When I talked to Rep. Jay Inslee, he specifically asked me to emphasize to readers the distinction between coal gasification (that is, producing electricity in IGCC coal plants) and coal-to-liquids (that is, producing liquid diesel fuel from coal via the Fischer-Tropsch process).
The former might some day be environmentally tolerable, if accompanied by carbon sequestration. The latter will never be tolerable, because even if the CO2 created in manufacturing is sequestered, the fuel itself releases twice as much CO2 as gasoline when combusted.
Inslee said that CTL proponents are deliberately trying to confuse legislators and the public by wedging CTL under the "clean coal" banner alongside IGCC. But it's not clean. For my part, I plead guilty to confusing the two in several past posts. Never again!
Anyway, the coal industry and its allies are conducting an all-out PR push to get CTL plants subsidized and built. But they're pulling some of the same flim-flammery as IGCC proponents. That is, when they discuss the costs of CTL, they don't include carbon sequestration (a technology that, when it comes to CTL, basically doesn't exist yet). But when they discuss the environmental impacts of CTL, they include carbon sequestration.
This Christian Science Monitor piece gives a good rundown. Watch this bait and switch:
But CTL supporters say the industry would produce "clean fuel" that helps the environment by putting out fewer smog-forming nitrous oxides and other chemicals than regular diesel fuel. If 85 percent of CO2 from coal-to-liquid refineries could be captured and stored, CTL diesel fuel would then have about the same emissions as a gallon of regular diesel, they say.
"By the time this first fleet of CTL plants is constructed, that technology will be there and we'll be using it," [Coal-to-Liquids Coalition spokesflack Corey] Henry says.
Such a promise was called into question in a DOE environmental impact filing in December, which reported that a leading CTL development had no near-term plan to capture any of the 2.3 million tons of CO2 it would produce annually. The $800 million project, which would make 5,000 barrels of CTL fuel a day in Gilberton, Pa., is part of an industry push where CO2 capture costs are frequently not factored into the bottom line of the business plan, Wall Street analysts say.
Here's the take-home message. When it comes to CTL, we have two choices:
- CTL + carbon sequestration: This will be grotesquely expensive, and will only happen with massive government subsidies. The net result will be a liquid fuel that is just as bad for the atmosphere as current liquid fuels.
- CTL without carbon sequestration: This might be economically viable without subsidies, but it would be an utter disaster in terms of global warming.
Here's a third choice: URGE2.
Coal is the enemy of the human race. The coal industry is desperately trying to keep itself alive with boondoggles like CTL. There's absolutely no reason we should help it along with huge taxpayer subsidies. Just let coal die.
Copenhagen, U.S.A. December 7
Comments
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Sam Wells Posted 10:07 am
05 Mar 2007
Man, the truth is that when you heat coal for coal gas is creates gas and liquids. The Fischer-Tropsch method takes it one step further by using cataysts to convert CO and H to gasoline and diesel mixtures.
Hey, wasn't that how Hitler made diesel for his tanks when they invaded Africa?
Anyway, weither is synthetic and both outcomes are plain old organic compounds with the same ole greenhouse gas problem.
To retrun to my point, though, what would anybody gain by these technologies, when a powerplant can run just fine on powerderized coal? Wouldn't you waste any benefits by making coal gas or fake diesel, and net-out about even?
Don't both coking processes make huge amounts of solid wate that is toxic? I mean at least coal ash can be encapsulated in concrete - for use in construction - not so with the other technologies.
I do detect some politics at work here, since anything to do with coal really sucks. /sammie
Onward through the fog
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GRLCowan Posted 10:43 am
05 Mar 2007
But it's certainly plausible that ~1 times the CO2 per joule of petroleum-derived diesel would come out the vehicle tailpipe, and another ~1 times at the CTL plant. That's why billions of motorists-to-be in Asia are going to make a lot of CO2, if nothing better than oil combustion turns up for the cars they are going to get, and probably we'll have to sequester it over here. Or start to do so, anyway, and shame them into doing likewise.
--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goes
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Laurence Aurbach Posted 11:17 am
05 Mar 2007
Here are some references for IGCC:
The National Energy Technology Laboratory
FutureGen Alliance
Turning Black Coal Green (PopSci, Feb 2007)
The one prototype FutureGen plant will take 6-7 years from design to commissioning, if all goes as advertised. Is it just me, or does that seem like an impossibly slow schedule for reforming the entire industry in time to mitigate climate change impacts?
Also, I'm not so sure IGCC will ever be environmentally tolerable as long as coal mining impacts continue, like mountaintop removal/valley fill, subsidence, aquifer disruption, high-volume water consumption, acidic runoff, other air and water contamination, ecosystem destruction, etc.
