phanly’s Recent Comments

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  The New York Times article "A Sea Change in China's Attitude Toward Carbon Capture"
     ( http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2009/06/22/22climatewire-a-sea-change-in-chinas-attitude-toward-carbo-94519.html )
  published 22 June 2009 says in part:
     "China's first near-zero-emissions coal plant won state approval this month -- an apparent formality, since construction already is far under way. Two other pilots are in the works, including one in inner Mongolia that could be the largest sequestration project in the world. Conferences on carbon capture in China now routinely feature high-level government and industry leaders."

  In the absence of proper sources for the claim that there are 11 CCS plants in China I'll go with the NYT that there are no CCS coal fired power plants in China today, and with http://www.thisisreality.org/ that there are none.

  The IPCC says 25 to 40% reductions by developed (Annexe 1) countries are necessary by 2020. CCS for Coal fired power plants is widely acknowledged not to be existing now on a commercial at scale basis and industry proponents say it won't be commercially deployed by 2025. CCS is not a near term solution and may not ever be commercially viable. Every dollar spent on CCS research should be spent on wind and solar thermal which are deployed/able at scale although on a limited basis now and are very near grid parity and don't need to destroy mountains, have ash spills, emit Mercury etc.

   

   

   

  On What the heck is CCS and can it really help fight climate change? An expert explains posted 4 months, 1 week ago 8 Responses

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  When they stop building new coal fired power stations and start closing existing ones we will know they are acting on climate change.

  On Despite Ban Ki-Moon's complaint, G8 summit produced climate progress posted 4 months, 1 week ago 7 Responses

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  Where are the details for the 11 Chinese plants which have CCS available?

  What proportion of the CO2 emissions are captured and stored?

  What is the electricity output of the plants?

  I thought http://www.thisisreality.org claims there are no commercial scale Coal fired power plants with large scale CCS anywhere in the world today.

  On What the heck is CCS and can it really help fight climate change? An expert explains posted 4 months, 1 week ago 8 Responses

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  List economic organisations reports on Wikipedia

  Great article! Thanks.

  Please see:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_opinion_on_climate_ ...
  and list all major economic reports abut climate change under the appropriate heading.

  See also the Wikipedia page linked from there:
  Scientific opinion on climate change

  It is very useful to have all the major reports listed in one place
  On Most economists agree on the economics of climate change mitigation posted 9 months, 1 week ago 6 Responses

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  250 years at present rates of use???

  I am ignoring the climate change issues for this post.

  For a 1000 year resource where use is growing at 7% per annum the resource is exhausted after about 65 years.

  You can prove this yourself with an Excel spreadsheet if you know compounding interest formulae.

  In simple terms usage rate doubles every 10 years at 7%. So even ignoring the year by year usage after 10,20,30,40,50,60,70 years at 7% growth the 1000 year resource has to get divided by 2,4,8,16,32,64,128 to determine the remaining life. So if we ignored all use for the first 70 years, then, after 70 years at 7% growth per annum, the 1000 year resource will only last 7.8 years. Once you factor in the actual year on year use, the resource was actually totally used up after about 64 years.

  After 40 years, ignoring actual usage, a 250 year resource will only be good for 15.6 more years. Factor in the actual usage and the resource is gone before 40 years.

  There is a crisis coming with oil, coal and a host of other resources so we need to replace virtually all our coal and oil fired generation within about 50 years anyway, particularly with the increasing usage of and China, India.

  Cheers
  PaulOn Placing coal reserves into trust status would be a nice gift to our kids' future posted 1 year ago 6 Responses