Both major presidential candidates have written "clean coal" into their energy plans. CNN discussed just how similar the big two are. WATCH:
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Do we really have to build ANY plants?
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/07/28/energy_efficiency/index.html
"Clean Coal" is mentioned in the title. This has not yet been invented.
Dirty coal plants cost 2.1$ per installed watt.
Wind costs only 1.4$ per installed average watt.
god knows what "clean" coal will cost or how long it will take to implement (20 years).
20GW of wind was installed world wide in the 2007.
Wind is the fastest, cheapest energy source available today.
See my profile.
Research,, you are 100% right, but Clean Coal is a HUGE component of our Energy Independence strategies.
These are transitional Technologies, not an end all cure all.
Our FREEDOM from,, not only foreign OIL that drains our economy, our fortunes, but freedoms from damaging effects of current technologies surrounding the Coal Industry as we presently know it.
Gasification and Liquefactions of COAL,, has been done for over 100 years. Not some futuristic DREAM!
Why? Transporting through pipeline, 10 times as efficient as rail or trucking.
Transitional Technologies EXIST. Coal Oil used to light and heat our homes,,,,. 100 YEARS ago. Coal Sourced,,, Diesel,,, equivalents are HERE NOW.
Capturing , BIO, Remediation of co2 and using it to make MORE OIL,, is here,,, TODAY. It just needs to be implemented and encouraged. No more smokestacks,,, just fields of Solar Powered and harvested algae,, processed and harvested as a LIQUID.
America is even growing bacterium that turns methane into alcohol. Nearly directly and is energy free except for Solar Powered Pumps.
The Carbon Fiber Industry is burgeoning. Coal is the core of this entirely NEW, BOOMING Technology.
What the word,,,, Plastics,,, was to our world of the 1930s,,, Bio-Remediation,,, is to our world,,,, today.
LEARN THIS WORD,,, Bio-Remediation!
You’ll be richer than ANY Oil stock ever dreamed.
Why?
Because nature is, infinite, NO MOVING PARTS few LABOR COSTS and as prolific, PROFITABLE as its potential and environment permits. BIG BUCKS.
All the best
Knute Neo-LIB
Cost.
Wind is cheaper.
Time:
Wind is faster to install.
Bio remediation is usually bs. The rubble piles restored after mountain top removal leach heavy metals from the increased surface area and contaminate the ground water. Rubble piles collapse in earth quakes.
We don't need coal. We can't afford coal.
There is no such thing as "Clean Coal"
Exactly what I was thinking 60and - Clean Coal is an oxymoron.
There are 'cleaner' ways of using coal, but even they are quite dirty, and produce a sh*tload of CO2.
We need to ramp up decentralized, neighborhood wind and solar production, decentralized networks for distributing energy regionally (without big-ass corporations skimming off a huge speculative profit), and every sort of conservation method we can think up and implement.
The answer isn't switching to a 'new' source of hydrocarbons to fuel our society. The answer is to figure out how to live without a new source of poluting hydrocarbons.
Right-Clean Coal is an oxymoron on the order of military intelligence or planned progress. Coal, even with new burning methods & stack filters, isn't clean.
of course, it takes energy to obtain energy
but if you want to clean coal it will require more energy
so we just lost some of our potential energy in those coal seams if we clean it b4 burning it
but that's a good trade off since some of us who are smart are worried about the experiment we are running on our atmosphere
Right 60 plus. (me 2). No matter how one uses coal it is too costly and dirty. The mining of it causes untold destruction. The most important issue however is the huge amounts of water required to use it in anyway. Coal bed methane destroys and poisons water, liquefaction and gasification and power plants use unimagined quantities of fresh water. Water is more important than any other resource and will be the cause of future wars.
The most interesting part of this video is the very last screen splash. The US has 25% of the entire world's supply of coal. We have enough coal to power our entire country for literally hundreds of years. To not embrace that is utterly ridiculous.
I think BHO is off his rocker. Banning all new coal plants isn't the way to move forward. What we should do first is to ban all natural gas power plants, and replace them with new coal and nuclear plants. Coal because it's very plentiful and cheap, and won't increase CO2 emissions any more than the natural gas plant it would replace, and nuclear because it doesn't emit CO2 at all.
Converting from natural gas to coal would be carbon neutral. And then we could switch out vehicles from gasoline to CNG. Or we could make it 50/50. Half gas, half CNG. That would also be carbon neutral.
So, making that transition using existing technologies would drastically reduce our dependence on foreign oil, without increasing our carbon footprint at all. But BHO would never allow that. According to him, replacing an old, inefficient natural gas power plant with a new clean burning coal plant is somehow bad, even though it's carbon neutral and as part of a larger strategy could help solve the current energy crisis for the future.
But Obama told Illinois and Kentucky that he was all for coal. There is no way Obama would pander for votes is there?
There was more to the video than the last screen, like the part that specifies Obama would consider banning new traditional coal plants, as opposed to *all* new coal plants. He specified that low-emission coal plants would be deployed.
I personally would like to see an end to coal, but we do get too much of our electricity from it to just switch it off. A transition to low-emission then to no coal entirely is a more realistic approach.
they usually state we have enough coal to last 300 to 250 years AT CURRENT RATES OF PRODUCTION.
current rates keep rising from one year to the next.
at one time, we had 500 years of coal, but now we rip it out of the ground so fast, it's down to 250 years.
go back further in time we had 1,000 years of coal.
so we don't have 250 years of coal because if we rely on it more and produce it faster, the length of time we have coal will decrease.
coal production fallows a bell curve like oil so it peaks -- after that it declines and it will easily peak this century. Plus there are different grades of coal: anthracite burns nice and clean and very hot but it’s very rare, Bitumin (50% of our coal; burns dirty but is still hot, and lignite, very dirty and burns much cooler so is less useful; just under 50% of our coal is lignite.
natural gas burns a lot cleaner then any other fossil fuel
but it should not be used to generate electricity
we are going to need to imprt natural gas soon
that's why we are building natural gas terminals
because natural gas production peaked a long time ago in North America
and now we must drill more and more wells form year to year just to maintain current production levels
How would burining coal be carbon neutral?
you have so many mistakes on you post, it's hard to get to them all
Actually natural gas production is far from peaking. It is just that federal rules and regulations make it almost impossible to get to all of the natural gas that we have. Here in the west we are sitting on enough natural gas to last America several lifetimes but we can do nothing about it since the government would rather pay foreign countries to power us rather than do it ourselves.
OMG, there is no way in this world that a Democrat and one of those others could ever agree on anything. Right wing media! Right wing media!
I was watching the Prez speaking at the West Virginia Coal Association just now...the thrust being, of course, how wonderful "drill here, drill now" would be for the "average American".
What tickled me is that CNN had a reporter stand outside their meeting place to give the lead-in, and I recognized the facility where the WVCA and the Prez are - it is the Greenbriar Resort in White Sulfur Springs, WV....wheeee....expensive!!
Ironic, is it not, that the Prez would choose a location that the "average American" does not have a prayer of affording - especially in this Republican "trickle down" economy - to talk about how he is only looking out for the interests of the "average American"?
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First Posted: 07-31-08 11:24 AM | Updated: 08- 8-08 05:12 AM