Well THIS is news!
The Kansas Department of Health and Environment yesterday became the first government agency in the United States to cite carbon dioxide emissions as the reason for rejecting an air permit for a proposed coal-fired electricity generating plant, saying that the greenhouse gas threatens public health and the environment.
Imagine, Kansas, more forward thinking than Alberta!
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
This is what all our governments should be doing. “New” power should produce no emissions – period. There should be no more coal fired plants unless they are fitted with “clean” technology that removes emissions.
Agreed. Sort of. In fact, there is no such thing as zero emissions for anything other than conservation. If the life cycle is considered, and I always advocate that it should be, then every power source has emissions. Wind and Solar included, albeit much lower emissions than the traditional power sources.
Unfortunately, the powers-that-be (read big, traditional parties) are committed to unclean technologies.
Both the Liberals and Conservatives in Ontario are committed to wasting $40B on nuclear. This is NOT zero emission no matter what the nuclear lobby says, and will get worse year by year as high grade ores are used up and we have to process lower grade ores.
On the coal side, there is not a single commercially viable CCS (Carbon Capture and Sequestration) plant yet in the world to my knowledge. (I would be most happy to be proven wrong about this. Please advise if you know of one.)
And yet these are the types of things that our federal Conservative government is banking on to save us from Climate Change disaster.
–Glenn
CCT is feasible right now. It’s just cost prohibitive and you have figure out what to do with the captured CO2.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4468076.stm
You’re right about nuclear. Mining operations for uranium produce emissions as well. It’s best to avoid nuclear if possible. My understanding is that even with our population growth, we could conserve 20% of our power every decade with technological changes and innovation. By 2050 the energy we would use would be roughly what we use now in Ontario. We should consider investing much more in solar and wind power coupled with pumped storage plants and high efficiency battery power stations to store excess power for use when there is little sun or wind.
Another interesting technology I’m reading up on is methanol fuel cells. Methanol can be used as fuel, the CO2 produced captured and recycled to create more methanol. It has an octane of 100 and can be produced from the oxidative conversion of methane or reductive hydrogenative conversion of CO2. Ultimately you could eventually extract CO2 from the atmosphere to produce fuel and reverse climate change. The only down side is that methanol is toxic but then so is gasoline..
Biodiesel from algae is another promising technology. All current production methods of biodiesel from corn and canola has been proven to be WORSE for climate change than just using gasoline. They are also developing bio-reactors using algae to generate energy from hydrogen. We could be living in an interesting world in a decade or two.
Well Glenn,
It appears our worst fears have been realized:
http://www.thestar.com/News/article/269265
Yes, I was reading that study on the GO Train this morning. I’m working on a post which will link to it. Should be ready tomorrow. –Glenn