Posted on 02/18/2015 4:23:44 AM PST by thackney
On the banks of the Illinois River, about 60 miles west of the state capital in Springfield, an old coal-fired power plant sits waiting for its future to arrive. First opened in 1948, it's been dormant since 2011, when its owner, St. Louis-based Ameren, shut down the plant rather than retrofit it to meet federal standards. Last year workers came to give it a makeover. Using almost $1 billion in stimulus money, the project was supposed to become the poster child for clean-coal technology. Rather than spewing into the sky, the carbon dioxide produced as the plant burned coal would be captured into a pipeline buried below corn and soybean fields. It would run 30 miles east to Jacksonville, where the gas would be injected 4,000feet underground....
The resurrection was short-lived. On Feb.3, the Department of Energy announced it was withdrawing support. Environmentalists who want investment in renewable power technologies rather than fossil energy cheered the decision. "We don't need it, and we can't afford it," Bruce Nilles, head of the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign, says of carbon-capture projects.
President Barack Obama has made addressing climate change a key part of his legacy. In November he struck an historic agreement with Chinese President Xi Jinping to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The White House has backed solar and wind power projects and touted the benefits of the country's surging production of natural gas, which burns about 50 percent cleaner than coal, still the largest source of electricity in the U.S. Last year the Environmental Protection Agency proposed tighter standards forexisting power plants....
A similar project is under way in Texas, where NRG Energy, a utility in Houston, is leading a $1billion effort to build a clean-coal plant called Petra Nova.
The project got $167million in federal funds....
(Excerpt) Read more at mcclatchydc.com ...
Started with a problem on the train, spread to the bridge and then the coal.
http://www.arizonarails.com/bad_day.html
ROCKEFELLER, John Davison IV (Jay), (1937 - )
Senate Years of Service: 1985-2015
http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=r000361
There’s no such thing as clean coal; the enviroweenies said so!
Why to the government? Wouldn't private industry take more of an interest, if there's profit potential?
That would be the deciding factor. If it needs a subsidy or government mandate to be used...
pitched it to the govt.
Wait a minute- that's impossible! The Bush-did-9/11- and fire-can't-melt-steel crowd say so! < /sarc >
There are quite a few private corporations who are interested but nobody is putting out any money on new processes right now. They won’t until we get a new administration who can give them some kind of reassurance as to what to expect down the road.
America has too much coal. If we use it to become energy liberated, well you can see what that might do to our enemies abroad.
Or we need more CO2?
Old Clean Coal ping. Thanks thackney.
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