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.
This is an artist's concept of how the FutureGen coal-burning power plant would look. The FutureGen power plant would confine the carbon dioxide that it generates and store it deep underground. (Photo courtesy of the Department of Energy)
We’re hearing more and more these days about global warming and how human activity is believed to be changing the climate. A lot of the blame has gone to pollution from coal-burning plants that produce electricity. Now, the U-S wants to build a plant that would capture and store the pollution… if it can find the right site. The GLRC’s Julie Grant reports:
Transcript
We’re hearing more and more these days about global warming and how
human activity is believed to be changing the climate. A lot of the blame
has gone to pollution from coal-burning plants that produce electricity.
Now, the U.S wants to build a plant that would capture and store the
pollution…if it can find the right site. The GLRC’s Julie Grant reports:
The U.S Department of Energy is chipping in 750-million dollars to the
build what’s called the FutureGen coal-burning power plant, and a
consortium of power companies is contributing an additional 250-
million. That’s a billion dollars of investment.
It’s exciting to Craig Stevens. He’s a spokesman with the Department of
Energy.
“FutureGen could revolutionize the way we use coal in this country and
around the world.”
We get most of our electricity from power plants that burn coal and belch
out greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide. But Stevens says
FutureGen would be a cleaner coal-plant…
“And that’s important because today, we in the U.S have a 250 year
supply of coal reserves. It is our most abundant fossil fuel. These
electric plants actually burn coal to produce electricity for millions of
Americans. One of the things we want to do is to use this coal in an
environmentally sensitive manner.”
The hope is that FutureGen will capture the carbon dioxide it generates
to store it deep underground. Scientists plan to purify and liquefy the
CO2, so it’s a water-like substance. Then they want to inject it into the
earth. They plan to dig wells 9000 feet deep for CO2 storage. They also
want to use the space left behind from old coal mines, oil and gas wells.
Geologist Neeraj Gupta is with Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus.
He’s been researching what’s known as carbon sequestration since
1996…
“And that time this was just the beginning of an idea that you can take
carbon dioxide emissions from large industrial sources, you know, such
as power plants, and you can purify that, to make like a pure CO2s
stream. And, just like you produce oil and gas from the deep geologic
formations, you can take that CO2 and inject it back into the ground into
those same or similar deep geologic formations.”
Gupta says in the same way fossil fuels are trapped deep in the earth,
carbon dioxide could be trapped underground for millions of years, but
there are a lot of uncertainties.
Dr. Rattan Lal is director of the Carbon Management and Sequestration
Center at Ohio State University.
“Uncertainties are… is there going to be leakage? Either at the place
where it’s being injected or several miles away where there might be a
geological fracture in the rock strata.”
Lal says areas that have the right kind of rock layers and are not prone to
earthquakes, would be the best places to experiment with a project like
FutureGen.
Mark Shanahan is director of Ohio’s Air Quality Development
Authority. He thinks his state might be the perfect place because it has
the right kind of geology. At the deepest levels, the rocks aren’t entirely
solid. They’re porous, like a sponge, but with microscopic holes.
Scientists expect those tiny holes to absorb the CO2…
“The second thing is that that porous geology has to be beneath another
formation that is not porous, so the non-porous formation serves as a cap
on top of your CO2. So, once you put it into the porous formation, it
can’t go up.”
So the CO2 is trapped underground… hopefully permanently. Other
states, besides Ohio, think they also have good places for the plant.
The Department of Energy is currently reviewing proposals and plans to
pick a site by late next year. The agency wants to have FutureGen up
and running by 2012.
With concerns about global warming, the government wants to build a power plant that would capture emissions – if it can find the right site. The GLRC’s Julie Grant reports:
Transcript
With concerns about global warming, the Government wants to build a
power plant that would capture emissions – if it can find the right site.
The GLRC’s Julie Grant reports:
The U.S Department of Energy is chipping in 750-million dollars to the
build what’s called the FutureGen coal-burning power plant, and a
consortium of power companies is contributing an additional 250-
million. That’s a billion dollars of investment.
Craig Stevens is a spokesman with the Department of Energy. He says
there are 250 years worth of coal reserves and this project would burn
that coal without polluting the air…
“If we can find a way to use coal that has zero emissions into the
atmosphere through geologic storage – actually pumping the carbon
dioxide into geologic formations – we can go a long way toward using
this coal but also saving our environment.
Stevens says the DOE is looking for a site that is safe to store carbon
dioxide deep underground.
The agency is currently reviewing proposals and plans to choose a spot
by late next year.
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)