Is what the environmentalists told us.
It’s a grudging admission that CCS can and does work. But the biggest issue many environmental groups have with clean coal is its high cost.
Enabling coal driven power stations to continue operating versus a million new windmills, twice as many new natural gas plants or a couple of nuclear plants is cheap at twice the price.
This effectively shifts the argument from, “Rargh fossil fuels!” to “Is it a real problem?”
That’s good.
Considering the theory of global warming is man-made, having to roots in science, carbon capture is a silly waste of money.
having no roots in science
We do not know yet if it works or not. The principal technical issue for the long term is the leakage rate. The CO2 to be stored is considerably larger in volume than the coal originally extracted. Thus it must be stored under very high pressure. Only time will show what the leakage rate is. But all the rest of the article is entirely correct.
the high cost of clean coal???????. science is not in the equation any longer. I am sick of the idiots who are carbon based organisms, living on a carbon based planet trying to get rid of any form of carbon. I will not tolerate any BS and so called science, about how we are not carbon based. we are and will forever be carbon based. when we no longer have CO2 in out atmosphere we are all dead carbon based organisms. that will include puppies and kittens.
(sigh) Indeed, Scar, it is a silly waste of money.
“… a costly, wasteful, risky expenditure of public funds to bankroll a technology that only partially cleans up the planet’s dirtiest energy source, while continuing our dependence on fossil fuels.”
Why the bitching now – you were the ones who wanted those wind farms.
“As they see it, clean coal is not a solution to man-made climate change; it’s part of the problem and must be swept away along with all other fossil fuels as we ‘decarbonize’ the planet in the next 85 years.”
Yes, unfortunately these ‘get back to utopia’ types want to ‘decarbonize’ the planet; which would include human lifeforms.
How many humans would they prefer to capture and store in the ground? Sounds all very cemetery like…
CO2 is not an evil ‘gassing of the planet’; but they don’t care if it is equated with potassium cyanide.
http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/ershdb/emergencyresponsecard_29750037.html
Cheers
Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group ‘True North’
The first stage of this green agenda should be a requirement that all hockey rinks be powered by wind or solar. No backup generators will be permitted. Let’s see how many people will tolerate the green agenda.
When coal is used, a very useful and essential bi-product is released – carbon dioxide. CO2 is in short supply in our atmosphere. Ask the plants. It presently makes up only 0.04% of atmospheric air. The Climate Alarmists say 400 parts per million (ppm) because it sounds like a huge portion but it is the same thing.
We are lucky that the concentration of CO2 did not fall from 0.03% down to say 0.02% because at that lower level our plants would stop growing and we would all die (which I guess is what some fanatics actually want.)
In millennia past, the earth’s CO2 concentration has been much much higher than today’s 0.04% and there was no Al Gore tipping point to the hot side. Lucky again because the Earth is a nice place for us to live.
In fact we are lucky again today in that warmer is better than cooler for virtually all of mankind. In the last thousand years Europe went through the Little Ice Age, a terrible starvation prone period and Europe also went through the Medieval Warm Period which was a great time for mankind. The Romans were able to grow grapes in Britain at the time and the wine flowed freely. What great times !!
Again we are lucky that our Earth has not cooled down to the point where it was just fifteen thousand years ago. With a drop of just a few degrees, Canada and many other parts of the world were under two kilometers of ice. Sorta cramps the lifestyle !!
So why on Earth do the Climate Alarmists want to ban fossil fuels and reverse all our good luck and deprive the common folk of a decent lifestyle?? (The Elites, of course, would still live the good life.) Why do they bad mouth carbon dioxide – that essential, odorless, colorless and in short supply gas ??!!
Well, you will have to ask them. I say it is simply the same thing that has happened many times before and in many different ways. Basically it is The Elite’s way of ruling the masses through fear and deprivation. Make the populous fearful and scared and dependent and they are easy to rule. This has been the way of The Ruling Class since the dawn of mankind. Witness the Kings&Queens, the Tyrants, the Marxists, some Religions, many politicians, and now Climate Alarmists.
