At Issue in the 21st Century: Coal-Fired Power Plants
As we bump along into a new year, perhaps it’s time to ask ourselves: What do the world’s scientists tell us about our course vis-à-vis sustainability? Well, a lot of things, really. For example, our oceans are over-fished and filled with mercury, and the natural mineral content of our farmland is so depleted that the chemical fertilizers and poisons we’ve chosen to mitigate the damage is crippling our environment, while leaving us with food increasingly lacking in nutritional content.
This could be the beginning of a very long list, so I’ll skip ahead to the granddaddy of them all: our society’s burning coal for energy. In brief, the developing world expects to enable its huge and ever-growing populations to enjoy the fruits of cheap and abundant energy in the 21st Century, the same way the developed world did in the 19th and 20th Centuries. There’s a catch, though, as there often is. If we pull all that carbon out of the ground and release it into the atmosphere, we’ll cause catastrophic climate change, not to mention other forms of ecologic collapse of monumental proportion.
Here’s a great article that speaks to where we are in terms of the construction and operation of coal-fired power plants. Note that in five years, the amount of coal burned around the globe every year will increase by an additional 1.2 billion metric tons — an amount roughly equivalent to the current annual coal consumption of the U.S. and Russia combined.
It just occurred to me to describe the whole problem this way. The Coal is connected to Oil via nuclear energy (in a negative sense) So now the problem is even more interesting to solve for the economic stability. ..but the Climate the first and the foremost (and what remains underground is always good for the future generations to own and explore ..and hidden from the Aliens at the same time)
The article makes it clear that reducing carbon emissions in the U.S. will make little difference on a global basis unless the developing nations stop increasing their carbon emissions. That is unlikely to occur unless we help them to implement energy systems that do not use fossil fuels.
India has a population about three times greater than that of the U.S. on a land area about one third as great, i.e., India has a population density about NINE TIMES that of the U.S. Even if we could make wind and solar power adequate and reliable in the U.S., that could not be done in India and other countries with exceedingly high population densities. The implications are clear and we must face them.
One of the ongoing realities of the 21st century is the global retreat from other nations using the US as a template as to how they will conduct their political, cultural and environmental affairs. We seem to think that if we stridently and demonstrably declare our passion and commitment to sustainability and a clean environment, the rest of the world will follow suit. The fact is that despite our military might, there are vast swathes of this earth that could care less what the US does or does not consider important.
Which brings us to coal
In my opinion the way forward is for us to develop through technology and policy, the mechanisms for the coal industry to clean up its act. Currently there is little incentive to do this as coal perceives itself to be despised and under attack. After all, why bother cleaning up your act if you’re going to be legislatively put out of business anyway?
The fact is that there are numerous ways to make coal viable. The simplest is to burn coal in an atmosphere of pure oxygen or oxy-combustion. This eliminates most of the particulate matter and nitrous oxide emissions. The resulting flue gas is a relatively pure stream of CO2 which can be dealt with via Windfuels or used for algae cultivation or enhanced oil recovery.
Other methods to mitigate coal’s deleterious effects include chemically pretreating the coal prior to combustion, reduce coal usage per MW via hybrid solar or nuclear production and underground coal gasification.
Another interesting development is the ‘farming’ of coal by introducing genetically engineered microbes into underground coal beds which consume the coal and secrete natural gas
This where the US could provide leadership and much needed jobs and tax revenues by exporting this technology and using it domestically.
Let’s try to embrace the challenges of coal and solve its shortcomings rather than attacking it and trying to ban it.
Simply using the emitted CO2 to grow algae will not solve the CO2 emissions problems unless some way can be found to get rid of the CO2-fed algae so that the CO2 will not be re-emitted when the algae decay.
It is questionable whether coal can actually be cleaned up since doing so requires finding a way to sequester the emitted CO2 permanently. We will have to stop using fossil fuels as a significant source of the world’s energy. In all likelihood, nuclear power will have to be used to meet most of the world’s energy requirements. Therefore, we must implement safer and more economical nuclear technologies than the ones we are now using.
I totally agree that nuclear is the way to go, however I’m not sure it will fly in developing countries.
That’s a good point. I can think of developing countries where I would not like to see nuclear power because I question their political stability and technical expertise. However, I think that India and China would be good candidates and both emit hugh amounts of CO2.
Remote villages in developing countries could benefit greatly from renewables because people there would find two 2-watt LED lights per house and the ability to recharge cell phones very helpful. Even if the power were not very reliable, they’d still be much better off. But as a major source of power for large countries, I do not believe that wind and solar are capable of doing the job.
Hydropower works well in some areas, although it has created serious problems such as displacing hundreds of thousands of people. Geothermal may also have possibilities, but much more work needs to be done to determine if it can be accessed economically and safely.