I oppose the continued use of dangerous fossil fuels, and want them all to be phased out. Many people give lip service to this conception, but then - and usually propose to couple this lip service with appeal to extremely expensive intermittantly available (and unsustainable) forms of gas backed energy that they call "renewable" energy. From my perspective, especially given the very limited supply of lanthanide ores - there is not enough neodymium to be strip mined in Batou (and eventually other places) to make tens of millions of wind turbines, nor enough lanthunum to make batteries for 700 million electric or hybrid cars - calling so called "renewable energy," um, "renewable energy" is rather like dubbing the war for the Iraqi oil fields "The War on Terror."
In addition, there is the matter of cost. It will not do for rich people - possibly including some people who define themselves as "middle class" even though they drive a hybrid Lexus that costs as much as the per capita income (for all purposes, food, water, shelter, education and "entertainment") of 25 or 30 Cambodians - to engage in "feel good" gestures like roof top solar cells, if the vast teething mass of humanity will be unable to pay for access to the energy they provide.
Before I get to discussing the paper from the primary scientific literature on Chinese "closed" carbon cycing - the paper I will discuss will be from the ASAP sections of the American Chemical Society's journal Energy and Fuels - I would like to give you the current pricing for electricity generated from different energy sources in the United States, as provided by the Energy Information Agency.
Anthropogenic Chemical Carbon Cycle for a Sustainable FutureFirst a brief definition of the unit of money used in the power generation, which is the mill which is one thousandth of a dollar or one tenth of a cent.
The data that I will discuss immediately below can be found on the website of the Energy Information Agency of the Department of Energy. Here is a link to this data:
Average Power Plant Operating Expenses for Major U.S. Investor-Owned Electric Utilities, 1998 through 2009
The figures below come from 2009, but there is no special reason to assume that they are dramatically different in early 2012, and they are busbar costs, i.e. costs at the site of generation and not at the wall socket:
Hydroelectricity is the cheapest form of energy generated in the United States. It costs 8.38 mills/kwh, or 0.838 cents per kwh.
The next cheapest form of energy - and this will fly in the face of one of the more popularly believed lies as produced by the bourgeois fear, superstition and ignorance squads - is nuclear energy which produces electricity at an average busbar cost of 21.69 mills per kwh or 2.17 cents per kwh. This is less than one quarter of the average retail price of electricity in the United States as of 2011: 10.04 cent/kwh
(One can discuss why people think the opposite is true with respect to the cost nuclear energy: The real answer is involved with the selfishness, shortsightedness, ignorance and venality of the current generation of Americans as opposed to a previous generation that built more than 100 nuclear power plants to provide for future generations - that would be us. One generation cared for the future, whereas the present one - in my admittedly juanticed opinion - just doesn't give a rat's ass about anything other than its own immediate gratification.)
After nuclear energy, the next cheapest form of energy is fossil (thermal) steam energy - this is generally involved with coal but may also include some baseline gas and oil capacity. As of 2009, it cost 40.48 mills/kwh or 4.05 cents per kwh to generate electricity with this form of energy, still less than half of average retail electricity in the US. Here it is relevant to state that these figures do not include external costs, specifically the health costs of the more than 2 million people who die each year from air pollution exclusive of climate change.
Finally there is gas turbine, and "other" forms of energy, which includes generally what is also called "renewable" energy (as the EIA defines this class) that is a fig leaf for the fracking gas industry: The cost of this power was, as of 2009, was 57.55 mills per kwh, or 5.755 cents per kwh. Note that the inclusion of stuff like wind power under this category is something of a dodge, a fig leaf for the fig leaf if you will, the Cape Wind project that was rammed through in New England negotiated a busbar cost of "lower price" of 18.7 cents/kwh, or 187 mills/kwh, which is 187% of average US retail electricity prices. In addition Cape Wind will be permitted to raise its prices by 3.5% each year.
Cape Wind Proposes "Bargain" Pricing.
