Coal: it ain’t just the CO2, it’s also the ’soot’
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Posted on June 13, 2007
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Greenhouse gas emissions, Fossil fuel dependency
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
Democratic leaders are considering providing $10 billion worth of direct government loans to the coal industry for coal-to-liquid fuel (CTL) . This was in the papers today. Supposedly the loans would cover up to half the cost of a new power plant and would be contingent on building plants that capture and sequester the CO2 emitted during production. This is very expensive and unproven technology, but there you have it. Read more about the proposal and related issues in this NY Times article.
Research and experiments continue, and if you want to know a lot more about this capture and sequester technology, check out this page at Geotimes from 2003. The caution:
One of the biggest challenges for the long term, says Scott Klara, product manager for the carbon sequestration program in the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory, will be finding ways to verify that any buried carbon dioxide is staying put — that is, monitoring for leaks. If large amounts of the greenhouse gas are buried in geologic formations, enough small leaks over time could undo the advantages of sequestration, he says. “Catastrophic levels are going to be easy to find and really are improbable,” Klara says . The small leaks and seepage that can happen through microfractures present the largest monitoring challenge, he adds.
Another factor is time. In truth, there are very few power plants that are being constructed with this technology, and very few will be up and running, should the technology prove workable and safe, in the next couple of decades. Read more here from the Sydney Morning Herald.
So coal will remain the dirtiest of all fossil fuels for some time to come. The planet does not have this kind of time. We are still faced with the urgent need to reduce our energy consumption overall through more efficiency and conservation, through curbing of our energy-intensive lifestyles. That will do a whole lot more for the planet than CSS technology, and right now it would be a whole lot more responsible for Congress to subsidize that.
Like stringent new standards on vehicle emissions and gas mileage!
Now I keep harping on the other ecologically damaging aspects of coal-mining, as you know, because it just keeps annoying me that the debate around coal is so narrowly focused on CO2 and global warming, as if nothing else is going on. In reality, coal production is opening gaping wounds in our Earth while giving us the false promise that all this destruction will keep our lifestyles in place. This, of course, is the logic of the industrial age that has led us to the ecological crisis that we now face — the logic that says we can keep ravaging the Earth to fuel our economic growth.
Independence from foreign oil is not the most important priority for energy policy; saving our planet is. It’s not the source of energy that needs to change first, it’s the logic of this system that thinks we can forever provide a comfortable way of life while degrading the Earth.
So here is one more factor to consider. It’s not just the CO2 produced by coal; it’s also the soot. And now studies show this is a greater factor in the warming of the Arctic than CO2 emissions. I found this info in yesterday’s NY Times Science section. Here’s the link.
The study just published by the Journal of Geophysical Research shows that soot, from coal-fired power plants, tailpipes, wood-burning and agricultural fires, is dirtying the snow in the Arctic, darkening it — a phenomenon, the article points out, that is very familiar to we urban dwellers. Nice bright white snow radiates a lot of the sun’s heat back out into the atmosphere, while darker snow absorbs it.
The study indicates that this phenomenon may contribute a third or more to Arctic warming. Together, the two — greenhouse gases plus soot — help explain why the warming in the Arctic is so dramatic in the past 3 or so decades.
For more info, go to Dirty snow may warm Arctic as much as greenhouse gases,, an article at Physorg.com that comes from the University of California at Irvine. Scientists there conducted the study.
So let’s force Congress to enlarge this conversation. We can’t hope to come up with a long term plan for providing the energy that human beings need to live if we keep destroying the Earth under our feet and the air we breathe, and if we threaten to push the atmosphere beyond the temperature ranges that made the evolution of homo sapiens possible.
Technorati Tags: soot and warming arctic, coal-to-liquid, liquified coal, capture and sequester, carbon dioxide emissions, energy efficiency, senate energy bill
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2 Responses to “Coal: it ain’t just the CO2, it’s also the ’soot’”
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With nuclear power at the refinery, there is no soot or c02. The coal residue is placed back in the mine it came out of. The liquid coal would burn cleaner than the existing diesel it replaces. I agree we need to conserve. I have been a fuel conserver since 1982, and plan to continue. The US is far from a leader on this issue. China just set their CAFE to 40mpg, and in Europe, the average car reportedly already gets 40mpg. The Hummer H2 is the real enemy, not clean liquid coal from a pebble bed nuclear reactor. Oil production is going to fall off to nearly nothing in the next 35 years, and there will be 9 billion mouths to feed. Counter to your evolutionary position, surrvival of the fittest will not happen as mass starvation consumes those trapped in large cities. A small fragment will exist on local farms or small communities that have a local agriculture to support them. Don’t expect ethanol or biodiesel to save us. If 100% of our land went into fuel production, we still could not support our basic needs of food production and transportation.
http://www.liquidcoal.com/pdf/Nuclear%20Refineries%2008%20May%202007.pdf
obewan
“evolutionary position?” I don’t know what you mean by that. Survival of the fittest is certainly not our philosophy here, deeply rooted as we are in the matter of justice and equity.
Actually we are in favor of quite considered and deliberate human ingenuity in this matter of the energy needs of the future. But we reject wholeheartedly the false choice of coal/nuclear v. mass starvation. If we continue developing as we have over the past two centuries, destroying the Earth for the energy needs of the human, there won’t be any humans one day.
Nuclear energy will not solve our problem. It is too expensive and too dangerous. Will it play a part? It does now and will continue for some time until we have the technology to wean ourselves from it. Meanwhile, we continue to be saddled with the responsibilities of safe waste disposal and global security because of proliferation issues.
But nuclear to create clean coal technology? Even if this monumental task could be done, the water requirements and the destruction caused by mountain-topping and strip mining would bring untold horrors to local communities. We need water more than fuel for our cars.
In the end, like it or not, in order to meet the energy needs of the future, including the 2-3 billion people about to join us, we must redefine ‘needs.’ And we in rich countries have got to start living differently, down the energy chain, to something that is actually sustainable in terms of all the rich gifts of the Earth — it’s aquifers and mountains and forests and streams and natural habitats and ecosystems. Otherwise we will simply be powering ourselves towards our own extinction.
We need to go local in producing what we NEED — re-creating the local family farm economy, developing local renewable energy sources to power our homes, building clean, efficient mass transit systems, and more. We need to ratchet down our energy consumption drastically and learn to live simply again.
As response to the link on your comment, here’s one on CTL a bit more from our perspective: http://www.sierraclub.org/coal/downloads/2007-04liquidcoalfactsheet.pdf