IGCC would merely be better than the status quo, and it might help to head off catastrophic climate change. CO2 sequestration of coal is far from ideal, but might be the best we can make of the situation.
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GreyFlcn Posted 12:20 pm
05 Mar 2007
However I do think coal could play some role.
"Air Blown" IGCC plants look pretty nice at 55% effeciency. Since it doesn't need purified oxygen to run. And cuts water usage by 70%.
The real catch being, you don't need to use coal. You could use algae BioMass instead.
_
But what REALLY gets interesting is Direct Carbon Fuel Cells.
It operated at 70-80% effeciency. And uses no water.
Or it could be operated at 33% effeciency generating liquid diesel fuels, and 31% effeciency generating electricity.
But once again, the real interesting part is if this is all done using Algae biomass instead of using Coal.
Could have some reliable renewable power that fills the gaps between solar and wind.
And it wouldn't just be baseload like IGCC, it'd also be useful for peaker power like natural gas.
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GreyFlcn Posted 12:22 pm
05 Mar 2007
Then use Biomass-to-Liquid.
Win-win
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amazingdrx Posted 2:37 pm
05 Mar 2007
No cO2 produced in the refining. If the diesel is used in a plugin serial hybrid with over 200mpg, the total emissions are cut from very high mileage and wind electric power charging the plugin cars and renewable powered no CO2 refining.
Oil refining could be done with wind electric power too. When demand from utility customers drops, wind could be used to refine extra fuel products. Renewable power stored in liquid fuel.
Wind would be great for tar sands too. Both coal and tar sands to liquid could be done with electric plasma drills. They can be sent down into the deposit and the liquids come up the drill pipe for refining.
The only other really clean coal would be methane from coal deposits injected with bacteria that make coal into biogas. This would work with tar sands and oil as well. A lot of oil is sour or unretrievable.
This source of natural gas would last 100+ years. Enough time to solve our energy problems.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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GreenEngineer Posted 3:17 am
06 Mar 2007
I would submit that taking a hard-line "kill coal" stance is likely to do more harm than good: it gives your opponents an excuse to marginalize you, and it plays into their tactics of lumping all coal technologies together under a single banner. A more nuanced approach (distinguishing IGCC from CTL from fluidized bed technology, etc) is both more realistic, and may help separate the really bad ideas from the merely bad.
Also, consider this: An IGCC plant (or better, a direct carbon fuel cell) with waste heat capture to a district heating system (cogeneration) can achieve a total efficiency upwards of 80%. Burning coal with an 80% efficiency produces less carbon than burning natural gas with 35% efficiency (in a conventional plant) and then supplying heat with yet more gas. The mining impacts are a problem, to be sure. But even without sequestration, coal can be an effective, relatively low-carbon energy source, if used properly. (Yes, you can apply these same techniques to natural gas plants, and do even better. But coal's what we have, and what we're going to have in the future. We'd better figure out how to use it properly, or it will simply be used improperly.)
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GreyFlcn Posted 3:45 am
06 Mar 2007
Or the housing density would be so low, that it'd be rather pointless.
So lets peg AirBlown IGCC at 55% effeciency.
And as to not oversell DCFC, lets call it 70% effeciency, by using it's lower bound.
Direct Carbon Fuel Cells (Which are actually just an enhanced version of Molten Carbonate Fuel Cells)
Those actually do lend themselves to onsite cogenerated heating.
Since they have an operating temperature of 750°C
And that might be what the difference is between the 70% and the 80%.
_
But really when you compare IGCC to DCFC, the DCFC costs less. Berkeley Livermoore Labs is claiming $1000 per kW of installed capacity.
Which is suprisingly inexpensive, even by conventional Coal, Wind, and Nuclear standards.
http://eed.llnl.gov/co2/7.php
http://www.sara.com/RAE/carbon_fuel.html
http://www.fuelcellsworks.com/Supppage5634.html
http://www.sri.com/news/releases/11-11-05.html
http://thefraserdomain.typepad.com/energy/2005/12/direct_ ...
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GreenEngineer Posted 3:47 am
06 Mar 2007
http://tinyurl.com/yp9993
http://tinyurl.com/32wajm
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GreyFlcn Posted 4:02 am
06 Mar 2007
But apparently those yard clippings that cities take in the yard waste recycling bin.
Those actually don't get used for agriculture.
Most the time, it's just used as an "alternative daily cover" dirt layer ontop of landfills.
