More than half of the mercury switches still on the road are in GM’s cars. But, since filing for bankruptcy, GM stopped paying into the program. (Photo courtesy of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory)
The new General Motors, which recently emerged from bankruptcy, wants to create a clean, green image with its Chevy Volt electric car. But GM might have a bit of an environmental PR problem on its hands. Tamara Keith explains:
Transcript
The new General Motors, which recently emerged from bankruptcy, wants to create a clean, green image with its Chevy Volt electric car. But GM might have a bit of an environmental PR problem on its hands. Tamara Keith explains:
Automakers used to use mercury switches for lights and anti-lock brakes. But when old cars are scrapped and melted down, those parts turn into toxic air pollution.
So automakers and environmental groups created a program to recycle the mercury.
More than half of the mercury switches still on the road are in GM’s cars. But, since filing for bankruptcy, GM stopped paying into the program.
Rich Bell is president of the program, and he also works at Ford.
“None of our members are interested in paying for GM’s environmental legacy issues, and so we’re looking for a path forward, and we’re kind of in the midst of that now.”
In a statement, the new GM said those cars with mercury switches were made by the old GM.
The new GM that emerged from bankruptcy is not responsible for those old switches.
North America's largest solar plant, covering 140 acres, is located near Las Vegas (Photo courtesy of the Nellis Air Force Base)
Environmental groups have pushed for decades to get the federal government solidly behind solar energy. Shawn Allee reports some of them don’t like the government’s most recent effort to promote it:
Transcript
Environmental groups have pushed for decades to get the federal government solidly behind solar energy. Shawn Allee reports some of them don’t like the government’s most recent effort to promote it:
The Federal Bureau of Land Management developed 24 “solar energy study areas” in Western states.
The idea is to identify federal land that might be be good for solar power plants.
Some environmentalists scoured maps of these solar study areas and got concerned.
Jeffrey Morgan is with Tahquitz Sierra Club in California.
Morgan says a solar plant can take up hundreds of acres, and construction could disturb desert tortoise and cactus habitat.
“They have no concept the desert is a vital, living place with a vast diversity of species, unspoiled landscapes and many, many other things. They they just see it as a waste-land. That’s just not true – it’s not a waste-land.”
The Bureau of Land Management says the “solar energy study areas” are just that – they’re for study – and the government would not let solar energy developers disturb critical wildlife habitat.
A creek runs through Melvin Hershberger's farm in Holmes County, Ohio.
He was able to clean up the water with money from the Alpine Cheese Company.
The company needed to offset phosphorous pollution from its factory, so it pays farmers to
reduce their manure runoff. (Photo by Julie Grant)
Hershberger has 54 milking cows. Their manure used to run into the waterways.
Now the cows are fenced away from the creek. (Photo by Julie Grant)
When you hear about dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico and the Great Lakes, they’re largely caused by pollution draining from the farm belt. It can take a long time and a lot of money to reduce pollution at factories. So they’re starting to pay farmers to cut pollution instead. Julie Grant explains:
Transcript
When you hear about dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico and the Great Lakes, they’re largely caused by pollution draining from the farm belt. It can take a long time and a lot of money to reduce pollution at factories. So they’re starting to pay farmers to cut pollution instead. Julie Grant explains:
When you eat cheese, you might not realize that something so delicious creates a lot of waste. And that waste – that pollution – ends up going into the drain. It eventually ends up in rivers and lakes.
(sound of a factory)
We’re at a cheese factory in Holmes County, Ohio where they make nearly 60,000 pounds of cheese a day.
The big stainless steel vats look immaculate. But our shoes are wet.
Bob Ramseyer is CEO of the Alpine Cheese Company.
He says the floors are covered with water because the equipment is constantly being washed.
“We have a pre-rinse – that goes to drain. We have a final rinse, and that goes to drain. And we have all the floors that are flushed down and so forth, so that all ends up as part of the wastewater.”
The cheese factory’s wastewater includes not only those caustic chemical cleaners, but wasted milk by-products. One milk nutrient is the chemical, phosphorous.
About a decade ago, the Environmental Protection Agency told Ramseyer that the cheese company had to reduce the phosphorous it was releasing into the nearby river. Ramseyer was concerned.
“The equipment alone was going to cost a half million dollars. We projected it was going to cost between a half million dollars and a million dollars a year in operating costs. So we were looking for any way we could to reduce that cost. That’s where we got into the nutrient trading program.”
