US Pulls Plug on Low-CO2 Powerplant Project 360
Geoffrey.landis writes "The administration announced plans to withdraw its support from FutureGen. FutureGen was a project to develop a low CO2-emission electrical power plant, supported by an alliance of a dozen or so coal companies and utilities from around the world. The new plant would have captured carbon dioxide produced by combustion and pumped it deep underground, to avoid releasing greenhouse-gas into the atmosphere. It had been intended as a prototype for next generation clean-coal plants worldwide. Originally budgeted at about a billion dollars, the estimated cost had "ballooned" to $1.8 billion, according to U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman."
Money well spend? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Money well spend? (Score:5, Informative)
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This makes my blood boil (Score:4, Insightful)
And spend close to a trillion dollars on a war over fossil resources in the Middle East.
The US energy policy is fucked. Totally, completely, totally fucked. Utterly utterly mindbogglingly stupid.
Re:Money well spend? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Money well spend? (Score:4, Informative)
Just to put it into perspective.
Re:Money well spent? (Score:2)
It's pretty valid comparing the cost of clean coal to the cost of Nuclear or Oil? Should I have phrased it a little different? I.e. spell out the cost of ensuring a steady supply of oil is, erm, enormous?
Re:Money well spent? (Score:5, Informative)
The objection that I have to this program was that it was an experiment, a costly one, with no guarantees of future success. Nuclear energy isn't a panacea or necessarily the best of ideas, but the risks and challenges are well known and it can already be used to produce energy in a cost effective manner.
Most of the complaints people have about the current Fission reactors is that they are unsafe and the waste is toxic and hard to handle. But the reality is that it is really hard to get a nuclear reactor to reach a meltdown. Even the plant in Chernobyl which was being run in the least competent manner imaginable, was able to keep from reaching the really serious point where there's a sustained uncontrolled nuclear reaction. 3-mile island, the nuclear material was completely unable to make it past the huge amount of concrete that the facility was made of.
The amount of waste from a reactor tends to be exaggerated, it is significantly less material than is created by coal plants, with the ability to reprocess the majority of the radioactive material for another plant. The amount of waste that is created in the US would be reduced significantly if it were subjected to the sort of reprocessing that happens in other parts of the world.
Re:Money well spent? (Score:5, Interesting)
If there were guarantees of future success, it wouldn't be much of an experiment. It's worth our pouring a lot of money (but still microscopic compared to our overall energy expenditures) into ambitious experiments just so that we learn the full range of options and their implications - if we learned, we example, from this experiment that "low Co2 coal" is much more dangerous and expensive (for whatever reason) than the coal industry would like us to believe, wouldn't that be worth a mere couple billion dollars?
Re:Money well spent? (Score:4, Informative)
As the laws now stand, you could drive a flotilla of aircraft carriers through the loopholes. For starters, pre-1970 coal burning powerplants were effectively grandfathered in under the Bush era laws. Those powerplants don't have to be upgraded to meet current regs as long as the owner only performs "routine maintanence".
The EPA defines "routine maintanence" as anything that doesn't exceed 20% of the powerplant's value.
In 5 years you could rebuild that powerplant doing nothing more than EPA approved routine maintanence.
Re:Money well spent? (Score:4, Insightful)
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My understanding is that reprocessing spent fuel rods creates fissionable material suitable for creating atomic weapons. My guess is that we can't 100% guarantee these reprocessed fuel rods won't end up being used as weapons and that's the reason the US doesn't do this.
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The reason for the US not doing this is quite simple: th
Re:Money well spent? (Score:5, Funny)
That's right, since Iraq is costing us orders of magnitude more than almost anything else. We really should be using more reasonable units like milliIraqs.
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Close, but a miliIraq is a ridiculously small unit, much like measuring the U.S. military budget in pennies (or pesos), a more appropriate unit would be the kiloIraq. pronounced as "Kill-O-Iraq," of course.
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Way too much money is being spent CURRENTLY on a situation that has gone on far too long, and that just about everyone agrees is a mistake for one reason or another. Since a vast majority believe that it was a mistake to go over there, or to still be there, we can safely look at the countless millions (billions?) that are being used to fund that ongoing issue.
