Instantman points out an article in the Strib today about a potential breakthrough in clean-burning coal.

If it's true, expect many of the environmentalist groups to throw rocks at it--this is their worst nightmare. After all, who cares if we reduce sulfur dioxide (SOX) and nitrous oxides (NOX)? It still emits that horrible, deadly CO2 that's going to cook us all.

And of course, it will remove one of the barriers to their worst enemy of all--economic growth and capitalism.

Comments from an extremely knowledgeable source in the coal-burning power plan industry:

What can I say about the process?

Nothing more really than any other similar process - it looks like something akin to an activated carbon process. Which we've already known for decades can remove huge amounts of pollutants from power plant flue gas - even at the efficiencies quoted in the article. And remove mercury and other heavy metals too.

So why don't we use activated carbon? One over-riding reason is that it costs too much.

Unlike most articles that set off my "bullshit" alarm, this one only has two issues that make me wonder - cost, and scalability.

They show lots of estimates for "30-50% reductions in cost", but no numbers at all as to how they arrived at that. And from the cost data that I have available to me, I think that their estimates for FGD+SCR installation and O&M are way too high. But since I can't provide numbers here, I guess it evens out from a credibility standpoint.

On scalability - their demonstrations have impressive numbers, but have not actually been verified by the USEPA. They also deal in quantities of "500 to 2,000 cubic feet per minute". Well, that's nice and all, but there is a serious question of scalability. A relatively small coal power plant (say, about 225 MW) may produce more than 900,000 cubic feet per minute of flue gas to be treated. And a really big one might put out as much as 4,500,000 to 5,000,000 cubic feet per minute of flue gas. So we're talking about a scalability of possibly as much as 450:1 to 2300:1.

Many experimental technologies break down at scalabilities of around 100:1 to even 20:1 at power plants. 450:1 to 2300:1 is a big gamble.

As a nitpick, this quote was a little disturbing from the Star Tribune article:

quote:
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and the EPA links one member of the Nox family, nitrous oxide, to global warming.
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That's great and all, but irrelevant, since coal power plant NOx is typically about 98% NO and 2% NO2. Nitrous oxide is N2O, and is not typically produced at coal power plants in any important quantity.

This also bothered me:

quote:
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Jenny Reinertsen, an air-quality engineer for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, said that if the technology works as described in the planned full-scale scrubber, the impact on the industry would be profound.

She said the federal government requires new plants to use the best pollution-control systems available. "Plants that came after would have to meet the same standards," she said.
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I think Jenny needs to review what BACT (Best Available Control Technology) really means with respect to meeting emissions regulations. Right now we have systems that can remove nearly 100% of all NOx and SO2 - but we don't have to use them.

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