_
Best part about using Biomass instead of coal
You wouldn't have to worry about all the nasty sulfur or mercury present in Coal.
Or also, instead of Coal. Use Charcoal.
Which is essentially just biomass thats been burned at very low oxygen content.
Either way, scrapping the need for emmisions reduction technology would go a long way to making Biomass cost competative with Coal.
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GreenEngineer Posted 4:13 am
06 Mar 2007
I assume you're refering to carbon sequestration specifically. Air quality is still an issue with either technology, though in both cases, gasification is a big improvement over direct combustion. But, yes, coal + CO2 sequestration is probably on par with, or more expensive than, biomass gasification.
We need a clear carbon policy so damn bad...
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Delay And Deny Posted 5:03 am
06 Mar 2007
Gristers need a Chemistry Class...it doesn't have to be Orgo -- it's not like you guys are pre-med here. But remember all these fuels are basically the same.
Coal. Carbon. Hydrogen.
Oil. Carbon. Hydrogen.
Gasoline Carbon. Hydrogen.
Hydrogen Water Hydrogen.
So, it's not what the fuel is, but how we process it. Ultimately there could be a solid fuel "cell" that could strip out the hydrogen and convert it to electricity.
Anything is possible...so don't close off options. Coal could be the cleanest of the clean.
The Texeme Construct offers international text memetics construction and textcasting services.
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GreyFlcn Posted 5:45 am
06 Mar 2007
Infact I think carbon sequestration is bunk.
What I'm refering to is that by exclusively using biomass inside a Direct Carbon Fuel Cell.
You would forgo the need for virtually any sort of Air Toxics Removal.
And from what I'm aware, the Air Toxics Removal is a very expensive part of making a coal fired power plant.
_
So by using the difference in cost of not having any Air Toxics Removal
You could then apply that to the increased cost of Biomass.
_
The other advantage, without any form of air toxics removal, it'd be impossible to use Coal in this system.
Since you'd need to remove Sulfur and Mercury.
So that tends to force the fuel choice.
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JMG Posted 7:10 am
06 Mar 2007
Bountiful supplies of oil thus assured, there's obviously no reason to fear anyone will do something both exotic and stupid like trying to make liquid fuels from coal.
(It does make one wonder why, when there's no peak in sight, those silly oil companies are investing so much in canadian tar sands and in extreme deep water drilling. Apparently they haven't consulted enough economists to know that there's no end to the increased volume of oil that we can expect for--well, forever, apparently, since anyone who denies that oil will peak is arguing that we will never reach a peak in oil production.)
Meanwhile, let's just go back to pretending that peak oil and global warming are seperate problems. It'll be like doing coupled differential equations: MUCH easier when you just assume the boundary values that you need to make the problems tractable. And if any little snots ask why there's such a push to turn high-carbon sources into oil replacements, we'll just refer them to Scorse, who can assure them that there's nothing to worry about and that concern about peak oil is just so last year ....
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Gar Lipow Posted 9:47 am
06 Mar 2007
Coal. Carbon. Hydrogen.
Oil. Carbon. Hydrogen.
Gasoline Carbon. Hydrogen.
Hydrogen Water Hydrogen.
Correct to:
Coal - Carbon. Almost no hydrogen (minumum of 50% carbon by weigh, very low ratio of hydrogen atoms to carbon atoms (varies depending on other hydrocarbons in coal).
Oil Carbon. Very little hydrogen (mostly various forms of CnH2)
Gas Carbon. Significant amount of hydrogen (CH4)
Natural gas (methane) has higher ratios of hydrogen to carbon atoms than other fossil fuels, and thus produces fewer carbon emissions per BTU.
Incidentally the comparison of the most efficient coal to the least efficent gas is absurd. The most efficient large scale combined cycle turbines, mature technology, commerically available turnkey have a theoretical efficiency of 60% and get around 55% efficiency in practice. Because they reach full economy of scale in sizes as small as 3 MW, you can use them in commercial buildings and factories for combined heat and power, which means that in practice you could burn the cleaner, less carbon intensive fuel as or more efficiently than coal.
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GreyFlcn Posted 2:12 pm
06 Mar 2007
Bountiful supplies of oil thus assured, there's obviously no reason to fear anyone will do something both exotic and stupid like trying to make liquid fuels from coal.
I think you misunderstand what Peak Oil is.
It's not saying that we're running dry on oil.
It says the next half of the oil will be progressively more expensive.
_
Furthermore, what with the slogan of "Energy Independance from Foriegn Nations"
Chances are they will still proceed doing exactly what they've been doing.
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treehugger399 Posted 5:21 am
20 Apr 2008
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