If there's anything that could drag me out of my hungover stupor today, it's some bad news for coal, and luckily there's plenty of it!
Get this AP story:
At least 16 coal-fired power plant proposals nationwide have been scrapped in recent months and more than three dozen have been delayed as utilities face increasing pressure due to concerns over global warming and rising construction costs.
The slow pace of new plant construction reflects a dramatic change in fortune for a fuel source that just a few years ago was poised for a major resurgence.
[happy dance]
It's important to note that the risk of carbon regulation is part of the story, but not the whole story:
Meanwhile, material costs and demand for skilled labor has prompted plant costs to spike 40 percent or more. Industry representatives blamed increased competition from China and other developing nations aggressively pursuing new coal plants.
"This is like a tsunami attacking the whole industry all at once, with very limited amounts of solutions going forward," said Daniele Seitz, an industry analyst with Dahlman Rose and Co. in New York.
What does this mean to coal-state legislators? Take a wild guess:
A spokesman for U.S. Sen. John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican, said the Energy Department report shows more incentives are needed to help utilities develop cleaner coal-fired plants. Wyoming is the largest coal producer in the nation.
You know what they say about how everything looks to the guy with the hammer ...
A milestone: 100th coal plant stopped
McCaskill says House climate bill will sink in Senate
Coal-nundrum and Ex-gas-peration
Comments
View as Flat
Sam Wells Posted 11:38 am
18 Oct 2007
Good Coal
I am very glad to hear that many of the 150 planned coal fired electrical generation plants are stopping or delaying their plans.
That said, like corn (another thread) there is nothing inherently wrong with coal in small doses. Smite me with words if you want, but a tons or two burned here and there really isn't all that bad. The problem is these huge users that require 100 car trains once or twice a week.
I was a blacksmith apprentice for about a year and really enjoyed it. We'd burn maybe a ton every year or two but there's no way to make ornamental iron, knifes, and other cool stuff without a real hearth. It was fun in the winter when it was cold as heck. I learned a lot about steel grades, fullering, heat treating, tempering, and sharpening.
Nasty, smoky, and dirty, yes, yes, yes. But our test for knives was to hang a 1/4 inch rope from the ceiling, no weight, just dangling loose. If you could cut it clean in one swoop the knife was done. It did take practice.
Shame, due to environmental regs us poor small blacksmith guys (any gals out there?) got the kybosh while HUGE coal power plants were planned to come online. That really sucked. It ain't coal that is the problem, it's how we use the stuff.
Onward through the fog
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JMG Posted 3:17 pm
18 Oct 2007
Even better
A coal plant rejected due to CO2 concerns!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007 ...
Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.
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GreenEngineer Posted 3:44 pm
18 Oct 2007
forging
Can't you use charcoal? Not that coal per se is a problem in those quantities (very little is a global-scale problem in non-industrial volumes), but if you're having trouble getting coal...
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caniscandida Posted 7:30 pm
18 Oct 2007
quibbling
Just as it is not true that coal is THE enemy of the human race, as if it were the one-and-only enemy -- to say nothing of how it is at least as much an enemy of lots of other living creatures -- ; so, it is apparently not true, on the basis of this AP story, that ALL the human race "figures it out." E.g., have the Chinese got there yet?
Still, why not, it is as fine a time for a happy dance as any.
Sammie,
I did not know that coal is used by blacksmiths. But I am not surprised. Probably it is the same thing with the furnaces used for glass-blowing, an art that fascinates and terrifies me equally.
Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.
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Ron Steenblik Posted 9:02 pm
18 Oct 2007
Costs of constructing plants
It would be ironic, but I wonder whether part of the reason for the rising costs of labour and materials for building new coal plants is due in part to the artificially stimulated demand for construction crews to build new ethanol plants.
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Sean Casten Posted 11:16 pm
18 Oct 2007
Ron - no link there
The costs for power plant construction are going up for 3 reasons, largely unrelated:
- The china effect. China is building lots of everything, and this has driven up costs for all the raw materials that go into power plants, from steel to copper. Some of this is probably speculative (it's a good time to be in the commodities business), but the underlying increase in demand is dramatic. ANY think that has cast iron in it is probably 30 - 50% more expensive today than it was 5 years ago. (Take this from a guy who's bought a lot of industrial turbines and generators over that period, and gotten slapped around with a lot of sticker shock.)
- Pollution control. The overwhelming majority of our existing coal fleet predates the Clean Air Act, and was grandfathered out of compliance. New coal plants have to add all sorts of backend equipment (baghouses, scrubbers, etc.) that the old coal plants didn't have to. In aggregate, this just about doubles the installed cost of the facility. It also lowers the generating efficiency, which has the perverse effect of (a) increasing the cost of power, since we have to burn more fuel to make a MWh and (b) increasing the carbon emissions from coal plants since we have to burn more fuel to make a MWh. This is one of the greatest unappreciated failings of the clean air act, but that's a subject for another post.
