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First CO2-free coal power plant announced
Coal is almost the perfect fuel. It's cheap and absurdly abundant -- especially in the United States, which has the world's larges reserves. There's just that tiny problem of massive climate-altering carbon dioxide emissions. Or is there?The FutureGen Alliance -- a coalition of private power companies and the U.S. Department of Energy -- thinks it can make power cleanly by siphoning off the carbon dioxide and Unlike a regular coal power plant, the FutureGen plant won't actually burn coal but gasify it by exposing powdered coal to oxygen in a high-pressure heated chamber. The system yields several gases which are processed into hydrogen, which burns in a turbine to produce electricity, and carbon-dioxide, which is Proponents say that gasification is easier than capturing CO2 from a regular power plant because it produces it produces a smaller volume of exhaust and it easily traps most other pollutants from coal, such as Mercury. Assuming that global warming is true and all this is somehow necessary: Is it just me or does it seem that eventually the Earth is going to want to burp this stuff up? You can't put too much pressure on the containment geology or it's going to crack and leak, if it isn't leaking already. Maybe it would be better to pump this stuff into the void between Al Gore's ears. What is so wrong with a Thorium reactor or solar that they need to pray that all this weird stuff actually works in the long run instead of making a bigger bomb that our grandkids would have to deal with rather than the smaller bomb our kids would have to? Posted by: gorb 2007-12-20 |
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