Alpine Cheese was among the first to negotiate what’s called a nutrient – or water quality – trading program. Instead of reducing the phosphorous coming from his factory, he pays farmers to reduce manure – another source of phosphorous – from washing from feedlots into the river.
(sound of cows)
Mervin Hershberger is an Amish dairy farmer with 125 acres and 54 milking cows.
(sound of a stream)
His farm looks like a postcard – beautiful hilly green pasture.
But a lot of the manure was washing off his farm into the streams. Herberberger says the cows were grazing right around the water.
“With the cows being in the creek we could see dirty water. The rocks were covered with dirt from cow’s waste. You walk through the stream, you’d kick up dirt and waste from the cows.”
Hershberger didn’t like it, but he didn’t have money to change it.
So when the County Soil and Water Conservation District held a neighborhood meeting to explain that Alpine Cheese was going to pay to reduce pollution from nearby farms, Hershberger saw a way to afford to clean up his farm.
He did about a dozen projects to reduce manure run-off into the water, like building a fence to keep the cows out of the stream.
And the little creek is bouncing back:
“As of now, it’s just totally clean, what you see. For the minnows and all the critters that are in the creek.”
Hershberger gets paid for the amount of phosphorous he keeps out of the water.
About 25 other farms in Holmes County are doing similar projects to reduce water pollution. And Alpine Cheese foots the bill. In exchange, the company doesn’t have to clean up wastewater coming from the cheese factory.
It’s a lot like a cap and trade program on water pollution.
There are a growing number of small programs like this around the country. But some people are trying to create water trading projects on a much larger scale.
That would mean a factory in one state might be able to pay farmer in another state. Eventually, all of the thousands of factories in just one river basin could pay farmers enough to reduce dead zones like the one in the Gulf of Mexico and in some of the Great Lakes.
The Anacostia River in Washington DC is ridden with garbage, and plastic bags make up 20% of the trash tossed in (Photo by Kavitha Cardoza)
For years, the Anacostia River that flows through
Washington DC was widely known as the forgotten
river, lost in the shadow of the better known
Potomac. At one point, some say the trash in the
river was so thick you could walk from one side to
the other without getting wet. Today things are
better. But, most people say not enough has been
done. DC’s city council is considering a five cent
tax on every disposable plastic and paper bag with
most of the money going to cleanup efforts. As Kavitha
Cardoza reports if it passes,
the fee would be the toughest law on plastic and paper
bags in the country:
Transcript
For years, the Anacostia River that flows through
Washington DC was widely known as the forgotten
river, lost in the shadow of the better known
Potomac. At one point, some say the trash in the
river was so thick you could walk from one side to
the other without getting wet. Today things are
better. But, most people say not enough has been
done. DC’s city council is considering a five cent
tax on every disposable plastic and paper bag with
most of the money going to cleanup efforts. As Kavitha
Cardoza reports if it passes,
the fee would be the toughest law on plastic and paper
bags in the country:
Kindergartners from the Evergreen School in Wheaton, Maryland are leaning over a rail and looking at bags, cups, wrappers and other trash floating in the Anacostia River.
They’ve travelled to D.C. to learn more about, as they put it, “what kills fish.”
The five-year-olds are NOT impressed with what they see.
The children roll up their sleeves and start pulling trash from the bank. But, it’s going to take a lot more than their small hands to clean up the mess.
Jim Connerly is with the Anacostia Watershed Society. He says Washington D.C.’s own environmental studies estimate each year 20,000 tons of trash is thrown into the Anacostia.
“It’s like a landfill on a conveyor belt.”
Studies also show plastic bags make up about 20% of the trash in the Anacostia.
When grocery bags are thrown away, many of them are swept up by rain water and carried into storm drains that flow into streams. They end up in the Anacostia.
The bags often ensnare birds and turtles. Fish eat the small torn pieces. That results in toxins making their way into the food chain.
Tommy Wells is the D.C. council member who came up with the idea of charging a nickel for plastic and paper bags.
“By charging a nickel, it really gets more into your head than your pocket. Also, it reminds you maybe I should have bought a reusable bag.”
And part of the money raised will help low-income residents buy reusable bags.
But Laurie Walker hasn’t heard about that proposal. She says, as a senior citizen on a fixed income, those nickels can add up quickly.
“Five cents is a whole lot of money, if I put it in a jar, every month when I get paid. I can buy a chicken, hot dogs, eggs for my grandchildren or for myself. I can buy a whole lot with that.”
The fee would raise nearly 2.5 million dollars a year. Besides the reusable bags, the money will fund educational efforts and return a portion to local businesses as an incentive.
