I used to work in an office building where a co-worker complained of constant respiratory problems.  She searched high and low for the cause.  Our building was inspected numerous times because of her complaints.  But just outside...if you looked straight up the railroad tracks, right on the Potomac River just a mile upstream from our office in Quantico was a huge coal-fired plant.  It was the single largest point source for a huge number of pollutants anywhere near us.  We've got to kick this fossil fuel habit.  Get those lobbyists off the hill!

Wow, that's a huge capital cost -- much more than nuclear.  I think I'd rather deal with solid nuclear waste than sequestered CO2 as well.

Compared to solar, you could certainly get more nameplate capacity for less.  Solar is still around 4500 $/kW.  The drawback is the 20 % capacity factor compared to perhaps 75 % for coal.  The benefit is no fuel costs, trivial maintenance, and no unaccounted liabilities.

This does seem to suggest that advocating coal with sequestration is a great way to improve the market penetration of renewable energy sources.  

-- entropyproduction.blogspot.com

And $4500/KW for silicon solar panels.

We should note that this is a demo plant, and shouldn't presume that this is the permanent price, impossible to reduce with process advancement.

That said, even if they can strip 50% off the price (e.g., make it almost competitive with the current price of Clean Air Act-compliant, but without CO2 sequestering coal), it still doesn't pencil.  

But the silver (soot soaked, but I swear, silver underneath) lining is that if we ever build something this foolish, it will increase local power prices so much that all the clean stuff GreyFlcn describes comes on line, competes against it and drives massive equity losses to the IGCC investors.  Or, we could just start with the smart stuff.

In the interests of full disclosure...
We should note that this is a demo plant, and shouldn't presume that this is the permanent price, impossible to reduce with process advancement.

Perhaps, but all-things-being-equal thats true of all of those technologies.

So it's not much an argument to use ;D

Just looking out for our friends in the coal sector.  Lord knows they need it. : )

Just a note for rmcleod - solar plant maintenance is not trivial. The figures I have seen from the California SEGS units indicate the maintenance cost is significant. I surveyed a number of operating and proposed installations and found that maintenance cost amounted to 20% to 50% of the cost of electricity production.

Consider the obvious with regards to photovoltaics: no fuel costs.  

For the clean coal plant, 1 kW at 75 % capacity factor for a year is 31.5 GJ of energy.  Coal is about 21 GJ/short ton, or at 30 % burning efficiency produces 6.4 GJ electricity/ton.  Say $40/ton for bituminous stuff.  That works out to about $200 per year per kW of electrical capacity, just in the cost of coal.  Personal and maintenance are on top of that, let's say double.

Everyone knows that PV is front-loaded in the capital costs.  It's just they work for 25 years, guaranteed.  As long as the contacts don't corrode out, they should still be working in forty years.

Given the above numbers, over the cource of 25-years, PV is $22,500/kW delivered (capital divided by capacity factor $4500 / 0.2 [/kW]).  

If we consider coal maintenance roughly double fuel, or $400/kW then over 25-years of operation that 'clean coal' plant will require ($6500 + $400/year*25year) / 0.75 [/kW] = $22,000/kW.

That's basically saying that only the cost of borrowing money is putting 'clean coal' ahead of PV, and we're not assigning coal any future liabilities.

If this is the 'future of coal', then coal has no future.

-- entropyproduction.blogspot.com

Nucbuddy:

You are mis-reading that particular section, and it's thermodynamically impossible anyway.

Look up in the heading "Storage & sequestration of CO2":

"Currently IGCC plants have a 45% thermal efficiency."

That 45 % figure is without the energy cost for sequestration, which, as the article discusses, is currently very high (and frankly not likely to decline as much as they would like).  I have some grave doubts regarding some of the numbers that article throws around with regards to sequestration numbers, I would have to check the sources.  I suspect they aren't based on real-world tests.  

The 73 % figure you list is simply for the gasification of the pyrolyzed coal to carbon monoxide and hydrogen and then a pure hydrogen stream.  It covers the liquid oxygen plant, etc., not the combustion of the hydrogen.  By my reading it does not cover the pyrolysis (i.e. burning off the hydrogen in the coal to be left with coke) either.

They seem to be implying that the efficiency of burning hydrogen is 73 % / 60 % = 82%!!!  I know of no thermal cycle that achieves 82 % efficiency.  It's likely past Carnot cycle theoretical limits, or the Gibb's free energy formulation of the same for fuel cells.

-- entropyproduction.blogspot.com

Rmcleod,

Thank you for catching my error.

73% ("overall thermal efficiency for oxygen-blown coal gasification, including carbon dioxide capture and sequestration") x 60% hydrogen-turbine combustion efficiency = 44% overall system efficiency.

So lets see.
$6500 * (30%/44%) = $4432/KW

Even if they could achieve that big efficiency gain, thats still too expensive to be even considered.

GreyFlcn wrote: So lets see.
$6500 * (30%/44%)

Wherefrom did you get those figures? What are you trying to calculate?