First CO2-free coal plant announced

[Natorgator]

Not sure if this is a good idea or not, but apparently they've figured out how to sequester CO2 underground and still have all the benefits of cheap coal:

Coal is almost the perfect fuel. It's cheap and absurdly abundant -- especially in the United States, which has the world's larges reserves. There's just that tiny problem of massive climate-altering carbon dioxide emissions. Or is there?

The FutureGen Alliance -- a coalition of private power companies and the U.S. Department of Energy -- thinks it can make power cleanly by siphoning off the carbon dioxide and pumping it into underground reservoirs. The Alliance spent the past year evaluating four locations around the country that applied to host the first full-scale power plant using the technology; and today it chose Mattoon, Illinois as the winner.

Unlike a regular coal power plant, the FutureGen plant won't actually burn coal but gasify it by exposing powdered coal to oxygen in a high-pressure heated chamber.

The system yields several gases which are processed into hydrogen, which burns in a turbine to produce electricity, and carbon-dioxide, which is pumped into deep geologic formations that researchers expect to hold the gas indefinitely.

Proponents say that gasification is easier than capturing CO2 from a regular power plant because it produces it produces a smaller volume of exhaust and it easily traps most other pollutants from coal, such as Mercury.

[CaptainChewbacca]

I'm cautiously optimistic about this. I'd like to know more about the geology, but it looks promising.

[Natorgator]

Whenever I read an article about coal they always have experts talking about how much we have in the US. I hear as much as 100 years to 300 years. How accurate is that?

[Zac Naloen]

I'm curious about how much we have left in the UK personally, reopening the mines could "save" the north.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Whenever I read an article about coal they always have experts talking about how much we have in the US. I hear as much as 100 years to 300 years. How accurate is that?

We have ridiculous amounts of coal in the eastern US and elsewhere, the only limiting factors are our need and our desire to dig up entire mountain ranges to get it.

[J]

http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?p=2502125

100 years, at current consumption rates, give or take.

[Illuminatus Primus]

Nothing is really workable unless you constrain population growth and energy consumption.

[Flagg]

I await the first "containment breach" that, like a lake in Africa, suffocates an entire town.

[CaptainChewbacca]

I await the first "containment breach" that, like a lake in Africa, suffocates an entire town.

That was CO2 dissolved in water. Storing it in rock should (theoretically) be more stable.

[Flagg]

I await the first "containment breach" that, like a lake in Africa, suffocates an entire town.

That was CO2 dissolved in water. Storing it in rock should (theoretically) be more stable.

Hope so. All it takes is one time for the industry to be ruined.

[Wyrm]

I'm wondering about the amount of work needed to store the CO2 in this rock.

[Sea Skimmer]

I'm wondering about the amount of work needed to store the CO2 in this rock.

Not very much other then some drilling and piping, the intent is to fill up areas which have been previously drained of oil or natural gas reserves. The test programs have already pumped a couple billion cubic feet underground with no problems yet.

Leakage is certainly possible, but it’s most likely to occur when a given reservoir is still being filled, and the fact that the stuff is thousands of feet underground is going to prevent a massive release all at once like that African lake had.

[J]

There have been plans for many years now to use the CO2 from power plants to scavenge the last drops of oil from older oil fields, and once all the oil's been pumped out the gas is permanently capped in the former oil reservoir.

[fnord]

I'm wondering about the amount of work needed to store the CO2 in this rock.

Not very much other then some drilling and piping, the intent is to fill up areas which have been previously drained of oil or natural gas reserves. The test programs have already pumped a couple billion cubic feet underground with no problems yet.

Leakage is certainly possible, but it’s most likely to occur when a given reservoir is still being filled, and the fact that the stuff is thousands of feet underground is going to prevent a massive release all at once like that African lake had.

I think you're referring to Lakes Nyos and Monoun, where a controlled version of the process that made them catastrophically overturn is currently in-place to remove the dissolved CO2 and vent it to the atmosphere. The quantity of CO2 dissolved in the lakes is not quite trivial - > 10 million cu m in Monoun, and > 300 million cu m in Nyos. If nothing at all had been done, the Franco-Cameroonian team that worked on degassing the lakes estimate that Monoun would have already erupted at least once, and Nyos would be teetering on a knife edge.

From Feb 2003 thru Jan 2007, approximately half of Monoun's dissolved CO2 had been removed thru the controlled gas lift process, while Nyos is being degassed at roughly 2 million cu m per annum, with a net degassing rate of 1.5 million cu m pa.

The third such problematic lake in Africa is Lake Kivu, bordered by the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda. It's orders of magnitude bigger than Nyos, (Wikipedia quoth ~500 cu km of water for Kivu, as opposed to an upper bound of 0.5 cu km for Nyos) and no large-scale degassing is in progress, just small scale methane extraction to power industry near the lake.

[InnocentBystander]

Gas storage is a big business, most of our natural gas hangs out in dried out oil wells and salt caverns. I don't know how much spare storage capacity exists, but if it isn't considerable, I doubt this is a very cost effective approach. Once you fill up a reserve with CO2, you've got to seal it off forever, right?

[Wyrm]

I was thinking "work" as in Joules per mole of CO2 to pump down into the rock. After all, that takes energy, and the more energy you spend pumping CO2 into the empty cavern (so to speak), the less you have to power your stuff.