Now, if our Presi
Re:Money well spend? (Score:5, Informative)
Rubbish. Over in Britain the royal academy of engineering compared costs of nuclear ( yes, including decommissioning costs) to that of various energy sources: http://www.countryguardian.net/generation_costs_report2.pdf [countryguardian.net] . Essentially, while nuclear is expensive to build, the overall cost is comparable to coal fired power plants due to the low cost of fuel, and if you add on carbon capture and storage then the cost of coal overtakes nuclear rapidly.
A further thing to take into consideration is that increased energy consumption across the world combined with decreasing oil reserves is likely to drive up the price of coal/uranium. Since the fuel is a much lower proportion of the cost of nuclear power than it is for coal power this is likely to have a much lower impact upon the cost of nuclear power than for coal.
Finally, since nuclear power technology is advancing rapidly at the moment ( High temperature reactors around 2016 , breeders by 2025 , high efficiency hydrogen estimated 2030 ) the cost of nuclear plants is likely to drop ( per kilowatt generated ), while the cost of coal plants is likely to spike due to tighter emission standards.
The capture and storage research is worth it mainly because we can't expand other energy sources quick enough. In the long term it is not going to be economically competitive.
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Papers here (in UK) were suggesting that the costs for Nuclear are being massively underestimated, and that the *net* . That was back when there was talk of replacing the current power stations, so may well have been more greenie FUD.
Just saw this on the BBC from 2005:
> Nuclear electricity has been repo
Re:Money well spend? (Score:5, Interesting)
there's no "probably" about nuclear being safer, it's a simple fact.
there's always 2 things greenies try to call on nuclear - cost and life span. firstly while nuclear costs more initally, it's running costs see it break even with coal in 5 years. life span they will try tell you we only have 5 years of fissionable material - i make it clear right now they got that figure from the fact we have 5 years IF we all swapped to nuclear TODAY and relied totally on STOCKPILES. that means we didn't dig another ton out of the ground and didn't look for more. we also have breeder reactors which extend a plants life indefinately.
Re:Money well spend? (Score:4, Insightful)
Your question is impossible to answer because variable costs are measured over a plants lifetime and thus they are strictly speaking not defined for any plant that is still operating. Many costs ( repairs, refueling , service, etc
If we were to answer your question by taking the costs incurred by a plant up until today and average it over the time it has been in service the estimate would likely be too low because more repairs are necessary towards the end of its life. Similarly if we were to take the variable costs associated with a plant that has already been decommissioned then the estimate would be too high because technology has improved over the years. Your question is similar to the problem of estimating how long it will take to download a file. You can't answer it with certainty until after the file has been downloaded, because you don't know what will happen to your download speed before it is done. What you CAN do is to make a reasonable estimate based on previous based on previous experience and the knowledge at hand. This is the estimates that are quoted in most reports ( among others the one I gave above ).
Now, I don't expect you to accept this answer, because I've seen you argue this point before only to reject every reply you get when you don't like it, but simply put there is no way to know the life-cycle variable costs of ANY power source until after it has been decommissioned, and that is not something that applies merely to nuclear, it applies to Solar, Wave, Coal etc
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Nuclear has become an option due to CO2 concerned after it was largely abandoned in the 90's, but it's not because it's cheaper.
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Yeah, so the funds are going to the iraq war and we all looooove to hate it. But here's some news for you: money's fungible; it'd all have to come out of the same taxes an
I'd like to note (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I'd like to note (Score:4, Informative)
Morons! (Score:2)
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Big Nuclear Fusion Reactor to Provide Free Energy (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure... (Score:5, Insightful)
Please go away and actually do some research into the costs of the various energy options, and you might appreciate why research into carbon capture and storage is money well spent.
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Those two tired-old bullshit arguments won't matter until there is more solar capacity online than we can use in real time, which won't happen for two decades under even the most favorable set of assumptions.
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Re:Sure... (Score:4, Funny)
Then obviously we should be devoting the funds to stopping Earth's rotation. With the US facing the Sun 24/7 we get 24 hours of solar power and more hours for crops to grow for biofuels. It'd also save us a fortune in lighting at night and allow for an unlimited work day. Seems like a win win.