It follows in a rational world - that being a world that doesn't declare that what already is exists is impossible - if we cared about poor people and their access to energy, especially given that we are out of major rivers to dam, and given that as of this writing, more than 48% of the landmass of the lower continental 48 states in the United States is now experiencing drought conditions of varying intensity, we would build more nuclear power plants. We might have to shell out a lot of money right now to do this, but the benefits would accrue to future generations who would enjoy access to reasonably priced and reliable electricity.
But we do not live in a rational world or a rational country, but rather a world and country that is governed by the rather bizarre rantings of a set that appeals to fear, ignorance superstition, mysticism with sprinklings of denial, wishful thinking and dollops of scientific illiteracy.
So what the world will do rather than what it should do will be shatter every last bit of the planetary crust to scratch, scrape, gnaw and rip every last shred of carbon out of it.
I have two sons, one about to embark on his teen years, and the other late in those years. Sons, if you ever read this, I am ashamed of the world we gave you, but you know that already.
Recently, out of the depths of my cynicism, I offered this uncharacteristically hopeful bit of rhetoric in one of my diaries, this:
Maybe, just maybe, these young people will prove better than we were. Maybe, just maybe, they'll be able to deal with some of the awful crap we're handing them.
.
One can only hope. Which brings me - at long last - to the point of this diary, which is about a (partially) closed carbon cycle proposed for the forms of energy that, irrespective of my personal contempt for them, will be the forms of energy we leave the next generations: More gas, oil and coal dependency.
Some years back, in this space, in a diary I recall working very hard on (for no good reason) I touched on the subject of how to transition away from these forms of energy, and I proposed using captured carbon dioxide as a starting material to (at least for the short term) engineer the phase out of the easiest fossil fuel to phase out: Petroleum.
That diary was called The Utility of Light: The Utility of Light: Getting Real with the Existing Energy Infrastructure.
The idea was how to manage existing coal, oil and gas infrastructure to get rid of them with the least possible pain. (Note that since writing that diary I have changed my mind about so called "renewable energy," but not nuclear energy.)
This sort of idea was not, in any sense original with me, and apparently it has not died, if we take the recent publication in the ACS journal Energy and Fuels to which I will now refer.
The paper is entitled Evaluation of Newly Designed Polygeneration System with CO2. I would rather the title be called, to quote a phrase in the paper, "No Free Lunch!" The paper is written - as one can glean from the link - by scientists at Key Laboratory of Coal Science and Technology (jointly constructed by Shanxi province and Ministry of Science and Technology), Taiyuan University of Technology, Taiyuan 030024, PR China.
Coal Science: As coal science goes the ideas are not as terrible as say, any of the drivel one might hear out of say, Amory Lovins' mouth.
Some quotations from the paper:
Nowadays, anthropogenic emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere are mainly caused by combustion of fossil fuels, oil refinery, iron and steel plants, cement industry, lime industry, and natural gas.1 Coal plays an important role in the survival and evolution of human society. Total production and consumption of coal around the world was 3.73 billion tons in 2010, which is equivalent to 3.56 billion tons of oil. China’s coal production and consumption shares of global proportion are 48.3% and 48.2%, respectively.2 Global emissions of CO2 have reached a historical maximum of 30.6 billion tons in 2010, and about 44% of the CO2 is derived from the burning of coal.3 For these reasons, it is significant to have advanced technology options that will allow the continued use of fossil fuels without substantial emissions of CO2.
By the way, brats in this country have a lot of complaints about China's effect on the climate, even though China's per capital energy consumption is about 1/12th of US consumption and even though China has a rational energy policy now being exercised that will allow it to phase out coal (except for maybe coal used to make steel) long before the US will be able to do so.
