Greenhouse gas can find a home underground
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/greenhouse-gas-in-aquifers-0320.html[font size=4]New MIT analysis shows there’s enough room to safely store at least a century’s worth of U.S. fossil fuel emissions.[/font]
March 20, 2012
[font size=3]A new study by researchers at MIT shows that there is enough capacity in deep saline aquifers in the United States to store at least a century’s worth of carbon dioxide emissions from the nation’s coal-fired powerplants. Though questions remain about the economics of systems to capture and store such gases, this study addresses a major issue that has overshadowed such proposals.
The MIT team’s analysis — led by Ruben Juanes, the ARCO Associate Professor in Energy Studies in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and part of the doctoral thesis work of graduate students Christopher MacMinn PhD ’12 and Michael Szulczewski — is published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Coal-burning powerplants account for about 40 percent of worldwide carbon emissions, so climate change “will not be addressed unless we address carbon dioxide emissions from coal plants,” Juanes says. “We should do many different things” such as developing new, cleaner alternatives, he says, “but one thing that’s not going away is coal,” because it’s such a cheap and widely available source of power.
Efforts to curb greenhouse gases have largely focused on the search for practical, economical sources of clean energy, such as wind or solar power. But human emissions are now so vast that many analysts think it’s unlikely that these technologies alone can solve the problem. Some have proposed systems for capturing emissions — mostly carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels — then compressing and storing the waste in deep geological formations. This approach is known as carbon capture and storage, or CCS.
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= new reply since forum marked as read
...for which I wrote the RFP and handled all negotiations.
I said nothing about nuke plants and am not sure why you even went there?
I suggest that we expose the research for what it is: pie in the sky.
"there’s enough room to safely store at least a century’s worth of U.S. fossil fuel emissions"
there's also enough room on Mars.
business of usual is part nuclear and thats where my reply on that came from.
The part about mars I'm not so sure of what you're getting at. Maybe you forgot something 
Congratulations on what you are doing. Its much more than what I'm doing thats for sure and I applaud you for it.
Peace
It angers me, and you I'll bet, that they keep looking at ways to make coal or nukes friendly, when all the technology is already her.
I might have needed to us a sarcasm smiley or have been less angry in my reply.
Peace back to you, madokie!
Some people are simply class acts and I'm happy to say I see you as one of them.
(Please note, US Department of Energy information — copyright concerns are nil.)
http://fossil.energy.gov/programs/powersystems/gasification/howgasificationworks.html
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In Integrated Gasification Combined-Cycle (IGCC) systems, the syngas is cleaned of its hydrogen sulfide, ammonia and particulate matter and is burned as fuel in a combustion turbine (much like natural gas is burned in a turbine). The combustion turbine drives an electric generator. Exhaust heat from the combustion turbine is recovered and used to boil water, creating steam for a steam turbine-generator.
The use of these two types of turbines - a combustion turbine and a steam turbine - in combination, known as a "combined cycle," is one reason why gasification-based power systems can achieve high power generation efficiencies. Currently, commercially available gasification-based systems can operate at around 40% efficiencies; in the future, some IGCC systems may be able to achieve efficiencies approaching 60% with the deployment of advanced high pressure solid oxide fuel cells. (A conventional coal-based boiler plant, by contrast, employs only a steam turbine-generator and is typically limited to 33-40% efficiencies.)
Higher efficiencies mean that less fuel is used to generate the rated power, resulting in better economics (which can mean lower costs to ratepayers) and the formation of fewer greenhouse gases (a 60%-efficient gasification power plant can cut the formation of carbon dioxide by 40% compared to a typical coal combustion plant).
All or part of the clean syngas can also be used in other ways:
- As chemical "building blocks" to produce a broad range of higher-value liquid or gaseous fuels and chemicals (using processes well established in today's chemical industry);
- As a fuel producer for highly efficient fuel cells or perhaps in the future, hydrogen turbines and fuel cell-turbine hybrid systems;
- As a source of hydrogen that can be separated from the gas stream and used as a fuel (for example, in the hydrogen-powered Freedom Car initiative) or as a feedstock for refineries (which use the hydrogen to upgrade petroleum products).
OK, so conventional coal is 33-40% efficient.
“Commercially available gasification-based systems can operate at around 40% efficiencies” (better, but not much better.)
IGCC may reach 60% efficiency perhaps achieving a 40% reduction in carbon emissions over conventional coal technology (much better, but a long way from carbon neutral.)
...but I know from experience charcoal making is a bitch, even if you're not trying to catch the gases - ending up with ash would be more likely . Run the process with coal and you'll get coke.
Possibly worth noting that the process was originally developed to get the coke out: It makes for cheap iron, and reliably coking coal was one of the key technologies of the industrial revolution. It wasn't until the 19th century we figured out the stuff going up the chimney was useful, too.
Now we've swung the other way and are trying to pretend the coke doesn't exist at all...
