Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Public Interest Groups Oppose Carbon Capture Scam


Unproven technology, Ridiculous Risk, Exorbitant Cost
Oppose industry-driven plans for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) to keep COAL burning. Read this article

The time to stop these projects is BEFORE COAL, and its friends, enter your community!

It's time to find alternatives - every dime spent on CCS is a dime spent on COAL and NOT Renewable Energy.
Not only does CCS keep the coal industry going, it requires up to 40% MORE ENERGY - MORE COAL !


Citizens Against CO2 Sequestration has taken a stand in our community to oppose Carbon Capture and Sequestration.

Our Community is opposing one of the 7 DOE large-scale CO2 sequestration demonstrations (experiments) targeted for our community - the MRCSP Phase III project. This grassroots movement of concerned citizens understands the risks and finds them unacceptable for our community - and yours.

700+ Opposition Yard Signs are up - with more on the way!

Darke County is an agriculturally strong community, ranking #1 and #2 in most areas. Our Farmers' Union has taken a stand to oppose CCS! (Thank you Darke County farmers!)

Protect health, safety and environment - Take A Stand AGAINST CCS

Fighting a CCS (Carbon Capture and Sequestration) project in your community?
Contact us.

StopExperimentalCO2Projects@yahoo.com


DO MORE

Click Here to Access the Sierra Club Web Site

To Sign the Petition and Add Your Name to Oppose Coal

America needs more clean energy jobs and less pollution--and President Obama's EPA already has the power to act. Sign their petition to your Senators asking them to urge President Obama to create rules that regulate coal ash, mercury, soot and carbon pollution.


Evaluating Geological CO2 Sequestion Sites (Permanent Storage)


"This report describes a screening and ranking framework (SRF) developed to evaluate
potential geologic carbon dioxide (CO2) storage sites on the basis of health, safety, and environmental (HSE) risk arising from possible CO2 leakage. The approach assumes that HSE risk due to CO2 leakage is dependent on three basic characteristics of a geologic CO2 storage site: (1) the potential for primary containment by the target formation, (2) the potential for secondary containment if the primary formation leaks, and (3) the potential for attenuation and dispersion of leaking CO2 if the primary formation leaks and secondary containment fails. The framework is implemented in a spreadsheet in which users enter numerical scores representing expert opinions or general information available from published materials, along with estimates of uncertainty to evaluate the three basic characteristics in order to screen and rank candidate sites. Application of the framework to the Rio Visa Gas Field, Ventura Oil Field, and Mammoth Mountain demonstrates the approach."

The full report can be accessed here

CO2 Sequestration - Does NOT work


Ike Solem says:

Read the full story here


The reality is not quite as rosy as it looks. This same issue arose in 2007, when the nuclear industry tried to force $50 billion in loan guarantees through. Historically, nuclear and coal and oil have received giant federal subsidies in the form of loan guarantees, tax breaks, and direct subsidies via zero-oversight federal contracting deals. Despite popular pressure to roll back these subsidies and promises by politicians to do so, they largely remain intact – only gross expansions of these subsidies have been defeated – and according to reports, the $2 billion for the FutureGen “clean coal” project remains in the bill.

That’s $2 billion for one generation plant using an apparently failed technology. (The U.S. federal budget for ALL solar photovoltaic research is about 1/20th of that, $100 million) The technology is secret and proprietary and is controlled by a financial consortium of private coal interests (i.e. Southern, Peabody, BHPBilliton, etc.) and military government contractors (Battelle, the primary organizer). There are no published papers on the technology, which they refuse to talk about because it is proprietary. Try asking the technical advisers about it:

http://www.futuregenalliance.org/alliance/advisors.stm

Battelle is the world’s largest private research corporation, who manages five National Labs for the Department of Energy and plays the leading role in the U.S. biological warfare program, as well as in many other areas of military and commercial R&D. They are the proprietary controllers of FutureGen technology, and they’ve never published anything on it either. Despite the public financing of the project, Battelle insists that only “non-proprietary performance data” can be released, whatever that means. Fraud is the most likely story here.

The fact of the matter is that carbon sequestration-based coal combustion does not work, and will never work, on simple physical arguments. There’s also no prototype – for example, a car that drives down the road while capturing all CO2 emissions in the trunk. Try sticking a potato in the tailpipe – that’s what all CO2 sequestration involves – massive power losses. It’s likely that if you could design a coal plant that captured 90% of its CO2 emissions, it would only produce 10% of the power (per ton of coal) that a dirty modern coal plant does. There’s no way around it, especially if the coal is loaded up with sulfur and mercury and arsenic, as is typical.

What we don’t see is $2 billion to build an integrated wind-solar power system with backup biomass generations in some city as a test case. They are doing this in Germany – but not here. The reason for that is that the Democratic politicians from the coal states are dedicated supporters of the coal industry, and yes, that does include Obama and Dick Durbin, as well as Jeff Bingaman.

The last thing the coal industry wants to see is a city anywhere in the U.S. that operates entirely on renewable power – but it can be done, and it would be the perfect example. $2 billion would be a good initial investment – but there would be howls from the fossil fuel industry, that’s for sure – and they own Congress, more or less. You don’t see oil executives and coal executives being hauled before Congress the way the auto and finance executives were, do you? And no one is asking financiers why they are investing their bailout money in fossil fuels and not in renewables, either. (Bloomberg reported that Morgan Stanley and Citigroup were buying oil up and storing it in supertankers – a way to drive up the price, or to reserve oil for when prices rise – and these banks are also invested in fossil fuels, thanks to the repeal of Glass-Steagall banking rules c.1999 – and that’s why those rules were put in place – banks should not be able to loan their customer’s money to firms that they hold shares in, period).

I would put the celebrations on hold – this stimulus package is the equivalent of a band aid on a shark bite. There’s a whole lot of work to be done still, and the issues are very complicated. This was not a defeat for coal interests – they lost nothing, and even gained a little something. It would be a lot easier if the press would honestly cover this story, but they haven’t.