Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 05/21/2008 5:37:59 AM PDT by saganite
Researchers in Wyoming report development of a low-cost carbon filter that can remove 90 percent of carbon dioxide gas from the smokestacks of electric power plants that burn coal and other fossil fuels.
Maciej Radosz and colleagues at Wyoming's Soft Materials Laboratory cite the pressing need for simple, inexpensive new technologies to remove carbon dioxide from smokestack gases. Coal-burning electric power plants are major sources of the greenhouse gas, and control measures may be required in the future.
The study describes a new carbon dioxide-capture process, called a Carbon Filter Process, designed to meet the need. It uses a simple, low-cost filter filled with porous carbonaceous sorbent that works at low pressures. Modeling data and laboratory tests suggest that the device works better than existing technologies at a fraction of their cost.
Adapt this to auto tailpipes (if the catalytic converter doesn't take out the CO2 already) and the global warming crisis is, solved.
Cheers!
You’d see the AGW people shouting with delight,
IF
reducing CO2 were actually their goal.
Reducing our lifestyle is the actual goal, so don’t expect them to be too excited about a smokestack scrubber that allows the power plant output to remain the same or greater with reduced CO2.
Watch them and remember.
So I went to the link which in turn linked the researcher's technical paper.
The short answer to "where does the CO2 go" -- you have to PUT it somewhere (think geological formation), but if you do it right, it's a twofer! You can use it for enhanced oil and gas recovery techniques. From the paper:
"Although a typical destination of the captured CO2 is commonly envisioned to be some form of passive geologic storage or other storage type, this work is also motivated by a vision of utilizing the captured CO2 to displace valuable oil and coal-bed methane stranded in mature reservoirs, as illustrated in Figure 1, before storing it permanently in spent reservoirs. Such a CO2-driven displacement is referred to as enhanced oil recovery (EOR) and enhanced coal-bed methane recovery (ECBMR)."
but at least there will be no greenhouse gasses....
Seriously...has anyone picked up on just what level of CO2 would be acceptable?
Maybe just to maintain 25% of vegetation?,50%, or maybe 75%?
People are planting trees like mad, and there is a great movement to "save the forests"...so would not it be prudent to increase CO2 output just to support the increased vegetation?
Not good enough. We need 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% removed. Al Gore says so.
Exactly!!!!!!
This is gonna piss off the Gorons!
It appears to take about 10 years to get a politician to believe some econazi’s feel-good rape the citizen’s wallet BS. Then it porbably take 50 years, if then, for them to admit to the truth.
There is no AGW and CO2 is not the cause.
(They picked CO2 because water vapor would be harder to sell as APG, harder to find reasons to tax and/or regulate.)
“There is no safe level of CO2”
That worked for the Surgeon General it’ll work for Algore.
Costing less and working better is a death knell to the process. Now, if the report stated that it was less efficient and cost more, our congress would immediately appropriate billions and billions to fund it.
Why would it piss off the Gorons? Aren’t they in favor of reducing CO2?
(see my post 5)
As a matter of fact, satellite imagery reveals that the forested area of the planet has steadily risen every year since such surveys began.
Save the planet. Kill the trees...
The fact that it is simple, inexpensive and effective is enough to assure that it will never be put to common use.
2008 will be the year that I have officially lost all faith in humankind.
This could be excellent news for coal fired power plants.
Should I sell all of those carbon credits I have in my drawer at home?
I wrote a little analysis of synfuel upgrades to existing coal plants. I was going to give it a vanity thread, but instead I think I’ll post it here.
A 1GWe coal-fired power plant consumes ~ 7400 tons of coal per day, at a 2008 fuel cost of over $900K (at today’s rather high coal price of $120 per ton).
The plant produces 24 million kw/h per day, worth about $1.44M at $0.06 per kw/h.
The $540,000/day difference in fuel cost vs. electricity cost must cover plant amortization and operations.
Modern coal plants perform extensive processing of this coal (pulverizing, cleaning, etc.) before burning it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karrick_process -
By adding a “Karrick process” step to the pre-processing, the coal demand of the plant would increase by about 1/3 - i.e. the plant would require 9200 tons of coal worth $1.2M per day.
However, in addtion to producing the $1.44M worth of electricity per day, the “Karrick process” augumented plant would produce 9200 barrels of synthetic crude per day, worth over $1.1M at todays extremely high oil prices.
Total US coal-fired powerplant installed capacity is over 300 GWe. If half of these plants were equipped to also produce syncrude, they would increase US domestic crude oil production by 16%.
Most of the infrastucture required for coal liquification is ALREADY in place at these power plants, and they are already cleared for the environmental impact. The cost of adding a 9K barrel/day Karrick extractor to an existing 1GW coal plant should be less than 1/5th the cost of building an identically sized (in output) F/T or “Bergius process” coal liquification plant.
At > $100/barrel crude prices, the payback time for adding a “Karrick process” step to a 1GW coal power plant would be less than two years.
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