More from the paper:
As a kind of promising technology, the integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) with carbon dioxide capture and sequestration (CCS) is the type of power generation technology with higher efficiency and less carbon dioxide emission. For the purpose of CCS, different technologies of CO2 emission reduction such as physical absorption,4,5 membrane reactors,6,7 chemical looping4,8 and some other related technologies are investigated.9,10 The above technologies can achieve about 90 mass % CO2 recoveries. However, there is no such thing as a free lunch, and a substantial energy penalty must be paid for CO2 capture in most of the above technologies. The energy efficiency of IGCC with CCS decreases by about 10% as a result of the CO2 capture: the efficiency is 35−38% on the basis of the lower heating value (LHV), which is lower than that in the IGCC process without CO2 capture, which is about a 41−44% LHV.11−14 The efficiency loss then becomes the energy penalty for CO2 recovery in the IGCC system, and the great energy penalty leads to the high cost of CO2 capture.15,16 The CCS approach consumes not only much energy but also a large amount of valuable carbon resources. In other words, the application of CCS technologies can improve CO2 recovery but greatly decreases the energy utilization and element utilization. Additionally, most CCS technologies based on the IGCC system17,18 do not consider CO2 treatment, transport, and storage after the CO2 is separated.
In other words, in order to capture carbon from coal one needs to burn more coal than one would have to do otherwise. Um, um, um...
Now, I personally don't happen to regard IGCC as a "promising technology." I see it as a disgrace, but overall, I happen to know that most of what these coal scientists say is actually true, at least with respect to what's involved in removing carbon dioxide from coal waste streams.
The authors go on to say more:
A polygeneration system, which integrates the IGCC system with a chemical production process system, can be an option to solve problems associated with both the energy system and chemical production process.24 Based on the concept of a polygeneration system, Liu et al.25−27 put forward polygeneration systems with different types and configurations. With the purpose of improving the integration and performance of the systems, the multiobjective (e.g., energy, economy, environment) optimization of polygeneration systems was researched by an integrated systematic approach, complexities of very different scales, ranging from technology and plants to energy supply chain and megasystem on the basis of energy systems engineering, and the polygeneration system after optimization showed the better overall performance compared with the single chemical production system...
Jin et al.16 proposed a coal-based sequential polygeneration system for power generation and methanol production with CO2 recovery, in which 45−48% of the equivalent thermal efficiency could be acquired. It is not only higher than 35−37% of GCC with CCS but also 1−4% higher than the 42−45% of IGCC without CCS, which indicates its potential in recovering CO2 at a lower operating cost.15,33,34 The world’s first polygeneration system in operation by the Yankuang Group in China producing methanol and electricity has 57.16% of the total system energy utilization, and the CO2 emission has been reduced by about one-third compared to the single product system by adopting precombustion CO2 capture.36
So, um, China built an example of what they are talking about a plant that produces both electricity and methanol.
Methanol is the simplest alcohol and it can be used directly as a motor fuel or it can be transformed into the wonder fuel DME (dimethyl ether) which could displace all fossil fuels used in internal combustion engines as well as all of the world's dangerous natural gas and propane. Not so long ago, Japan approved the use of DME in all of its dangerous natural gas plants, although regretably, Japan intends to get its DME from China, DME made from coal.
But one does not need to burn coal to get the heat one would use to manufacture DME (or methanol). Nuclear energy, which is cleaner, safer, more sustainable and cheaper than all other forms of energy can also be used to make DME or methanol from carbon dioxide.
I'm not a fan of solar thermal energy, but I note that many papers funded by and for solar thermal interests are useful because they discuss these sorts of things. I read lots of papers written with the solar thermal meme in mind. I think that solar energy is an expensive affectation, and that it will never be as sustainable as nuclear energy, and that it will never be economic.
By way of contrast to what may be, however, slightly hostile agnosticism with respect to the solar faith, I abhor coal energy and oppose the construction of all new coal power facilities everywhere and anywhere. That said, as this paper shows, some of the coal research is also not without merit.
One may read more about the methanol/DME economic proposals written by the Nobel Prize winning American Chemist (of Hungarian origins) George Olah here:
Anthropogenic Chemical Carbon Cycle for a Sustainable Future
George Olah has long been the inspirational leader of the effort to construct an anthropogenic closed carbon cycle. He is also a long time supporter of nuclear energy.
It's too bad the world didn't listen to him very much back when there was still time. But the world didn't listen, possibly because he's a great scientist.
Have a nice day.