[Biofuel] Texas Clean Coal Plant May Be Environmental Game Changer | Fronteras Desk
http://www.fronterasdesk.org/content/9645/texas-clean-coal-plant-may-be-environmental-game-changer [Another coal industry disinformation piece. CCS still apparently stands for Citizen's Cash Sink. Note $450,000,000 already sunk into preliminary research from U.S. DOE. Also, this is not actually a CCS project, but an EOR (enhanced oil recovery project), which means 60 to 80% of the CO2 injected will likely resurface in short order with oil or methane produced. To see what happens when the taxpayer-funded grants, subsidies and other incentives stop, see second article below.] Texas Clean Coal Plant May Be Environmental Game Changer By Lorne Matalon May 28, 2014 PENWELL, Texas — New EPA rules aimed at cutting carbon emissions are expected to be unveiled June 2. Coal generates nearly half of this country’s electricity and is the largest source of air pollution. The new rules are expected to spur the use of clean coal technology. At least that’s the hope of both the coal industry and some environmental groups. Although the term “clean coal” seems like an oxymoron to some people, the expression refers to the best way known currently to use a product that’s plentiful in the United States and relatively cheap. Some analysts believe the United States has coal reserves they say will last for 250-300 years. The United States has often been cited as the the Saudi Arabia of coal since the energy crisis, a theme that has been trumpeted by both Democrats and Republicans, although that description has been routinely challenged. There are two planned coal plants in the U.S. that will sequester harmful CO2 and generate electricity. One is in Kemper, Mississippi, and the other is in West Texas. The Texas project is slated for an 600-acre piece of empty land in Penwell, a onetime oil town in the 1930s near the geographic center of the Permian Basin of West Texas. Today, Penwell is a deserted piece of flatland beside a major interstate highway that didn't exist when the town was created to service the oil industry. Abandoned oil tanks lie in an empty field. Wind whistles through a fence and the rumble of nearby Interstate 10 is constant. The directors of a plan known as the Texas Clean Energy Project say a coal-fired power plant will be built here over the next four years. It’s a plant some people say can be an environmental game changer. “I am in favor of building electric power plants that capture their carbon,” says former Dallas Mayor Laura Miller. As mayor, she was decidedly against expanding coal’s footprint in the energy grid. In 2007, Miller was one of the leaders of a coalition of Texas cities that successfully derailed plans by the energy company TXU to build 11 coal-fired plants in Texas. Fast forward to 2014. Miller now heads up the $3.5 billion Texas Clean Energy Project, which despite the name is all about making electricity from coal. But not the old way, as Miller explained. “Traditional coal plants take a lump of coal, put a match to it and it burns up a smokestack,” Miller said. “And you desperately try to pull off sulphur, mercury, grit off the coal emissions. The new twist sounds simple enough but it’s expensive, turning coal into gas. “Twenty-first century coal takes coal and puts it in a large receptacle called a gasifier and you add a little pure oxygen and you heat it up to 3000 degrees Fahrenheit and you make a gas out of the lump of coal,” she said. Miller says that’s what marks this technology. “By putting it into a gaseous form,” Miller said, you’re much more able to pull out the bad stuff including carbon dioxide.” The technology is called called Carbon Capture and Storage, or CCS. Eight U.S. plants use this technology right now, burying the carbon dioxide or in the ground, theoretically permanently. What’s new here is the plan to recycle the CO2. A major Texas utility has agreed to buy captured CO2 to make electricity. And CO2 will also used to extract oil here in the Permian Basin, the country’s highest producing oilfield. The captured carbon will be specifically used for enhanced oil recovery. Carbon gas is injected into the ground, reducing the viscosity, or the thickness or gooiness, of crude oil, which eases the crude’s flow to recovery wells. The operation also produces byproducts like fertilizer and even baking soda. As hopeful as that might sound, critics charge that any use of CCS will slow the country’s migration to renewables like wind and solar. But several major environmental groups, historical foes of coal, support the project. Inside Energy spoke with Tim Profeta, Director of the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Solutions at Duke University. Tim Profeta heads the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Solutions at Duke University. He says climate change cannot be addressed if we do not capture carbon from fossil sources as CCS is designed to do. “It’s very difficult to