- Capacity factor. For the last 30 years, we haven't really had to build much new baseload power. We had spare reserve margin in the coal plants, spare reserve margin in the nukes and could get by just building gas peakers. But as load has grown (and generation fleet has not), those coal and nuke plants are now just about maxed out. Which meaans that there is all of a sudden a massive rush to put a lot of capital in the ground, compounding the demand issues associated with the china effect, and adding on lots of extra $ for pollution control.
These are obviously really big issues, affecting billions of dollars of generation capital. Ethanol is largely irrelevant to this story, other than the indirect effect of slightly increasing demand for steel as well for those plants. But that demand is trivial relative to Chisna, and isn't exactly anything to get upset about, inasmuch as this is true of any economic growth.Permalink
Biodiversivist Posted 11:32 pm
18 Oct 2007
The price of copper is also through the roof
as is anything else I can think of.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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Jon Rynn Posted 1:05 am
19 Oct 2007
Here's an ny times article from july
on costs of coal plants surging
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Sam Wells Posted 2:20 am
19 Oct 2007
Right on Sean
Major power boiler companies such as for coal fuels (with natural gas start-up) are mostly located overseas now, with names like Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.
Now the dollar is so low it makes exports profitable but imports extremely expensive, especially from EU countries (e.g., the turbine). The Chinese Yuan is begged pretty much to the dollar but still there are shipping costs as well.
Need I mention that heavy industry took a huge beating in the U.S. and we simply don't have the iron workers, pipe-fitters, and steam boiler workers like we used to - I mean check out the Great Lakes heavy industry centers and all you'll see is miles of abandoned warehouses with broken windows.
Canis - most small time blacksmithing is done with coal in a small fire where you put the metal IN the coals and turn on a blower that can get you direct heat. Basically you heat up existing metal until it glows red-orange and throws off sparks, and then hammer, bend, twist, fold, or whatever before it cools. The best blacksmiths, incidentally, were perhaps the makers of real Samurai swords in Japan.
Most glass-blowing is done in electric pots (like for firing pottery) using indirect heat - in other words, in a crucible pot instead of an open flame. The idea is to melt cullet (broken glass of certain colors or qualities) and maybe add some compounds for coloring, or more pure silica, or whatever you want. Special cooling oven are required because if molten blown glass cools too quickly it can explode - so it's hot work as well.
Onward through the fog
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Jon Rynn Posted 2:24 am
19 Oct 2007
Sam, speaking of tanker emissions...
...hope this is somehwat on topic, because it's a big emissions problem, but from BBC:
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Sam Wells Posted 3:37 am
19 Oct 2007
Coal and ships
Back a century or so in the past there were mostly coal-fired reciprocating ship engines. Today the few steamships are all steam-turbine, maybe 5% of the fleet. Coal simply was too difficult to manage on ships, and it required large crews of firemen to keep the boilers lit. Modern motorships are rated 8,000 to 100,000 HP and only require a Chief Engineer and three mates, one per watch.
What a lot of people don't know is the all coal fired boilers must be cleaned now and then. This involves stack blowing and boiler tube cleaning. The kinds of crust that build up inside the pipes and stacks is similar in heat resistance to asbestos, so it must be cleaned or the boiler will fail to work. It is nasty, dangerous work.
Even the waste from an oil-fired boiler is tremendous. I had the pleasure of watching a steamship "blow its tubes" off Brownsville TX and it shit a stretch that covered a good part of the sky, and the next morning we had toxic black stuff washing up all over our beaches. Of course, the authorities didn't do anything ...
/sam
Onward through the fog
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carfree Posted 3:41 am
19 Oct 2007
AP Reports on the impact of the Kansas decision
What is that giant sucking sound? The sound of big capital headed out of coal and into green energy. Thanks Republican-stacked Supreme Court who declared we really should do something about global warming back in April.
Once conservatives realize there is money to be made building the sustainable energy economy, this argument will be over.
Today is a tipping point.
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Sean Casten Posted 4:12 am
19 Oct 2007
Sam
You're partly true, but modern ships are increasingly gas turbine powered. (We used to hire lots of steam turbine jocks from the Navy, but as the Navy has shifted their fleet over, we've had to look elsewhere.)
If you're into the history of ship propulsions systems, pick up a Churchill biography. (Or Yergin's The Prize.) He made his name in WWI by converting the British Navy to oil-fired ships, which gave them a huge tactical advantage because they could now accelerate/manuever much more quickly (since a coal ship is only as flexible as the dude with the shovel). That got a lot of credit for British naval superiority in WWI, and helped him get his later job in WWII. At which point it became pretty important for Britain to develop strategic links to places that had oil, since Britain only had coal. Which led to the creation of national petroleum companies (the predecessors of BP and Shell) and a few small investments in the Persian gulf.
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