Feminist Man Wrote: "On the storage of CO2, I believe if you research this you will find that it is viable today. It is not used today because no one has mandated it. One would not habve to build pipelines to an appropriate site; build the plant where a good geologic formation exists, and transport power by power lines."
My Response:
I did more research on it and most of the sites had this caveat on saline aquifer storage.
From Article:"And, she says, "we need monitoring technologies to assure us that once the CO2 is stored, it's stored safely and permanently." In the long run, this may be the most important goal of all, the one that determines whether the public accepts the concept of carbon sequestration.
"With ocean and terrestrial sequestration, we need to understand ecosystem impacts and long term effectiveness. With geological sequestration,
we need to know that the carbon we put in the ground isn't going to come back up," says Benson. "Otherwise we're just transferring our responsibility to future generations."The main sites that promote this are government sites and they bill it primarily as a means to increase yields in existing oil fields. I personally would love to see us gradually start running low on oil so that we have incentive to shift away from fossil fuel. A potential problem with deep brine wells is the change in pH due to formation of carbonic acid in the deep brine could eventually corrode any carbonate rock that traps the CO2 in deep storage. Heck, that is probably the reason why they won't even consider it for Florida. We sit on a porous carbonate platform that would probably slowly dissolve in the case of deep injection releasing the gas into the atmosphere or mixing it with our water supply. In the same article it maps the areas where sequestration is possible based on oil and gas fields or deep brine storage. Florida, where I reside, is nowhere near any suitable storage area. We'd have to pie our CO2 across the Gulf to Louisiana or Texas. The article also mentions that the cost is currently prohibitive unless there is a return such as increasing yields in oil or natural gas fields.
Feminist Man wrote: " The bit about fining TECO has to do with storage of slag. That has nothing to do with air emissions from the plant, which is what we were talking about. And I do not condone what they did, but that is not a fault of the clean coal technology."
My Response:
From the article in my previous response:" But the Florida Department of Environmental Protection says
the plant burned inefficiently, and produced huge piles of unburned coal, ash and a waste product called slag, threatening groundwater."
The plant burned inefficiently. That means that because it was not working as billed, the plant produced more pollution. I'm not just worried about air pollution. Pollution from coal fired plants hits us in land, sea, and water. TECO also has faced fines at their coal-fired plants for air pollution. Their response was not to build more clean coal facilities but they are converting the existing facilities to
natural gas. They chose natural gas because it is cheaper.
Treepig wrote:
"specifically your statement:
"I'd rather us modernize our nuclear plants than go with "clean coal".
(a) a sincere endorsement?"
My Response:
It is an endorsement. It makes sense to me to go with the improved technology in nuclear power instead of the clean coal technology as a stopgap for power production until we come with something better. Clean coal (IMHO) is a band-aid for technology that is centuries old. At least nuclear power is from this century. When I drive up to Crystal River, FL and snorkel with the manatees, I hardly notice the nuclear power plant nearby. When I go out fishing in Tampa Bay, I see the huge plume of smoke coming from TECO's stacks. That sums it up for me.