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To: Toby Zidle who wrote (50429)	5/24/2004 10:19:47 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Toby, none of those look like problems. There's heaps of coal and heavy crude oil [such as Orinoco]. There's a cost to disposing of waste products, but at $40 a barrel of oil, the coal people don't have a problem doing so and still making money. Saudi Arabia doesn't want to push people away from oil too much and wants King George II back in charge, so expect lots of oil on the market. Once a coal power station is built, and an old oil-fired station is closed, oil has to go down a long way to get the business back. Acid rain? Ah that was a good scare for the 1980s. We don't hear about it lately. Mqurice

To: Toby Zidle who wrote (50429)	5/25/2004 3:40:33 AM
From: Seeker of Truth	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 74559

Clean coal burning is possible. Please consider the integrated gasification combined-cycle technology, aka IGCC. A recent description is in a publication of the American Chemical Society called the Chemical and Engineering News, Volume 82, Number 8, February 23, 2004, the article starting on page 20, entitled "Getting to Clean Coal". I personally think that the country which first wraps the pieces of this technology into a single package and uses it on a large scale will jump rapidly ahead of the rest of the world economically. I can see from the data in that article that this technology will replace natural gas and oil from the generation of power but they only add up to 15% of the electricity generation. Its main effect will be to reduce the harmful emissions of coal burning plants which these days produce 52% of the electricity in, for example, the US. Bad emissions will be reduced almost to zero. Part of the package is underground storage of the CO2. Of course the level of cleanliness is superb and it will cost money; that's why nobody is rushing in. It will take money to do the development to cheapen IGCC. Once this is done the hypothetical adopting country can use coal in almost unlimited amounts, creating a semi-monopoly on clean energy production in the world. All the energy intensive industry of the world would transfer to that country (or region, if we are talking about the European Union.) Despite your dismissal of coal, I expect that in your lifetime you will see a vast increase of its use, via the integrated gasification combined-cycle technology. I certainly don't disparage wind generated power and solar power. Least of all do I disparage population control. But we also must clean the production of energy by the world's cheapest energy source, coal.

To: Toby Zidle who wrote (50429)	5/31/2004 6:47:14 PM
From: maceng2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

System converts smokestack heat to electricity newscientist.com A system designed to capture waste heat from industrial smokestacks and turn it into electricity could significantly boost the efficiency of power stations, drastically cutting carbon emissions, its inventors claim. It could also reduce the amount of toxic pollution released into the atmosphere. The key to the efficiency of the heat-scavenging system is that it uses propane vapour rather than steam to turn a turbine and drive an electricity generator. This allows it to be driven by low-temperature waste heat. When steam is used to turn a generator, it must be pressurised and raised to around 650 °C. Below 450 °C, the process no longer operates efficiently because the steam pressure drops too low. This means that the heat in flue gases below 450 °C cannot be used to generate electricity, and so is lost to the atmosphere. Scavenging electricity from smokestacks This is one of the reasons why fossil-fuel-powered generating stations have an overall efficiency of only around 35 per cent. Many other industrial processes, such as chemical plants and oil refineries, also vent waste heat. Unlike water, propane's properties are much more suited to electricity generation at lower temperatures. After pressurising in its liquid state, propane's lower boiling point means it can be vaporised at much lower temperatures than water. But this propane still contains much useful heat after it passes through the turbine, so a lot of heat is still vented, and the small increase in efficiency usually does not make it worth the investment. Doubling up But now Daniel Stinger, a turbine engineer, and Farouk Mian, a petroleum engineer, have developed a surprisingly simple way to harness almost all this waste heat. They calculate that a second turbine, driven by the waste heat from the first, would capture almost all the remaining energy. The first turbine's waste heat would vaporise and pressurise still more propane to drive the second (see diagram). The pair calculate that flue gases will then emerge at a relatively cool 55 °C. They have set up a company, called Wow Energy, based in Sugar Land, Texas, to license the technology to industry once a pending patent is granted. Wow's concept should allow industry to make use of heat sources below 450 °C - which includes most industrial waste heat. The company's calculations suggest that power stations adopting dual turbines should be able to boost their efficiency from 35 per cent to potentially as much as 60 per cent. BP and Chevron Texaco have told New Scientist they are interested in adopting the systems to harness waste heat in their industrial plant. Closed loop If even 20 per cent of industrial waste heat, say, could be converted to electricity in this way, Stinger estimates the US alone could add over 200 gigawatts of generating capacity - almost 20 per cent of its power needs. No one is pretending it would be cheap: it would produce electricity at about the same cost per megawatt as electricity from conventional steam turbines. But more power from the same fuel means less CO2 emissions. Promising as it sounds, Wow Energy's scheme, called a cascading closed loop cycle (CCLC), remains untested. But engineers who have studied it say it makes sense. "It certainly looks very feasible, and the numbers seem to pan out," says James Prochaska, an engineer with turbine maker GE Aero Energy in Houston, Texas. If CCLC can be shown to work, says Joseph Roop, an economist at the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, it "opens a vista of possibilities for capturing low-grade heat that we don't currently try to exploit at all." CCLC also has another potential advantage. Because it cools smokestack emissions to about 55 °C, many pollutants that enter the atmosphere today, such as mercury oxide and cadmium oxide, would instead condense inside the stack, from where they could be disposed of safely through chemical treatment.

To: Toby Zidle who wrote (50429)	5/31/2004 6:48:45 PM
From: maceng2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Blackout gave cities a breath of fresh air newscientist.com The blackout that left 50 million North Americans without power in August 2003 had an unexpected benefit - the air became cleaner. As power plants were turned down in south-east Canada and the north-east and mid-west US, levels of pollutants fell, says meteorologist Russell Dickerson. His team from the University of Maryland in College Park flew an aircraft over the middle of the blackout zone 24 hours after the power had gone down. "This was a unique opportunity to explore what would happen to air quality if power station emissions were reduced," he says. The team compared pollution levels over Pennsylvania with those on a similar hot, sunny day the year before. While there was no significant difference in levels of pollutants associated solely with traffic, other pollutants linked with power stations fell dramatically. Sulphur dioxide levels decreased by 90 per cent, there was around half the amount of ozone and visibility increased by 40 kilometres. Acid rain Oil, coal and gas-burning power plants emit sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and particulate matter into the atmosphere as waste, where they go on to form acid rain and smog that can drift hundreds of kilometres from the source. Prevailing winds in Pennsylvania, for example, tend to blow whatever is in the air towards nearby cities on the east coast. Measurements from the US Environmental Protection Agency show that during the blackout, emissions from affected plants dropped by two-thirds or more. However, measuring the effect of this on air quality was difficult because many ground-based stations were also blacked out, being powered by electricity. The team's results should allow researchers to improve the sophisticated models already used for tracking atmospheric pollution from different sources. It is also likely to provide ammunition for environmental groups that are calling for stricter regulation of emissions from power plants. The research was presented at the spring meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Montreal, Canada