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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (9405)	2/7/2007 4:25:42 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Respond to of 36917

Clean coal? Can Coal Come Clean? How to survive the return of the world's dirtiest fossil fuel. excerpts... Unfortunately, coal is as filthy as it is cheap and abundant. When burned it releases three pounds of sulfur dioxide and four pounds of nitrogen oxide for every megawatt-hour of operation. The nation's plants produce a total of about 48 tons of mercury annually. "If all the coal-burning power plants that are scheduled to be built over the next 25 years are built, the lifetime carbon dioxide emissions from those power plants will equal all the emissions from coal burning in all of human history to date," says John Holdren, a professor of environmental policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Holdren and many others are especially concerned about the carbon dioxide, which unlike coal's other emissions is completely unregulated in the United States. By 2012, the new coal plants in the United States, China, and India will send 2.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. According to leading climate models, all the added CO2 could trigger an average global temperature rise of up to 10 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. That much warming could raise sea levels several feet, flooding the world's coastlines and shifting global weather patterns in ways that could cause massive recurring crop failures. The smoke-free skies above the Polk plant hint at a way out. We now have the technology to capture and store most of the carbon dioxide generated by burning coal. "It's very important what we do with the next 25 years of coal plants," says Holdren. "If all those coal plants are built without carbon control, the amount of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere would make it virtually impossible to stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations at a moderate level." Right now the Polk power plant is one of just four of its kind in the world. If we are going to survive our coal-fueled future, we will probably need a whole lot more like it.... Although Polk does not capture carbon dioxide (it still goes up the exhaust stack, at a rate of 5,000 tons a day), it could easily be retrofitted to do so; new IGCC plants could have the capacity built in. Shorter reports that TECO is planning to replace this plant with a much larger, 600-megawatt IGCC facility. "The rumor I've heard is that it will be online by 2013. I'm sure the new plant will be CO2-capture ready. It wouldn't make sense not to. Anyone that's going to build one today has got to be thinking that carbon-emissions permits are going to be required in the future. What do you do when that day comes and you're not ready for it?"... Schrag suggests that the costs of cleaning up coal are surprisingly modest. "Right now we put about 2.5 billion tons of carbon from coal burning into the atmosphere each year. An order-of-magnitude estimate for capture and storage is something like $100 a ton. That 2.5 billion tons is only $250 billion dollars a year—about half a percent of global GDP. It's a lot of money—it requires political will—but it's not a ridiculous amount of money." For context, Schrag compares that cost to other ways we willingly pay for security. "Solving the climate problem altogether—completely rebuilding our energy infrastructure—is something like a $400-billion-a-year program. The U.S. share is maybe $100 billion. That's not that much compared with defense outlays. It's small compared to Iraq. If we really got scared, we could do a lot in a hurry." discover.com