[Biofuel] Hungry for land: small farmers feed the world with less than a quarter of all farmland
http://www.grain.org/article/entries/4929-hungry-for-land-small-farmers-feed-the-world-with-less-than-a-quarter-of-all-farmland Hungry for land: small farmers feed the world with less than a quarter of all farmland GRAIN | 28 May 2014 | Reports It is commonly heard today that small farmers produce most of the world's food. But how many of us realise that they are doing this with less than a quarter of the world's farmland, and that even this meagre share is shrinking fast? If small farmers continue to lose the very basis of their existence, the world will lose its capacity to feed itself. GRAIN took an in depth look at the data to see what is going on and the message is crystal clear. We need to urgently put land back in the hands of small farmers and make the struggle for agrarian reform central to the fight for better food systems. Download the PDF version of this report here http://www.grain.org/article/entries/4929-hungry-for-land-small-farmers-feed-the-world-with-less-than-a-quarter-of-all-farmland.pdf Download a printer friendly dataset in PDF format here. http://www.grain.org/attachments/3011/download Download a fully-referenced dataset as a spreadsheet here. http://www.grain.org/attachments/3003/download Governments and international agencies frequently boast that small farmers control the largest share of the world's agricultural land. Inaugurating 2014 as the International Year of Family Farming, José Graziano da Silva, Director General of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), sang the praises of family farmers but didn't once mention the need for land reform. Instead he stated that family farms already manage most of the world's farmland1 - a whopping 70%, according to his team.2 Another report published by various UN agencies in 2008 concluded that small farms occupy 60% of all arable land worldwide.3 Other studies have come to similar conclusions.4 But if most of the world's farmland is in small farmers' hands, then why are so many of their organisations clamouring for land redistribution and agrarian reform? Because rural peoples' access to land is under attack everywhere. From Honduras to Kenya and from Palestine to the Philippines, people are being dislodged from their farms and villages. Those who resist are being jailed or killed. Widespread agrarian strikes in Colombia, protests by community leaders in Madagascar, nationwide marches by landless folk in India, occupations in Andalusia - the list of actions and struggles goes on and on. The bottom line is that land is becoming more and more concentrated in the hands of the rich and powerful, not that small farmers are doing well. Rural people don't simply make a living off the land, after all. Their land and territories are the backbone of their identities, their cultural landscape and their source of well-being. Yet land is being taken away from them and concentrated in fewer and fewer hands at an alarming pace. Then there is the other part of the picture: that concerning food. While it is now increasingly common to hear that small farmers produce the majority of the world's food, even if that is outside of market systems, we are also constantly being fed the message that the more efficient industrial food system is needed to feed the world. At the same time, we are told that 80% of the world's hungry people live in rural areas, many of them farmers or landless farmworkers. How do we make sense of all this? What is true and what is not? What action do we take to deal with these imbalances? To help answer some of these questions, GRAIN decided to take a closer look at the facts.5 We tried to find out how much land is really in the hands of small farmers, and how much food they produce on that land.6 The figures and what they tell us When we looked at the data, we came across quite a number of difficulties. Countries define small farmer differently. There are no centralised statistics on who has what land. There are no databases recording how much food comes from where. And different sources give widely varying figures for the amount of agricultural land available in each country. In compiling the figures, we used official statistics from national agricultural census bureaus in each country wherever possible, complemented by FAOSTAT (FAO's statistical database) and other FAO sources where necessary. For statistical guidance on what a small farm is, we generally used the definition provided by each national authority, since the conditions of small farms in different countries and regions can vary widely. Where national definitions were not available, we used the World Bank's criteria. In light of this, there are important limitations to the data - and our compilation and assessment of them. (See Annex 1 for a fuller discussion of the data.) The dataset that we produced is fully referenced and publicly available online and forms an
