Don, you asked:
[Today's coal question: how can we avoid the harmful consequences of burning it?] The SOx, NOx and ROx control of coal combustion is commercially available throughout the world. Economics and regulations dictate their utilization...no voluntary reductions here. CO2 control requires technology never tried on a global scale and, thus far, voluntary profit-seeking has promoted the idea we can capture and sequester (CCS) enough carbon to buy some time before the serious feedbacks kick in. Pricing carbon at $35/ton or $100/ton will not make CCS the mitigation option its advocates preach. Energy penalty, pipeline infrastructure requirement, liability and certainty of containment are years away from being diminished, capitalized and certified. Japan has virtually no on-land containment geology and off shore will be far more expensive and difficult to monitor and repair in the event of leakage. What I am about to suggest is definitely neither state of the art nor commercially viable but the chemistry is known and the back-end component (Fischer-Tropsch) is commercially available. Reacting CO2 with hydrogen to obtain CO as the F-T feedstock will, with sufficient research and testing, be a means to partially answer your question. South Africa is aggressively pursuing pebble bed modular reactor commercialization and its SASOL coal-to-liquids facilities provide 30% of the nation's liquid fuels. In 30 words or less: thermochemical electrolysis of water yields the hydrogen for the CO2 splitting and oxygen for the oxycombustion coal burner emitting a pure stream of CO2 for the reverse water gas shift reaction to yield CO fed into the F-T to produce diesel. This might all be an energy hog but the result is continued use of coal and increased liquids. The US Air Force and commercial aviation fleet are joining efforts to find alternative fuels to avoid volatile price spikes and find secure supplies. Thus far, their interest has attracted the C-T-L crowd but they offer more CO2 along with the fuel. I am not proposing the global warming solution and this concept is ten years from demonstration. Ten years is about the time we will need to learn some truths about CCS. An international consortium of chemists and physicists could take the current bench scale tests of the needed process steps up to the feasibility stage with about $30-$50 million. >From that stage to demonstration would likely require about $2 billion. World oil price jumped 11% since October 8. That was a $4.6 billion tax the world consumers paid to producers these past seven days. The following link is to a paper written by folks at General Atomics. It deserves a read. There are possible answers for you, Don. SYNTHESIS OF HYDROCARBON FUELS USING NUCLEAR ENERGY by K.R. SCHULTZ and S.L. BOGART http://web.gat.com/pubs-ext/MISCONF07/A25725.pdf --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Global Change ("globalchange") newsgroup. Global Change is a public, moderated venue for discussion of science, technology, economics and policy dimensions of global environmental change. Posts will be admitted to the list if and only if any moderator finds the submission to be constructive and/or interesting, on topic, and not gratuitously rude. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/globalchange -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
