Okay, I’m watching the Presidential Debates – no, more like watching two minutes at a time between commercial breaks elsewhere, because I just can’t handle that much Bush and Gore all at once. I’m delicate, ya know? (Even in porn movies, they separate out the bush from the gore!)
Now, I could have sworn on my dead cat’s grave that BOTH candidates said something about how they are FOR exploring new Coal Technologies, because gasoline is a limited resources and we have lots and lots of coal around, nevermind it’s still a fossil fuel… blah blah blah, back to South Park.
Was I hallucinating? Coal? Really? What the hell are we thinking?
I could understand the Idiot Bush, being all for it. But Mr. Green Gore? Who is backed by the Sierra Club, no less… What’s up with that?
Does anybody out there know exactly what new coal technologies they are talking about and can you also please explain to me why I should support this, instead of oh… I dunno… Solar/Hydrogen power? Hell, I think I’d rather support Nuclear Power than see this country go back to being so dependent on highly-polluting, fossil-fuel coal. Have they figured out a way to use coal for power without spewing CFCs into the atmosphere? Did the hole in the ozone close back up while I was sleeping last night? Huh?
Clearly I am missing something… Can anyone enlighten me? Or is the Coal Lobby just the one with the most money this year?
Just out of curiosity, did you try to find out anything about this anywhere else first?
No? I didn’t think so. Alright, I guess it looks like I’m going to have to enlighten you. But it’ll have to wait for a couple hours, as I’m sick right now.
Well, I’ll tell you what. Even though by blind luck you found the best person who can answer these questions, I’ll not spend much time on them so you won’t be taken away from too much Cartman et al.
And what they were talking about was the term “Clean Coal Technology”, a program in the Department of Energy for some time now, which has the goal of promoting research into the cleanest possible use of coal to generate power.
I know what the hell I’M thinking, what the hell are YOU thinking?
Al Gore only pays lip service to “Clean Coal Technology”. He is very strongly anti-coal, and will do everything in his power to limit and shut down coal generation in the US if elected President. And that includes forcing the PM 2.5 issue, mercury and heavy metal monitoring and scrubbing, and possibly complete bans on new coal generation.
Because Clean Coal Technology research can result in immediate improvements in emissions and energy efficiency, whereas solar and hydrogen are quite far away from being economical alternates (and you can ask sailor about those issues, he has a good grip on them).
Wow…that’s mighty generous of you. What do you mean “go back” to coal? We never left coal! Coal is still responsible for well more than 50% of all the electricity generated in the US. Bet you didn’t know that, huh? Well don’t feel too bad - almost no one does. In fact, almost no one really gives a shit about this stuff in their daily lives, except people like me. And even the very highly intelligent population of the SDMB really only views me as an amusing, mostly harmless curiosity at best, and don’t really care about my work or research into coal.
But I digress.
In 2000, the projected breakdown for US electrical generation sources (in terms of capacity, not generation) from the DOE is as follows:
So just in terms of raw generation, coal is 41.4% of the total US capability. HOWEVER, in terms of actual generation over the year, coal and nuclear are both much higher fractions, because their units have much higher capacity factors. Which essentially means they can operate much longer periods at higher outputs, so their yearly contribution is proportionately much higher than that of gas.
SO let’s look at the projected 2000 numbers from the DOE:
Coal - 1876 Billion kWh, or 55.3% of the total electricity
Gas - 403.41 Billion kWh, or 11.9% of the total…
Nuclear - 668.41 Billion kWh, or 20.3% of the total…
Petroleum - 77.48 Billion kWh, or 2.3% of the total…
Renewables (almost all hydro) - 346.58 Billion kWh, or 10.2% of the total…
So guess what? This year, coal will supply about 55.3% of all the electrical energy in the US!
A large reason why clean coal technology research might yield a benefit for us.
Why not just do nuclear? Do you think the Sierra Club wants nuclear any more than coal? In fact, according to the DOE,
of the 97 gigawatts of nuclear capacity available in 1998, 40 gigawatts are projected to be retired by 2020, and no new plants are planned to be constructed in that same timeframe. So somewhere, even if our consumption stays flat, we need 40 more GW just to replace retired nuclear plants. Where does this energy come from?
Yeah, “Huh?” is kinda what I thought when I read “CFCs” coming from coal. You’re demonizing the wrong thing here…
No, it’s pretty much simpler than that. To quote Living Colour, I’d like to talk right down to Earth, in language you can understand:
Solar, Wind, and Hydrogen are all really cool and neat things. They cost too much, and can’t deliver the output needed even if you are willing to pay the price.
Nuclear is feared and loathed by the average American just slightly less than Saddam Hussein, and most of the “Green” parties fear and hate nuclear as well.
Petroleum is out of the question, as it’s both too expensive and too badly needed for mobile transport to be used for electrical generation right now.
Biomass has serious practicality issues, which I discussed at length in a thread in GQ recently.