The chemical industry which makes the plastic bags hopes anybody opposed to these kinds of fees or taxes will come out against this proposal. But environmentalists like the idea.
(sound of a beaver)
Back at the Anacostia River system, Jim Connerly says, with a little effort, the Anacostia could be trash-free in just a few years.
“In a perfect world, the water quality would be addressed. The thing that’s encouraging to me is that nature is always trying to seek balance. If we let the river alone, if we stop the input of pollutants, it would clean itself. It’s just that we’re not allowing the river to do that.”
Connerly and many others are hoping the Washington DC bag fee helps make that happen.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu says coal will have to be a part of the energy mix in the future, so the government is committing money to clean it up. (Photo courtesy of the USDOE)
President Obama’s Energy Secretary is talking about building a facility to find ways to burn coal more cleanly. Lester Graham reports:
Transcript
President Obama’s Energy Secretary is talking about building a facility to find ways to burn coal more cleanly. Lester Graham reports:
Burning coal pollutes – acid rain, toxic mercury, soot. And lately the big concern – carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas contributing to global warming.
The Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu told Members of Congress, despite the concerns about pollution, we still depend on coal for half of our electricity.
“So, it’s very important that we develop the technology that captures and also that safely sequesters carbon from coal plants.”
The technology does not exist today.
Chu says three-point-four-billion dollars in government stimulus money is now available to find a way to clean up coal.
An experimental plant called Futuregen was supposed to find ways to burn coal more cleanly and do something about carbon dioxide emissions. But the Bush administration killed funding.
Secretary Chu says the Obama administration is now negotiating with Futuregen partners again.
The EPA and other agencies want to spend $475 million on the Great Lakes
(Photo by Karen Holland, courtesy of the EPA)
The Environmental Protection
Agency’s budget has a lot of
money for green energy projects,
dealing with climate change and
creating green jobs. But Lester
Graham reports the EPA will also
deal with old fashioned environmental
issues such as pollution:
Transcript
The Environmental Protection
Agency’s budget has a lot of
money for green energy projects,
dealing with climate change and
creating green jobs. But Lester
Graham reports the EPA will also
deal with old fashioned environmental
issues such as pollution:
Cleaning up air and water pollution almost seem passe’ after hearing about all of President Obama’s shiny green plans.
But cleaning up past messes is still a priority.
The EPA’s budget is 10.5 billion dollars. In a release, the agency highlighted a plan for the Great Lakes.
The EPA and other agencies want to spend 475-million dollars to clean up polluted bays, stop raw sewage from spilling into the lakes and deal with other ongoing problems.
Andy Buchsbaum heads up the Great Lakes office for the National Wildlife Federation. He says early signs indicate this item in the President’s budget will stick in Congress.
“They haven’t given final approval, but both the House and the Senate approved budget resolutions that include this 475-million dollars for the Great Lakes.”
And there’s also money to work on the Chesapeake Bay, San Francisco Bay, Puget Sound, and other big bodies of water around the nation.
One lawyer wants a class action suit against the manufacturer of Atrazine, an herbicide used on crops (Photo by Rebecca Williams)
Atrazine is a weed killer. It’s
used by farmers in several crops,
basically because the herbicide is
relatively cheap and effective.
When Atrazine is used in the spring,
it sometimes ends up getting in
water – and in some cases at levels
above the government’s drinking water
standard – the maximum contaminant
level of three parts-per-billion.
Steve Tillery is an attorney in a
lawsuit against the manufacturer of
Atrazine – Syngenta – and Synenta’s
partner, Growmark. Tillery represents
water suppliers and he’s seeking class-
action status to represent all water
suppliers who’ve had to deal with Atrazine
contamination. Lester Graham talked to
him about the lawsuit:
Transcript
Atrazine is a weed killer. It’s
used by farmers in several crops,
basically because the herbicide is
relatively cheap and effective.
When Atrazine is used in the spring,
it sometimes ends up getting in
water – and in some cases at levels
above the government’s drinking water
standard – the maximum contaminant
level of three parts-per-billion.
Steve Tillery is an attorney in a
lawsuit against the manufacturer of
Atrazine – Syngenta – and Synenta’s
partner, Growmark. Tillery represents
water suppliers and he’s seeking class-
action status to represent all water
suppliers who’ve had to deal with Atrazine
contamination. Lester Graham talked to
him about the lawsuit:
Lester Graham: Mr. Tillery, what’s this lawsuit about, if the level is less than the 3-parts-per-billion the government says is safe?
