Lots of interesting perceptions in this thread.
I was told many years ago by a wise mentor to never forget that big companies are only in business to do one thing, and that is to make money. GM, Ford, Toyota, etc. only make cars because they want to make money. If the cars are powered by fossil fuels, electricity, Soylent Green, whatever, it matters not to them. Heck, they’ll get completely out of the auto biz if the only way to make money is to do something else (GMAC comes to mind).
The real blame lies with the purchasers (us). People like fast cars, powerful truck, and the roar of the engine. Driving a larger, fancier golf cart just isn’t the same. It will be a long time, and gas prices will be much, much higher than they are now, before there is a wide-spread move to electric cars.
I’d really like to hear about “today’s sequestration technologies.” We’re a long way from having something that works on the scale that is needed to take care of the CO2 from a single 500 MW plant. There are tons of ideas and concepts, and a handful of development efforts, but that’s a far cry from having a technology that works commercially.
That’s pretty poor grade coal, probably lignite. In general, coal contains much less water than that. The 5 lb = 5 kWhr is pretty close, on average, and coal contains about 80% carbon, some a bit more, some less (subbituminous coal and lignite are on the low end, and can have as little as 50% carbon). On average, though, you still get about 10,000 Btu/lb of coal, and the average efficiency of coal-fired plants is such that it takes about 10,000 Btu to generate a kWhr at the plant breaker (check out the DOE Energy Information Administration site for details). There will be losses for transmission, distribution, and in storage, so you’re probably doing well to get 80% of the energy into your car. You then have to deal with the internal losses of the car, not attributable to moving - motor losses, inability to completely drain the battery, headlights, radio, air conditioning, heater, etc. We can be generous and say that it takes 7 lb of coal to generate 5 kWhr of energy in the form of movement.
At 80% carbon, we’ve just released 5.6 lb of carbon into the air at the plant, which is in the form of 20.5 lb of CO2.
There are major advantages to dealing with CO2 (and all the other pollutants) at a central facility rather than being distributed among several hundred million moving tailpipes. Moving the other emissions out of highly populated areas is also a good thing to do. And there are numerous other ways to generate electricity other than using coal. But for at least the next decade, things will look pretty much like they do now. There is a long way to go before electric cars and carbon capture and sequestration become a reality.