Hydro is great, but we have all we probabaly ever will in terms of capacity. And the Greens want to start tearing down some dams…
Natural gas is great - not too expensive, decent efficiency, and decent emissions. The problems is everyone has been treating it as a panacea, and it is being consumed at an alarming rate. Leading many to wonder if it will even be cost-effective to use in 12 years.
So then we come to coal (and conservation, which is another topic completely). Coal can be burned with very high efficiency and cleanliness, and is in the US, except for a few large grandfathered plants. All of which are slowly adding emissions controls to become cleaner and cleaner with each upgrade. In fact, a coal plant built to today’s regulations would be a very efficient and clean plant, like Deseret’s Bonanza Unit in Utah - a very fine running, super-clean plant, which I have been to myself. Coal is very cheap, and will be so not just for the next 20 years, but possibly for the next 100 years - we simply have a lot of coal.
A question for you Anthracite, I have known we can burn coal fairly cleanly for some time, but do have a few concerns about the Ash/Solid residue. I seem to recall that it has a fairly high concentration of toxics and undesirables in it. One of them being pretty high concentrations of radium. How well is the solid waste being handled these days? I remember seeing large piles of what I assumed was ash near one of the old coal fired plants we used to pass in WV driving to DC just out in the open, is that done anymore?
I enjoy your posts most when they shed truth and reason to issues that people have misconceptions and strong feelings about. Today it was coal power. Great post.
Wow. Anthracite, I am both impressed and enlightened. Thank you for the info.
Now to dig out the pictures of my grampa and uncles - all the men on mom’s side of the family worked the coal mines in PA (except one of my uncles - he was in the railroad, but he transported the coal so the family forgave him.)
I agree, Anthricite- I find your posts very intelligent and informative. Thanks for all that info- I had no idea (and I don’t normally keep my head in the sand over energy issues- I just didn’t realize the impact coal had on our everyday energy use).
Zette
(remembering her late Grandfather today, who died from working in the coal mines many years ago)
Coal ash is disposed of in one of three general ways:
It is sluiced with water to wet ponds, where most of the water evaporates but the ash remains. When the pond fills up, it is capped with earth and rock like any other landfill.
It is collected dry, taken to a landfill, mixed with water to keep it from blowing, and then landfilled.
It is sold, for one of two purposes:
a) Concrete, if there is little carbon residue in the ash and the ash is the right color and has the right calcium content.
b) Soil stabilization, if there is too much carbon.
The light fly ash from a pulverized coal power plant (about 80% of the ash produced) makes some of the best concrete that you can buy. Selling fly ash is a big business in the US and abroad, and most coal plants can sell all of their fly ash, at up to $2 to $8 per ton.
The heavy bottom ash from the plant (about 20% of the ash produced) can be sold as abrasive material for sandblasting, and as aggregate. But normally it is not. When it is sold, it is often sold for free transport off the site.
My experience has been that any coal plant that has efficienct combustion (and thus low unburned carbon in the ash) can sell all of their flyash, as the demand is greater than the supply.
Because of it’s light nature, stacking it in a pile is never done (in the US at least). What you probably saw was just plain old coal.
Now, as to toxics in the coal ash. When fixed in concrete, the toxics are not a concern at all. And even when just landfilled, coal ash is relatively benign stuff. You asked about radium being an issue. In reality, the radium and radon level released in coal combustion is pretty insignificant. In fact, they are so low they are not even reported on any standard detailed coal trace element analysis, nor does the EPA require and monitoring, tracking, or accounting.
What can be a concern are heavy metals. And I stress the “can”. Antimony, arsenic, beryllium, cadmium, chromium, mercury, lead, selenium, vanadium - all of these are found in varying levels in coal and the coal ash - from 0.1 ppm to 500 ppm. And while the levels overall are small, a coal plant can produce a million or more tons of ash per year. That results in a whole lot of some of these heavy metals.
But this is not a coal-specific problem. Petroleum has very high levels of nickel and vanadium, so high that sometimes the vanadium can be processed out of the oil ash and sold.
Based on current EPA direction (regardless of who wins the election) most likely the Coal Plant O’ the Future will be required to monitor mercury, arsenic, lead, and cadmium emissions. And possibly even start scrubbing these out of the flue gas. So the possibility of taking extra measures to prevent leaching of these metals from the ash as it sits in the pond or in storage exists.
I also want to add something to my earlier post. Regardless of how clean you make coal, there is still one, key emission that cannot be eliminated practically - carbon dioxide. We have enough energy to last for well more than 100 years in the form of coal, but while this can be burned very cleanly overall it will still result in an enormous contribution to carbon dioxide emissions, and thus any potential greenhouse effect.
I really appreciate you going to the trouble to enlighten me (us) on all that. I truly am ignorant on the subject and thanks for setting me straight.