Steve Tillery: Well, actually, at different times of the year, Atrazine does in fact exceed the federal standard. The federal government refers to MCL – maximum contaminant level – and that’s the maximum, they say, a chemical should exist in the water supply to be consumed by people in the community. The maximum contaminant level for Atrazine is 3-parts-per-billion. Many times, throughout the Spring, throughout Illinois and other Mid-Western cities, the levels grossly exceed 3-parts-per-billion. So what happens is that the cities, the water districts, are required to pay large amounts of money to filter the water so it is below that level. In addition, some have gone to the expense of completely cleaning it out of their water supplies. So that it doesn’t exist at all. And they should, in our view, be entitled to reimbursement for the expenses that they have incurred for completely cleaning it out of their water supplies.
Graham: Scientists that worked, then, for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association told me that during the application season, during the Spring, that they measured levels of Atrazine exceeding the safe drinking water levels in the rain on the East Coast from all of the application in the Midwest. Rather than just cleaning it up, is this not a problem of too much Atrazine – maybe we limit the amount?
Tillery: Well, the issue is whether or not it should be banned completely. The European Union has done exactly that. For all of the reasons that people look at – scientists look at – this chemical and point to the adverse health affects, changes to the environment, all of those reasons, the Europeans banned it some years ago.
Graham: The defense in most cases like this is: this is a regulated product, the label is the law, if it isn’t applied correctly, it’s the applicator – the farmer’s – fault; and if it is applied according to the label, the government says it’s safe.
Tillery: Yeah, we’re not safe. For two reasons. First of all, it’s not a problem with farmers. Farmers are doing exactly what is on the label. They are applying it precisely the way the manufacturer says it should be applied. So they’re not the issue. The problem is the manufacturer. To the extent that we rely on federal regulators to do the right thing, we are misdirected in this instance. For many years, the relationship between Syngenta – the principle manufacturer of this chemical – and the EPA has been under close scrutiny. And I’m hopeful that it’s reevaluated and examined under this new administration. Big corporations, in this case from Switzerland, who come here and sell this and make enormous profits in this country selling this chemical – 77 million pounds a year, average. When they make that money, and they cause taxpayers to incur $400 million a year in expense throughout the US to clean up their mess, they should be the ones that come back and reimburse them. We aren’t asking for anything else besides that. We are asking for compensation to these cities who’ve incurred this expense. The people who create the mess should pay for its cleanup. People should not be drinking water with Atrazine in it, at any level.
Graham: Steve Tillery is an attorney seeking class-action status trying to make the manufacturers of Atrazine pay to clean up the water their product contaminates. Thanks for your time.
Tillery: Thank you for allowing me to come here and speak.
(Photo courtesy of American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity)
You are being targeted by lobbyists. The coal industry and environmentalists are both trying to influence what you think. In the first part of our series on the future of coal, Lester Graham looks at the campaigns for-and-against coal:
Transcript
You are being targeted by lobbyists. The coal industry and environmentalists are both trying to influence what you think. In the first part of our series on the future of coal, Lester Graham looks at the campaigns for-and-against coal:
You probably don’t buy coal directly. But you do0 pay for it when you pay your power bill. 50% of the nation’s electricity comes from coal-burning power plants.
The problem with that is, coal pollutes.
Not as much as it used to. Some traditional pollutants have been reduced by 77% since the 1970 Clean Air Act.
Although the government forced it to reduce some some of the pollution, the coal industry brags about the progress and encouarges you to believe in the future of “clean coal.”
American Coalition for Clean Coal advertisement:
“I believe. I believe. We can be energy independent. We can continue to use our most abundant fuel cleanly and responsibly. We can and we will. Clean coal: America’s power”
Joe Lucas is the man behind that ad. He’s with the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. Lucas says the meaning of the phrase “clean coal” is always evolving.
“Ah, the use of the term ‘clean coal,’ it is a term of art. Up until now it has been technology that has reduced traditional pollution emissions and increased the efficiency of power plants and going forward we’re rapidly approaching the point to where it will be technologies for capture and storage of carbon.”
But right now, no power plant captures carbon dioxide. And carbon dioxide is the main greenhouse gas contributing to climate change.
That’s why environmentalists scoff at the coal industry’s use of ‘clean coal.’
Cohen brothers advertisement:
“Clean coal harnesses the awesome power of the word ‘clean’ to make it sound like the cleanest clean there is!” (coughing)
The guy behind that ad is Brian Hardwick. He’s the spokesman for the “This is Reality” campaign.