Re:Sure... (Score:4, Insightful)
I live in Australia. I have solar panels on my roof at home. The installation costs were subsidised by the Federal Government. My panels generate more power than I actually use, and the excess is fed back into the grid at a credit, so the power company ends up owing me money at the end of the year.
You were saying?
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Pal, I have been looking into this issue for years. I recently had an article published on th
Re:Big Nuclear Fusion Reactor to Provide Free Ener (Score:2)
Oh, except that congress just cut all funding for ITER [forbes.com] , the international thermonuclear experimental (fusion) reactor.
So no fusion, no coal, no basic research. It's all oil all the time.
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Haaaaaa ha ha!
Okay, time for bed...
No big deal. (Score:3, Insightful)
If you can't / won't do it NOW, then the long emergency will get longer. And Darker. No, it's not the end of the world. It's just a new world we won't recognise, and one that won't likely permit 7 billion people shitting all over it.
You can buy a shit load of grid tied windmills for 1.8 billion dollars...
RS
Re:No big deal. (Score:5, Insightful)
- RG>
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Burning Fossil Fuels = pumping CO2 from underground.
So what's wrong with putting the extra CO2 back where it came from? Assuming we have an effective method for doing so, of course.
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Re:No big deal. (Score:4, Insightful)
I must say you have a very good point there.
I wonder why they don't find something more constructive to do with all that CO2? Plants use water and sun to split CO2 and release O2, why can't we either make something that does that, or use plants to do it for us? I don't know, something like a giant version of what looks like a waste treatment plant. (with the large covered pools)
Is the rate of absorption too slow for that, where they'd need an unreasonably large biomass, or what's the problem?
Pumping CO2 undergound to get rid of it is about as forward-thinking as landfills. Burying it doesn't make it go away, it just makes it resurface well after you're dead. (and your elections are over)
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The problem is the need for a huge amount of biomass and huge amount of energy to keep the process going. (For instance, here in the US Pacific Northwest, you'll need considerable heating capacity for a good chunk of the year.)
Soda pop. (Score:2)
Can't we just double carbonate our soda drinks? Problem solved.
Jolt Cola: All the sugar and twice the caffeine. Now with double the green-house gases.
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And you can add: Directly from our "clean" coal power stations.
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YOU FIRST! (Score:5, Insightful)
As of NOW.
Have a nice day.
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Sure - but that won't actually noticeably decrease pollution and CO2 release once you factor in the need to keep some other form of generation in hot standby for when the wind isn't blowing.
The clear solution (Score:3, Funny)
Yes, it should be obvious to all patriotic Americans that the real solution is to pump the excess CO2 into water. In fact, many of the refreshing soft beverages currently available on your grocer's shelves, including the entire flavor line of Coca-Cola brand beverage products, contain significantly more carbonation than most sparkling water. When you drink beverages that contain still/non-sparkling water, the terrorists win. Have a Coke
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Yes, but humans don't exactly have a great track record with underground dumping.
I remember doing a little research on CO2 sequestering a little while back for an ethics class. The problem isn't so much the idea itself but the implementation...most companies simply do not want to spend enough to create deposits that will last for, as you said, 300,000,000 years, and instead are trying to fill old coal and oil deposits without making sure they can hold that much gas. They really don't care though: they'll a
Cost (Score:2)
Pumping into the ground perhaps not a great idea (Score:4, Interesting)
In the 1960s, Rocky Mountain Arsenal tried to get rid of waste by pumping it into the ground. When they started doing that, there was an increase in seismic activity in the region, including several earthquakes that caused significant damage. When they finally stopped doing it, the seismic activity tapered off.
Yes, there can (Score:5, Informative)
If you're pumping the CO2 into a depleted gas field, that gas field captured natural gas for many millions of years. Another type of disposal site that's been proposed is deep saline acquifers, in which case the CO2 will dissolve in the water, which has also stayed where it is for millions of years.
Finally, if you're really paranoid there's mineral sequestration, where you react the CO2 with various types of rock to form carbonates, which are very stable compounds (they're rocks, basically).
