Kyoto may be rightly doomed, but we know mercury maims.
EPA moves to weaken mercury emission rules
ajc.com
Let's see. In Brazil, the norm is 25% ethanol, with some autos running 100%. China is working to convert their coal into a cleaner liquid fuel. By appearances, the US prefers to keep things as they have always been.
Reminds me of Quarks indignation when he exclaimed 'They Irradiated Their Own Planet?'. <g>
Companies with significant investments in natural gas say that it can, in fact, be priced competitively-assuming it competes with clean-burning coal. "It's not true that gas is too expensive," says George Gilboy of Shell. "You have to ask, 'Relative to what?'" He says natural gas is expensive only when compared with coal-fired plants without pollution control technology. If those same plants were to install desulphurizing scrubbers and other equipment (increasingly mandated by the government), gas would be priced comparably with coal, and would be much cleaner. Shell points out that natural gas is already price-competitive with the manufactured, coal-based "town gas" now used by most urban residents.
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New technologies also hold out the hope of reducing China's dependence on imported oil. Coal liquifaction, a process for deriving liquid fuel from coal, was originally developed in Germany but really took off in South Africa when anti-apartheid embargoes threatened to cut off the country's energy supplies. By modernizing the German process, South Africa managed to continue producing coal-based liquid fuels that were competitive with petroleum even after the embargo was lifted. Nanotechnology has made liquifaction still more efficient: Today, it's possible to convert about 60 percent of coal's energy into liquid form.
China is placing at least one large bet on liquifaction. Shenhua Coal Mining Group, one of the country's biggest mining outfits, is building the world's largest liquifaction plant in Inner Mongolia. Officials believe China's lower cost structure can make the project economic here. U.S. scientists, for example, say liquifaction becomes economic when oil hits US$28 a barrel. For China, the key price point is $18 a barrel. The reason for the difference? The American calculation assumes coal costs $20 a ton; in China, it's half that. American technicians cost about $80,000 a year; in China they can be had for 80,000 renminbi a year. In the United States, building a facility such as the Shenhua plant would cost US$3.5 billion; China will spend US$2 billion. "When you look at the numbers, they seem to come out," says Jim Brock, an energy consultant in Beijing.
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