“In reality today there is no such thing as ‘clean coal.’ There is no commercial coal plant that captures its carbon pollution not to mention the other environmental impacts that the coal industry has – from burning coal and the runoff and the extraction of coal. So, we launched an effort to try to bring out the truth about coal in response to the marketing campaign that the coal industry had so that people could come to their own conclusions about whether or not they thought coal was indeed clean.”
Clean or not, we have a lot of coal here in the U.S. It’s relatively cheap. And when pushed, a lot of environmentalists concede we’ll need to rely on coal for electricity generation for some time to come.
During last year’s Presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama aknowledged that to people at a rally in Virginia, but indicated we need to find a way to really get to ‘clean coal.’
“Why aren’t we figuring how to sequester the carbons from coal? Clean coal technology is something that can make America energy independent.” (applause)
And President Obama has followed up on that. In the stimulus plan, 3.4 billion dollars was set aside to find ways to make coal clean.
There’s more to clean up. Sulfur dioxide, or SOx, contributes to acid rain. Nitrogen Oxides, or NOx, helps cause smog. Those have been reduced, but not eliminated. And then there’s toxic mercury and particulate matter – or soot. All of it harms the environment and public health.
President Obama’s Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, is a big proponent of cleaner energy sources such as wind and solar. But he says we do need to find a way to use coal.
“Right now as we’re using coal it’s not clean. But, I firmly believe that we should invest very heavily on strategies that can take a large fraction of the carbon dioxide out of coal as well as the SOx the NOx, the mercury, particulate matter.”
But until that technology is in place, ‘clean coal’ is no more than what the coal industry calls an “evolving term of art.”
The coal industry hopes the federal government will help them find a way to catch and store the carbon coming from smokestacks.
The coal industry got hit with expensive
pollution restrictions almost two decades ago. Now, the government’s considering putting a price on carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming. Coal companies think they have a technological solution in a test project called FutureGen. In the
second part of our series on the future of coal, Shawn Allee looks at why they
have such high hopes for it:
Transcript
The coal industry got hit with expensive
pollution restrictions almost two decades ago. Now, the government’s considering putting a price on carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming. Coal companies think they have a technological solution in a test project called FutureGen. In the
second part of our series on the future of coal, Shawn Allee looks at why they
have such high hopes for it:
The last time the federal government put a price on coal pollution was in 1990.
Power plants had to start paying for sulphur dioxide that came out of smoke stacks and caused acid rain.
To clean up, many burned cleaner coal.
That was bad news for Illinois miner Chris Nielsen.
He happened to mine some of the dirtiest coal.
“A good portion of the economy around here was built on coal industry. And coal mining jobs not only paid a good wage, they had terrific benefits. And as the industry went soft, people lost the best jobs they ever had.”
Cleanup technology improved, but it took nearly two decades to make burning the highest-sulpher coal economical again.
Nielsen says today, coal executives worry they’ll lose profits if the government prices carbon dioxide.
And coal miners worry they’ll lose jobs again.
The industry wants new plants that do two things: first, they capture carbon dioxide while burning coal, and then bury, or sequester this carbon dioxide – so it stays out of the atmosphere.
Nielsen says there’s a plant like that in the works, it’s called FutureGen.
“We can burn the coal in a clean, environmentally friendly manner. The FutureGen project where they were going to sequester the carbon dioxide was a terrific opportunity to show that.”
Well, Nielsen’s jumping the gun.
FutureGen hasn’t proved anything; it’s not even built.
The coal industry and the government were supposed to design and fund FutureGen, then build it in Central Illinois.
The government and coal companies fought over how much the plant would cost but now, it’s likely to move forward.
Even with a sketchy history though, the industry’s got almost no choice but to be hopeful for FutureGen.
The industry wants carbon dioxide capture and sequestration to work – otherwise, it’s gonna pay big for carbon pollution.
Not everyone’s so confident in the technology.
“We can not depend on carbon capture and sequestration to achieve greenhouse gas emissions reductions because we don’t know whether it’s going to work.”
That’s Ron Burke, with the Union of Concerned Scientists.
He says FutureGen is worth testing but it shouldn’t distract us from technology we know is low-carbon.
“There are ways to meet the greenhouse gas reductions targets that we need to meet without carbon capture and sequestration. We can do it, it’s primarily through in investing in renewable energy and energy efficiency in the near term.”