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Why it was cancelled (Score:5, Interesting)
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If there is any truth to that rumour, that alone is reason enough to drag the man out on the streets and put him up against a wall. Not to mention the rest of the hideous crimes he has committed. Why on earth have the american public - one which is so proud of its supposed ability to take down a corrupt government - not executed this man yet?
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I think it says much about the success of the social conditioning of the American people. After all else is said and done, one can measure the effects of mind control simply by looking at the end results. I think this was even noted somewhere in the bible using an agriculture analogy concerning fruit.
-FL
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Please link to the source of this fact. Or, consider the possibility that it's just a bunch of shrill nonsense being passed around by someone suffering from classic BDS. Read up a thread or two, and consider the fact that the notion of this approach has already been completely eclipsed by other developments.
The point isn't about using "clean" coal instead.. (Score:2)
In the other news... (Score:2)
Re:In the other news... (Score:5, Informative)
Cuba and Renewable Energy (Score:2, Insightful)
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HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!!!!!!!
Oh....my...god....
I'm wiping away tears here!
Cuban life expectancy: 77.08
American life Expectancy: 78.2
You really need to check your sources of propaganda, boy.
Thanks for the laughs!
Hilarity Does Ensue (Score:2)
Hmm... keep the blinders on. I guess you wouldn't know what to do without them.
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From Overpopulation.com [overpopulation.com]:
Recently released statistics on the infant mortality rate in the Western hemisphere yielded an odd conclusions -- Cuba's infant mortality rate, 16 6.0 per 1,000, is now lower than the U.S. infant mortality rate, at 7.2 per 1,000. Given Cuba's poverty level, its 6.0 rate is very impressi
Re:Cuba and Renewable Energy- wrong! (Score:2)
Aside from its own supply, Cuba gets oil from Venezuela. Cuba, a country of 11 million people, consumes 200,000 barrels of oil per day. That's a lot, given they only have a few cars and a sorry economy of the country.
Also, your claim about their life expectancy being higher than the US is wrong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy [wikipedia.org]
Please find me your statistic that disputes the above.
Cuba is an oppressive dictatorship. We need
Mole Men (Score:4, Funny)
what is the themodynamic efficiency of this? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Maybe not all of us, of course, because it's our god-given right to consume like maniacs and pollute like hell. The time when there is enough of everything is really over and invading iraq for their oil isn't going to help us in the long run. Yes, it sucks, but it's reality.
Re:Who cares (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Who cares (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, it's not a pancea - but it might be able to give us the time figure out how to exploit renewable energies cheaply and safely enough..
Re:Who cares (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Who cares (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, the reason Australia has been investing so heavily in this tech is that Australia has a crap-load of coal, which is propping up it's economy. If international demand for coal drops because people get serious about climate change, Australia's economy goes down the crapper (unless, of course, it goes ahead and tries something different).
thats why we have valves (Score:3, Interesting)
I have valves installed that hold a 10,000 psi well down in Venezuela right now. Many of them.
Trust me, we have valves and instrumentation that can handle CO2 underground. We already do this with underground natural gas storage and CO2 isn't a giant change.
And yes, I sell valves. Relief valves, control valves, block valves, cryogenic valves, high temperature valves, steam valves. All kinds of valves. All kinds of materials.
Re:Who cares (Score:5, Informative)
And as far as the fact that it may someday come up, methane (natural gas) is a much more powerful greenhouse gas and we go to great lengths to get it out of the ground. If we put the CO2 in those deep geological formations, we would be no worse off than we were previously.
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Statoil has been pumping CO2 underground in the Sleipner field [iea.org] off the coast of Norway for a few years now. You have to keep in mind that, at those pressures, CO2 becomes a liquid; but, even as a gas, you are putting CO2 in underground pockets that have a proven record of holding gas and hyd
Re:Who cares (Score:5, Insightful)
'Clean coal' is an oxymoron. It doesn't work. It's been touted here (Australia) by the last government as a way of keeping our coal power stations running too, but that was by a right wing, environmental hating government. When anyone looks at it seriously, it's all bunk.
Rather than investing in technologies to actually make energy without the horrendous environmental cost (solar, window, tidal etc. etc.) WHY on earth would you prefer them to invest money in continuing to use the horror that is coal, but just shove the waste underground?
