Coal gasification

Posted by David Roberts at 3:34 PM on 09 Jul 2006

A story in a West Virginia newspaper slobbers over coal gasification -- almost like the reporter got all her information from the industry. In West Virginia! Lawsy me. Needless to say, carbon dioxide isn't even mentioned.

A more sober assessment can be found in several posts on Daily Kos (if you can survive all the blogofascism!). Responding to Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer's NYT op-ed, Jerome a Paris asks him these questions. The Governor responded here. DarkSyde had this post about Schweitzer's 60 Minutes appearance. And finally, in response to an NYT feature on synfuel, Schweitzer wrote this post.

Enough homework for you?

Schweitzer's a smart, serious guy; of course it's no secret that he's advancing Montana's interests, but he's clearly no mere shill for the coal industry. And he's explicit that gasification is not a long-term solution, but merely a bridge:

So coal-to-diesel, in my mind, is a piece of a larger national plan that 1) takes us through the next several decades to the hydrogen economy, 2) includes a heavy dose of biofuels and other renewables, 3) breaks oil dependence in the short term, and 4) provides a boost for technology that will help us combat global warming.

Having read a good bit about all this, my skepticism has not been overcome. Here are what I see as the big limitations on gasification/sequestration:

Coal boosters say we have 250 years worth of coal in this country. But as Jeff Goodell argues persuasively in Big Coal, this number is wildly exaggerated. Much of that coal lies under inhabited or wilderness areas; the estimate is based on outdated studies; it assumes our usage won't increase, but the whole point of "energy independence" would be to increase it substantially. In short, if we replace all oil with liquefied coal, we'd burn through the coal quickly and do immeasurable damage to our natural landscapes in the process.
Schweitzer brushes off concern about mining, saying the surface mining in Montana is safe and landscapes are reclaimed. The truth is a bit more complicated.
Right now, the only demand for CO2 sequestration comes from enhanced oil recovery. Do we really want to enable the recovery of tons more oil, which would bring the price of oil down and, oh yeah, get burned and release CO2?
Who's going to pay for all the sequestration that doesn't help recover oil? Remember, if coal-to-liquid is to replace any substantial percentage of our oil, there's going to have to be a lot of it, and that means a lot of sequestration. Sequestration requires a great deal of money and a particular set of geological features. How will it scale up?

One could go on. Weighing against these negatives is one overwhelming consideration:

The hard, unavoidable fact that dozens, probably hundreds, of coal plants are going to be built around the world soon. If they are IGCC plants, we at least have a hope of sequestering the CO2. If they are conventional coal-fired power plants, all other efforts to slow the release of GHGs will be overwhelmed. Game over. Preventing the construction of these conventional coal plants should be our absolute first priority in the global warming fight. All else depends on it.

So there you have it. (See also Goodell's op-ed about gasification in the NYT, and watch for my interview with him this coming week.)

Thoughts?

For story: Coal gasification
13 Comments | Post a Comment

Dozens before the snow flies

Hundreds by 2010.

Two good possibilities exist. (1) Nuclear retrofit, to stop adding to the problem. Coal combustors are hard to feed, hard to babysit, and yet all they do is supply hot gas, I'm not a coal-fired plant expert but I think 600 Celsius is hot enough, to steam generators. CANDU reactors have cool heavy water for bulk moderation, hot heavy water in the fuel channels for cooling. Because in the latter circuit it is kept liquid, it is limited to about 300 Celsius. I don't think it would be too much of a change to have supercritical heavy water there, or liquid lead if one is prepared to deal with freezing. Then either the hot D2O(g) or hot nitrogen that has been bubbled through the lead goes to the formerly coal-fired steam generators. Much less trouble than coal.

(2) To begin backing out of the box, a few dozen large-scale centralized CO2 capture and sequestration "farms", so to speak --

A typical extraction facility that could extract all current carbon dioxide emissions would require only an area of one square yard per person in the developed world. A facility of sufficient size could be located in arid regions, since discharged air that is deficient in carbon dioxide could have consequences on nearby plant life.

Large expanses of desert would not be affected by the CO2 deficit however, and could provide the wide-open spaces necessary both for the facility and to allow the discharged air to become well mixed with the atmosphere again.

Rounding up to one square metre per person, we get for each 100 million persons in the developed world the need to capture CO2 over an 11.3-km-diameter circular patch of desert. This means the developed world could be the whole world long before much of Mojave was spoken for. Why would you Yanks pay to unwind the whole world's CO2 problem? Um ... because you can?

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen fan
Boron: internal combustion without exhaust gas

by GRLCowan at 6:20 PM on 09 Jul 2006

Political Snake Oil

Gov. Schweitzer is just chumming the waters for coal investors, and starting to smell like a fish left too long in the sun.

Energy investors still remember the 1986 oil price collapse. If US political leadership pulled for efficiency, like car pools, then the savings would be millions of barrels of oil per day and the world oil price would collapse.

Political leadership that push favorite local energy industries do not appear honest nor low risk. Investor beware.