Did ya have to be so condescending at the beginning? I was trying to be a little silly. IRL, I’m actually funny, but you can’t hear my tone of voice on a message board, so obviously I came off as a pompous ass, ranting on something I don’t know anything about. I’ll go do some actual research now.
I had no idea the US was still using so much coal… This makes me wonder about all those poor Appalachian coal miners… I was under the impression that many of them had nothing to do/were unemployed. Have we cut back on coal production so significantly? I’m a little confused about why there’s such ferocious poverty up there if we use/need coal so much. Are we getting it from other parts of the country and the West Virginians are just SOL?
And thanks again for clearing up my confusion: I hear CFC’s and know that means Chloroflourocarbons (sp?). In my tiny brain, Carbon = coal. Thought burning coal would do the same thing as spraying Aqua Net. Evidently not.
{slinks off, humiliated, to find a thread about South Park}
I am sorry about your grandfather. Coal mining was an ugly and dangerous business for more than a century, and although I know it doesn’t help in your loss, at least today it is a reasonably safe, high-paying business for those brave men and women that still work in it.
Atracite, I now know a something I necer know before. Thank you for educating me.
btw, you aren’t coal, you’re a diamond.
as an aside, would the level of Solar/Hydro “green” methods be able to compensate with the downturn in Nuclear creation?
is it worth the time and effort to develop these to help compensate the level of coal energy production needed?
OMG, what a great thread! Very interseting, Mr. Coal Man
The original power plant here in Lansing was constructed with different color bricks, darker at the bottom and progressing lighter toward the top, to illustrate the coal combustion process. Its a pretty neat building, right downtown. The local Board of Water and Light is trying to find a buyer for - I guess it wasn’t functional or whatever anymore. No one wants to tear it down 'cause its a pretty cool building, right on the river, and has a lot of local history.
Adding processed fly ash (known as pozzalin) to concrete results in a stronger, more uniform finished product, but the most common reason for using it is because it reduces the amount of water required in the mix. The water in concrete doesn’t evaporate – it drives a chemical reaction known as curing. While curing, concrete gives off heat and the amount of heat given off limits the amount of concrete you can use at any one time. Very large projects (e.g., Grand Coulee Dam) would be much more costly and time-consuming without the addition of pozzalin to the concrete.
There are naturally occurring pozzalins, but, as Anthracite stated, fly ash is a very good source and is used almost exclusively nowadays.
Part of the reason that you hear about unemployed coal miners in the East is because much of the coal there is high-sulfur and once Clean Air Act regulations went into effect it became cheaper to use or mix in coal from other places which had lower sulfur content.
The much bigger part of the picture however, is that a lot of the work that used to be done by people can now be done much more effectively by machines. It’s not unique to the coal industry–it’s just that alot of coal areas weren’t ever that strong economically anyway and didn’t have a very diversified employment base so losing the coal jobs really hammered them.
A state of the art coal plant will actually emit less carbon dioxide than a natural gas plant. Also, combined heat and power plants can cut down dramatically on carbon dioxide emissions (that’s when they use the steam generated to heat buildings rather than venting it or using cooling towers). My college actually used this system–it was pretty cool.
Anyway–I’m not quite the expert Anthracite is, but I did do a MS thesis on reducing CO2 emissions from coal in central PA so I know a little bit about that side of things.
No, I most certainly did not have to be, and I apologize to you. I posted that I was sick in my first response, and I will fall back on that as my only excuse for why I was in a bad mood last night. Once again, I am sorry.
Well, the coal produciton in the US has had a dramatic shift to the West over the last 10 years, and this is likely what you are seeing. There are two reasons for this:
Although the coal in the Eastern US is pretty good quality overall, it has been mined very heavily, such that prices have been climbing steadily every year. And many good mines have really started getting into the “boney” coal (coal with a lot of rock and debris mixed with it).
But the major reason is the sulfur content, as the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 caused most all coal plants East of the Mississippi to consider switching to low-sulfur Wyoming and Montana coal to reduce SO2 emissions (sulfur dioxide, a principal component of acid rain). Coal commonly mined in the East can typically have sulfur contents ranging from 1 to 3 percent, while coal mined in Wyoming and Montana can range from 0.2 to 0.5 percent typically.
Most all miners in the East were not willing to move to the West, and in the West most mining is done by open-pit mines anyways, which are less labor intensive than longwall (underground) mines.
And use of these PRB coals (Powder River Basin, meaning the region in Wyoming and Montana from which they are mined) has grown enormously in just the 8 years I’ve been working on this issue. Coal plants as far East as Virginia are now either receiving or planning to receive coal from Wyoming, due to it’s low sulfur and low nitrogen content as well (low nitrogen and the high moisture and other flame-specific characteristics of these PRB coals means less NOx, or nitrogen oxides produced, which are another component of acid rain and photochemical smog).
(Even in porn movies, they separate out the bush from the gore!)