There’re energy researchers who aren’t so sure enough renewable energy like wind and solar will be available soon enough.
One is of them is Ernest Moniz at MIT.
“We have a ways to go for let’s say, solar, to scale up. Right now, it’s less than point 1% of our electricity.”
Coal generates nearly half our electricity.
Moniz says it won’t be easy to replace, but it might be possible to improve it.
He says its likely carbon dioxide capture and sequestration can work technically.
But he says we need to build FutureGen to answer whether it works efficiently and economically.
“Well, if we are going to establish a new technology, like sequestration, and be able to have it not only demonstrated but then deployed and implemented, that means we would need to start, preferably yesterday, but at worst, today.”
For Moniz, FutureGen could be clean coal’s first major test – not just of whether it works – but whether it’s too expensive.
Engineering Professor Rich Axelbaum studies his "oxy-coal combustor," a device he hopes could someday trap CO2 in coal-fired power plants. (Photo by Matt Sepic)
The device has not yet been adapted to an industrial scale, and researchers are not whether the CO2 it would capture could be stored underground indefinitely. (Photo by Matt Sepic)
The combustor burns the coal with pure oxygen, rather than in the air. (Photo by Matt Sepic)
Coal has a reputation as a sooty, dirty fuel. More recently, environmentalists and the coal industry alike have become just as worried about the carbon dioxide released when coal is burned. In the third part of our series on the future of coal, Matt Sepic has this look at the science behind so-called “clean coal”:
Transcript
Coal has a reputation as a sooty, dirty fuel. More recently, environmentalists and the coal industry alike have become just as worried about the carbon dioxide released when coal is burned. In the third part of our series on the future of coal, Matt Sepic has this look at the science behind so-called “clean coal”:
As far as most leaders of the coal industry are concerned, the debate about global warming is over. It exists, carbon dioxide contributes to it, and it’s a crisis. But as they’re quick to point out, nearly half the nation’s electricity comes from coal. It’s domestic. It’s relatively cheap. And there’s a lot of it.
Steve Leer is the CEO of Arch Coal. Leer says unless Americans want that power to get really expensive, coal will have to remain part of the equation. But he says something has to be done about all that carbon dioxide.
If we don’t solve that CO2 question, the backlash of high cost electricity becomes an issue for all of us.
Arch Coal is the nation’s second largest coal producer. It’s paying for research into carbon capture and storage. The idea is to divert CO2 from smokestacks, compress it, and then pump it underground.
Engineering professor Rich Axelbaum is studying this with money from Steve Leer’s company. In his lab at Washington University in St. Louis, Axelbaum and two students are tweaking a device they call an oxy-coal combustor.
RA: “It’s a relatively small scale, quite a small scale for industrial, but it’s a relatively large scale for a university.”
MS: “It looks like a few beer kegs stacked end to end and welded together.”
RA: “Right, right.”
Axelbaum can burn coal inside this furnace along with a variety of combustion gases. He’s trying to figure out exactly how much oxygen to inject to yield pure carbon dioxide.
“We can capture the CO2 from a combustion process, by instead of the burning the coal in air, you’re burning it in oxygen, so the stream coming out of the exhaust is CO2.
Axelbaum says there’s no sense in filling valuable underground storage space with CO2 mixed with other gases if a power plant is built that can grab nearly pure carbon dioxide and store it.
He says energy companies already pump CO2 underground to extract crude oil, so some of the technology already exists. But environmentalists say the next step – which is crucial for any so-called clean coal power plant to work– is far from proven.
“No one knows in the industry whether in fact they can sequester carbon permanently.”
David Orr teaches Environmental Science at Oberlin College in Ohio. He says storing CO2 underground is easier said than done. And nobody knows if rock formations in different parts of the country can hold the huge amounts of carbon dioxide America’s power plants produce without it eventually leaking out.
Orr says because the goal is to reduce global warming, politicians would be better off funding research into other energy alternatives.
The metric here is how much carbon do we eliminate per dollar spent on research and deployment of technology?
Orr says the 3.4 billion dollars set aside for clean coal research in the federal stimulus bill would be better spent studying wind and solar power, modernizing the nation’s electrical grid, and finding ways to improve energy efficiency.
But the United States still has more than a century’s worth of coal reserves. And with plenty of money going into both research and advertising, talk of carbon capture and storage is certain to continue, even if it remains just that.
More than half of the mercury switches still on the road are in GM’s cars. But, since filing for bankruptcy, GM stopped paying into the program. (Photo courtesy of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory)