Honest political leadership will reduce the price of energy. Expansion of supply will become a negative investment when market demand shrinks from conservation, efficiency, price elasticity, and new energy technology.

Solar energy is cheaper than dirty coal, and much cheaper than clean coal.

by sunflower at 8:25 PM on 09 Jul 2006

If it's so easy and cheap to sequester carbon...

why aren't the nations in a race to do it now?

http://www.dailykos.com/User/Cassiodorus

by LegumeSam at 3:58 AM on 10 Jul 2006

Everything in the desert?

Doesn't it seem a little impracticle to have all of our power generation located in the desert?

What about the workers at the plant? What about the fact that there is no energy demand out there?

Or did I misunderstand the quote. It was a little jargony.

Diana

by DianaJardine at 8:26 AM on 10 Jul 2006
[ Parent ]

Gasification and Sequestering

There are oppurtunities to build some, cleary not hundreds, gasification plants and sequester for enhanced oil recovery. Granted these oppurtunties are limited to oil fields but generally the coal has to be shipped and it make more sense then to ship the coal and use the CO2 locally.

Consider TU recent annoucement to build 8 coal plants in Texas. Sound like a great place for enhanced oil recovery.

I am sure Texas rate payers would be happy, in the end, to pay the increased cost of coal gasification to help thir local oil production if not also to reduce CO2, which I am sure a significant number would also support. But getting any rate increase through is no small feat. Thing is would the Texas Commission rather see conventional coal with the most environmental impact, no support for oil production and least rate impact or ICCG with CO2 Capture with less environmental impact, CO2 for enhanced oil production, but higher rate impact. Often with regulatory bodies it is the rate impact that rules.

by ffletcher at 8:57 AM on 10 Jul 2006

Capture only

The CO2 capture plants would do only capture, compensating for CO2-emitting power generation elsewhere on the planet -- anywhere else at all, since the whole atmosphere mixes in a few years. (One way it is known for sure that increased atmospheric CO2 is from fossil fuel combustors, and not a cosmic coincidence, is that the increase lags by a few years in the southern hemisphere. There are also isotopic clues.)

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen fan
Boron: internal combustion without exhaust gas

by GRLCowan at 9:59 AM on 10 Jul 2006
[ Parent ]

Coal article

on the front page of the Business pages of The New York Times last week, 7/5. It included a map of the coal reserves in the US and it was frightening how vast they are. I have read that sequestration is not very secure; gas can escape and kill people, in fact has done so.

by AE at 7:19 PM on 10 Jul 2006

Lake Nyos

AE is perhaps thinking of Lake Nyos, which was a natural occurrence. Artificial sequestration has not been known to fail in the very limited instances so far tried. Deep ocean injection has been tried at beaker scale. Pressure was such that the CO2 had no choice but to be a liquid denser than water, i.e. to sink to depths where the pressure was even greater, while also slowly dissolving in the surrounding water.

The reaction with serpentinite, q.v., is also irreversible without input of energy (by pulverizing this mineral and combining it with CO2 we fast-forward a process that would eventually have occurred anyway).

So I see no reason to expect sequestration not to be reliable, if practiced. CO2 "wants", thermodynamically speaking, to be locked away.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen fan
Boron: reason for me to talk up the intractability of CO2, were it intractable

by GRLCowan at 8:46 PM on 10 Jul 2006

In the Ocean?

Couldn't sequestration in ocean depths mess with life down in the deep by changing the CO2 levels?

Diana

by DianaJardine at 9:51 AM on 11 Jul 2006

coal gasification

Use of carbon dioxide to enhance oil recovery is not sequestration! The idea with sequestration is to find a place to put the stuff where it will stay. In enhanced recovery much of the CO2 dissolves in and comes up with the recovered oil. It can be recaptured and used again, but the need for continuous supply suggests that it is not.

Howard Wilshire

by howardgw at 7:27 AM on 13 Jul 2006

EOR How Much if Any CO2 Stays

Howard makes a very good point. I have not heard this before but it makes sense. The following report from EPRI speaks to the issue:
"http://www.energy.ca.gov/process/pubs/electrotech_opps_tr113836.pdf"

It appears even with recovery of the CO2 dissolved in the recovered oil half of the CO2 will be released.

Drat...

by ffletcher at 9:04 AM on 13 Jul 2006
[ Parent ]

coal gasification

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by carox at 2:59 PM on 19 Nov 2006

sequester carbon ?

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- analsexgen - baisehargen
- asiatinuegen - bderotigen
- beauculgen - beaumecgen
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- bellefemmenugen -
bellefessegen - bellefilegen
- bellesalopegen - beurettenuegen
- beurettesalopegen -
beurgaygen - biteenroemgen
- blogpornogen - blogsexegen
- branlettegen - ceciledemengen
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- chatrencontgen - chattechaudegen
- chatteshumidesgen - chattepoiluegen
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- claranuegen - clippornogen
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by carox at 5:02 PM on 19 Nov 2006

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