How does that at all sound like a good idea to you?
"you're saying that because there is a tiny, remote chance that Co2 might leak into the atmosphere, that we should just put it into the atmosphere first"
Is exactly the wrong way of thinking. The options are not pump it underground and hope it stays there, vs. pump it into the air. The options are create vast amounts of CO2 and worse, OR produce power in an ACTUAL CLEAN MANNER.
Good riddance to the plan, and it would be great if it were just stricken from the worldwide stage overall... stop building coal plants, you can make the energy in so many other ways.
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etards like you would be the first to log on from their imac down at the local starbucks, and start complaining about all the power black outs and how you can't afford your expreso enemas anymore because your power bill is $20000 a year.
I don't own a mac, hate starbucks and know how to spell espresso. Also I love how you pulled a value like $20K out of your butt.
tidal power is limited by geography and solar is a JOKE when your talking about powering a country.
Tidal ma
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We've got two options. Mass transition to nuclear power ASAP or our great great grandkids living under domes. We can still work towards a post-nuclear future were everything is renewable
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Clean coal is a good alternative for the Arctic and Antarctic during their dark spells.
Re:Modest Plea: stop abusing WHATCOULDPOSSIBLYGOWR (Score:2, Interesting)
When I take a risk and kill someone, I go to jail for manslaughter.
When Big Business takes a risk and kills 1000 someones, the CEO gets a bonus.
Because of the risk of punishment in return for misjudging risk, I take the time to research what I'm doing and implement safeguards and backups in order to reduce the risk as much as possible. History demonstrates that corporations canno
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For example?
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Other than that I agree, some big corporations can get away with crime more easily than individuals as they have leverage on governments. It's no surprise that a monopoly a justice produces justice that sucks.
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In all honesty, abandoning such a project seems like a big step backwards.
Re:Who cares (Score:5, Interesting)
As for the comments I've read so far, it's not the CO2 only that is worrisome, but the fact that the waste heat generated from power plants (should read all heat exchange type power plants) is directly warming the Earth.
Not only should there be no CO2 from power plants, but there should also be no waste heat either.
So solar power/geothermal/hydro and to some extent, nuclear technologies have the clear edge.
Ideally, the model for future energy creation and use would be:
* non-heat producing energy creation and storage
* non-heat producing energy consumption
One system currently in focus by the Australian gov. are 1.5kw domestic solar roof installations feeding directly into the grid. If you have every house (excluding high rise) with an installation from Hobart (far South) towards the equator, then that would make a significant impact on all fossil fuel use. Currently, such an installation costs approx $15,000/household and the gov. pays for half.
Every country or geophysical region will have their own solutions, so I doubt that there will be a single technology that would be the panacea for everyone.
http://www.greenhouse.gov.au/rebates/index.html [greenhouse.gov.au]
Re:Who cares (Score:4, Interesting)
Vattenfall is working on it. [cnn.com]
"Can a coal-fired power plant completely eliminate carbon-dioxide emissions? That's what Swedish energy company Vattenfall is hoping to prove with a pilot project under construction in Germany that promises to be the world's first emissions-free carbon power-generating plant.
The $62 million, 30-megawatt facility, scheduled to go into operation by mid-2008, makes use of oxyfuel technology, in which coal is burned in pure oxygen instead of air. That leaves the resulting emissions nitrogen-free and easier to clean and store. Once the plant in Schwarze Pumpe, south of Berlin, is fully operational, the plan is to compress the CO2 into liquid and inject it into porous rock about a kilometer below ground."
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WARNING: GNAA (Score:3, Informative)
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Stop-gap (Score:5, Insightful)
Shifting reliance from oil to coal would "Make America safer!" because the US is like the Saudi Arabia of coal
China is building powerplants like crazy, and guess what they're using? COAL
Storing CO2 underground is a temporary solution, but it would buy us some more time to develop means of converting it into something in another physical state (gas or liquid). Then perhaps we could begin to fill up those oil fields we've been draining for the past hundred & some odd years.
Not only stupid - Very Dangerous (Score:2)