Enrique Gili is a freelance writer covering Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability (Given their track record big coal is very unpopular among environmentalists. But coal production seems to be a big part of the US energy future. According to a MIT report the solution is to capture the carbon dioxide it produces and store it underground.
But here's the challenge: To begin to curb climate change, the US needs to learn in less than a decade how to capture, compress, and then pump the carbon dioxide miles underground. The quantities are massive: the liquid CO2 equivalent of 20 million barrels a day - roughly equal to the amount of oil the US uses every day. ( CS Monitor)
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Comments
Yes, the scale of any such project will be large, and even larger
efforts will be needed in China, and India whose likely coal consumption geatly exceeds our own. The biggest impediment is price, the estimate is about an extra 3cents per KWhour -not so much for a residential end user, but make or break for investors building a plant
with the intent to make a profit. Unfortuantely the prospects for converting current Pulverized-coal burning plants for carbon sequestration are not very good -so minimizing the number of newly
constructed plants, that aren't easily convertable should be a priority.
Posted by: bigTom | March 16, 2007 12:39 PM