History repeats itself because Mankind is making the history happen and because there has been and is and will always be those (especially the Elites) who want to rule others. It is not to save your soul or save your planet, it is for power and glory and money. (Google/Bing ‘wealthy climate alarmists’)
Please respond with where I may be wrong here.
As someone who worked on clean coal combustion back in the nineties, it bothers me that the term “clean coal” has been hijacked by the warm-mongers. Coal has a lot of crap in it that you really don’t want spewed into your atmosphere, most of it various forms of sulfur. Keeping this stuff out of the flue stream is a Good Thing and there was some promising research being done on it at the time, much of which seems to have been mothballed in favour of just getting rid of coal as a power source entirely. Bah.
One thing for sure that doesn’t work is producing adequate reliable power from wind and solar. So I’m wondering why the debate doesn’t focus on nuke vs coal vs natural gas, all of which actually work.
I’m pretty sure that, if you take into consideration ALL factors, it will take more energy to capture and store carbon than you release from burning the fuel that produces the carbon in the first place.
No, I haven’t done the calculations myself, but I have a LOT of faith in the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
It is my understanding that 30% of the energy generated by coal is required by the CO2 pumps to pump the CO2 into the ground. Not very efficient . So storing the CO2 requires more coal to burn to provide energy for the storage process.
Pretty silly, when you consider CO2 is beneficial to all living organisms including trees, plants and humans.
It is my understanding that 30% of the energy generated by coal is required by the CO2 pumps to pump the CO2 into the ground.
Plus the energy needed to compress the gas to turn it to liquid. Normally about 300 psi. Plus the energy needed to transport it to the storage site.
All of the above generating more CO2…it’s nonsense. Plus increase power costs…enjoy. Wall and company are as nuts as the rest.
one has to wonder if the “professional” protesters are getting paid or not, what they protest is irrelevant, that they get paid is important!!!
Not to mention the fact that there is no discernible anthropogenic signal in so-called anthropogenic global warming equation – by which I mean there is no empirical evidence to differentiate any impact of human-produced CO2 from the two-orders-of-magnitude-larger impact of naturally-derived CO2 (within the larger fact that CO2 concentrations scale linearly with the integral of average global temperature – not, as the IPCC and all of the models assume, average global temperature scaling linearly with “anthropogenic forcings”).
Bottom line, CCS is simply a more expensive form of papal indulgence for the sin of fossil fuel consumption. It is a true auto-da-fe; an act of faith enormously destructive of capital, and serving no useful purpose whatsoever. The only reason the ecozealots are pursuing it now is because they know that, after the corrupt fiasco of EU carbon trading and the spectacular cratering of the Chicago Climate Exchange, they will never get carbon trading (let alone their cherished holy grail, ‘decarbonization’), and CCS is the last tool in their arsenal to impose grotesque and pointlessly punitive opportunity costs on fossil fuel consumption.
Let’s hope people wake up and smell what these Luddites are peddling.
Lance you are incorrect – this is a bad thing.
Brad wall is supposed to be a conservative. He should be skeptical of AGW theory and thus unsupportive of projects that imply he agrees with it. This plant and his quoted rhetoric indicate clearly that he has calipitulated. The AGW lobby will never be satisfied with clean coal. He should know that.
This was such a needless waste of money. I wish the Sask Party would’ve just said the hell with those wanting to shut down these coal plants instead of trying to pimp this technology around the world.
We need some conservatives in this province.
Some of you are missing the point. This isn’t about Brad Wall being a real conservative. It’s about Brad Wall defending the economic interests of his province. Should there be a change in government in Ottawa there will be great clamour from the feds to get serious about emissions reduction. Wall can point to the sequestration project and say “We’re doing our bit, go irritate someone else.” Make no mistake, Tommy-Boy and Shiny Pony would love to have at you fossil-fueled westerners with all the righteous indignation that can be mustered up by the denizens of the Annex and the Glebe.
Think the National Energy Program was bad? Hah! Just wait until the current generation of Quebec politicians get through with you, should they ever get their hands on the levers of power. And remember, Gerald Butts is Shiny Pony’s chief of staff. Carbon sequestration means that Wall can say POAD to any such nonsense.
This is about inter-provincial politics, pure and simple.
