You really can't get it through your head that naming a prestigious institution is the same as producing a result.
In fact, your completely misleading thread title aside, this facility has
nothing whatsoever to do with coal. It's a natural gas plant for which Norway
suggests sequestration. Why has Norway just begun to burn natural gas after decades of relying on hydroelectricity? Because they have not been able to
conserve and because they loudly eschewed nuclear power. It is
always the case that one eschews nuclear power, one relies on fossil fuels.
You substitute name dropping for thinking and no amount of confrontation and exposure can get you to desist from this demonstrably poor thinking. Saying "Princeton" or "Argonne" doesn't mean anything whatsoever. The need to say those words is simply a rather weak "appeal to authority argument."
The actual case can be looking at the
numbers. You do know what numbers are, don't you? Do you have a
number for the billions of tons of carbon dioxide being sequestered next week by Statoil?
You don't?
What a fucking surprise.
Maybe you think that Statoil has solved Europe's contribution to climate change. Any evidence? Has Norway and the rest of Europe announced Kyoto compliance because of the Statoil speculation?
If you
read the IPCC reports - and you haven't because you're so damn intellectually lazy - you will see that the mitigation strategies are all parts of "scenarios," and thus are not results, nor are they proved solutions.
Here is what Statoil
says it
could sequester:
http://technocrat.net/d/2006/3/10/1275. 2.5 million tons per year.
Here is what Europe releases: 4.6
billion tons per year.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/tableh1co2.xlsYou come here and you mutter nonsensical crap about "all" of Europe's carbon dioxide when if fact the actual number is 0.05% of "all" of Europe's carbon dioxide
if the system ever functions. It doesn't function in fact. It's a "what if" marketing fantasy. Maybe you think the readers of the E&E forum are
stupid?
One partial solution that is well characterized, and well discussed in the IPCC reports is the one I advocate, the expanded use of nuclear power. Regrettably there are stupid people all over the world who denigrate the
one strategy that is actually working at this time, as opposed to hare-brained wishful thinking about sequestration schemes that may or may not fail to deliver and if they do deliver - may fail within a few decades with a massive out gassing.
Here is what it says in the IPCC mitigation report of 2001:
The five variants constructed in the bottom-up analyzes were (1) BI: biomass intensive, (2) NI: nuclear intensive, (3) NGI: natural gas intensive, (4) CI: coal intensive, and (5) HD: high demand. The BI variant explores the potential for using renewable electricity sources in power generation. Both intermittent renewables (wind, photovoltaics, and solar thermal-electricity technologies) and advanced biomass electricity-generating technologies (biomass-integrated gasifier and/or gas turbine technologies through 2025 and biomass-integrated gasifier and/or fuel-cell technologies through 2050 and beyond) were applied. The NI variant involves a revitalization of the nuclear energy option and deployment of nuclear electric power technology worldwide. In the NGI variant, the emphasis is on natural gas. Any natural gas in excess of that for the reference cases is used to make methanol (CH4O) and hydrogen (H2). These displace CH4O and H2 produced from plantation biomass. In the CI variant, the strategy for achieving deep reductions involves using coal and biomass for CH4O and H2 production, along with sequestration of the CO2 separated out at synthetic fuel production facilities. Finally, in the HD variant the excess demand is met by providing an extra supply of fuels with low emissions. To illustrate the possibilities, the HD variant is constructed with all of the incremental electricity provided by intermittent renewables.
(bold mine).
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg3/073.htm#box22Note that this report is now 5 years old. In 5 years, not one of these variants is consistently used on an exajoule scale
except nuclear power.
The new report, due out next year, is said to be far more emphatic about the need for nuclear power. Even if
you don't get it, the rest of the fucking world does, and is now planning more than 200 new nuclear reactors. The world doesn't give a fuck about your ethanol dreams anymore. They're played out your dreams because - just as you vastly overstate the potential for that Statoil pilot - you have vastly overstated the potential for ethanol.
Now, I do realize that it is very difficult to get you to distinguish between 2800 tons per day (1 million tons per year) and 27 billion tons per year, and I also know that you hear only what you
want to hear, but the IPCC mitigation strategies are
on line. Still, if you want to know why people look at arguments like yours and find them laughable it because you oversell everything you talk about, hugely.
For the record, I have already written one of Sokolow's colleagues on the subject of nuclear power and received a gracious, albeit silly, response on the subject. The person in question
is a Professor at Princeton, and by the way, he's wrong. I contacted him after he appeared on the radio in a local talk show talking about climate change. He was claiming that climate change could be addressed with a few cool windmills. He thinks that renewable energy is sufficient to address global climate change. He says - to me and not on the radio - that he doesn't oppose nuclear power in principle, but
he doesn't know all that much about it.
He is
wrong - even if he is a professor at Princeton - if he believes climate change can be addressed without appeal to nuclear power. People have been appealing to renewable energy for decades - and it is failing to deliver. Climate change is getting worse, not better, and renewable energy is completely incompetent to meet the challenge. Even a country like Norway - which has huge hydroelectric resources - is
failing to avoid increased fossil fuel use. When Norway's glaciers are gone - and yes, they are going, the situation will deteriorate further, not that you give a fuck. The world is not building solar, wind, etc plants even at the pace it is building
new fossil fuel capacity. Renewables are thus
losing ground. However the matter is not about
new capacity only in any case. It's about
existing capacity. You have no fucking insight about what to do what is
coming, never mind what already exists.
You seem to think that because Sokolow of
Princeton wrote a paper, and someone published it, and Al Gore mentioned in it in his movie, it is
gospel. Actually the paper
also mentions nuclear power as a stabilization wedge so I could - if I were an idiot - cite it as justification for the
fact that global climate change is intractable without nuclear power. (Nuclear power is listed as Wedge #9 in the paper, which I linked here a long time ago.
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/NNadir/15) But I don't claim that the discussion of nuclear energy in this paper is the last word.. My posts substitute actual appeals to numbers as opposed to institutional name dropping. (As stabilization wedges go, nuclear is the one of the few mentioned in the paper that is current practice on an exajoule scale.) However not all papers published by people at Princeton (or Harvard or MIT, etc) are correct however. You think otherwise because you don't know anything whatsoever about science, not because the paper is correct.
In fact, of the 15 wedges there is just one that is industrially practiced on a wide, exajoule, scale, two if you note that
some automobiles are efficient. There are no wind generated hydrogen fuel cell cars. (#12) There are no synthetic syn fuel plants capturing carbon and sequestering it. (#8). Deforestation has not been stopped (#14)...
Like I always say, "If you don't know what the fuck you're talking about, make stuff up."
You must think everyone is monumentally stupid.