.
By establishing another, new pathway in the carbon cycle (deep sequestration), release of CO2 into the athmosphere is reduced or prevented, and that is the point.
CO2 is not a problem in and of itself - plants or algae need it for their life as we need oxygen - but release of CO2 into the athmosphere is.
Carbon capture and sequestration is a dead end street. It is a waste of good money, because it is not a sustainable technology.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn this example $1.5 billion delivers a 275 MW powerplant. You can also buy a 1000 MW windpower plant for the same amount of money. And this wind powerplant never needs to digg or buy any coal.
The 330, 3 MW windturbines are maintained, year around, by only 8 engineers. The coal powerplant needs to employ about 200 persons to remain in operation.
Really, investing in a coal powered plant is a joke. You do this only when your money is already stuck in a otherwise useless coal mine.
Moreover the wind has a very constant yearly average. The daily variation of output of a windpowerplant may change with the wind speed, but this variation is more slowly than the electricity usage pattern on an average day. By controlling the amount of wind that is converted to electricity, the control problem of a coal fired plant can be compensated.
I still don't see how pumping [b]corrosive[/b] chemicals underground is a good idea. People don't like power plants af any kind in their back yard. A coal plant is efficient in terms of MW per acre of land. So coal could take up less people's back yards. People also like to make money off of receorces. Coal is good for jobs and the economy, where wind power only puts food on a few people's tables. I like the idea of clean coal plants for the sake of people I just what to make it [u]honestlly[/u] clean. Corrosives under ground is not clean. I like algae to clean emissions as oxygen is good for people too. Be good to earth, there isn't any place better to live.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswanna know more,we will see
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCoal plants are an inefficient method of energy conversion; usually in the 40-45% range because they must first convert the chemical energy (coal) into steam energy, then the steam energy into electrical energy. In the process, they presently utilize 12-15% of the electrical energy produced for powering SO2/NOX/ash removal equipment. If they use an additional 20-30% of the generated power to remove CO2; they are really ineffective energy conversion plants.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHydroelectric plants have an energy conversion efficiency (potential energy of the stored water to electrical energy) of greater than 80% "with zero emissions". We have 80,000 "existing " dams in the U.S. (Ref. Hydro Review magazine,Sept 2007, "National Inventory of Dams"), but only 3% of these dams are used to generate electrical power. Estimates range from 23,000 MW to over 30,000 MW of power that could be generated from these "existing" dams. Why don't we utilize this source of energy?
The Illinois Clean Coal Institute is seeking Statements of Interest (SOI) for coal development projects that will lead to the increased utilization of Illinois coal in an environmentally acceptable manner.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFor more information visit: http://www.lincenergy.us
The Illinois Clean Coal Institute is seeking Statements of Interest (SOI) for coal development projects that will lead to the increased utilization of Illinois coal in an environmentally acceptable manner.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFor more information visit: http://www.lincenergy.us
Capture and sequestration of CO2 at coal burning is a total waste of money. Even if the technology is developed, the costs would be prohibitive. Current use of CO2 for enhanced oil recovery uses naturally produced CO2 which is reinjected into oil-bearing strata to force the oil out.
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