Traditional coal
Clean coal
Wind turbines
Nuclear power
Combined cycle gas
One of these things is not like the other. When it comes to cost, reliability, effects on human health there’s one clear leader as we’ve seen in the states. New gas plants are sprouting up everywhere, they’re quick to build, cheap, reliable, proven, and don’t have air quality concerns.
Canada has plenty of natural gas and Hydro Electric potential, so why do we even care about so called clean coal, wind turbines or solar pipe dreams. Its time to tell the climate alarmists to go pound sand.
I agree, but it is still a sad state of affairs when politicians know (I hope) AGW is a huge wealth redistribution and power grab feel they have to go along with this. That only cements the whole fraud more firmly into the public consciousness.
I imagine that erecting the bird wackers near Moosamin and in the SE (?) were also an appeasement of sorts.
Would that we could but the fraud has taken too much of a hold on the LIVs.
Ken, this is the kind of price that has to be paid to defend a province’s economy and keep the barbarians outside the gates. Of course Wall knows the lack of substance behind the global warming issue. Doesn’t matter in the current media-driven political policy frenzy. By backing this technology as strongly as he has, he and Saskatchewan can’t be attacked either by the green slime or by other provinces over things like inter-provincial trade issues.
Brad Wall as all of us here know is a very smart guy, probably the smartest in the room when the provincial premiers meet. Credibility costs and requires a lot more than just pious words. Notice that he never joins in the chorus of attacks on the federal government over this issue. What people do, or DON’T do, is always vastly more important that what they say.
Your reference to Moosamin is accurate. It’s a token. It’s also much less than how much Ontario or BC have stepped into the renewable boondoggle.
Think of it as a political insurance policy, with this being the premium.
Of course Wall knows the lack of substance behind the global warming issue.
If he does, such actions as CO2 capture and putting up bird blenders turn him into a thief. Rationalizing that he’s less a thief than the rest, still leaves him a thief.
Stealing money for no other purpose than political expediency. Thieves cannot be trusted, period.
I realize that, but it still irks me when we drive through that area twice a year. I have difficulty resting my mind about it being so sad that the Malthusian left has such a grip on our society through their media propaganda machine that even good politicians (a rarity)have to use devious methods to avoid the wrath of the new high priests.
Yes, Wall is hedging his bets. If CAGW fizzles then some money was wasted on clean coal (expensive to build, operate and produces fewer MW). Luckily the nearby oil field is paying something for the CO2 for enhanced oil recovery.
If CAGW does succeed in getting a binding limit on CO2 then Wall can claim the clean coal project as Sask’s contribution to the cause. Hopefully, saving the taxpayers and consumers a bundle by averting more radical CO2 abatement schemes. Besides, saskpower is also going full steam ahead with natgas plants.
So, being a lukewarmer, I’m not thrilled with clean coal. As a resident of sask I appreciate the attempt to play the political game in our favor. I also suspect a progressive federal government will reject clean coal and prefer schemes that produce $$$ for them instead of actual, real CO2 reduction.
A progressive government can reject or encourage whatever it likes, LC, but it can have little impact on any specific technology. That’s firmly in the jurisdiction of the provinces. It won’t matter what Shiny Pony and Grumpy Tom think about it.
Strad, please try to grow up. Infantilism is not very useful in dealing with the green slime.
You can rationalize and call names all you like, he’s still a thief if he doing this out of political expediency.
He’s stealing hard earned tax money, for what he knows is a useless purpose, to make his political point of view look better.
Mark those who would rationalize thievery, they will steal you blind and rationalize it was for a greater purpose. Exactly the way leftists do.
Strad, you’re being truly stupid. Do you call putting locks on your doors to prevent breakins by others theft?
This is why (among many reasons) Wall is Premier of the province, and you’re not.
Do you call putting locks on your doors to prevent breakins by others theft?
Only if I steal from you to pay for the locks. For the greater good, ya know…like leftists.
What is the premium per kilowatt hour? This is a stupid way of handling the issue; there are a multitude of alternatives that would get the heat off the ruling class for burning coal in the public’s eye. This is simply the ruling clown class caving to the left’s premise that Co2 is a problem.
What Ron/Kelowna said.