Tag Archives: Coal

BEIJING, CHINA - JANUARY 23: A tourist and her daughter wearing the masks visit the Tiananmen Square at dangerous levels of air pollution on January 23, 2013 in Beijing, China. The air quality in Beijing on Wednesday hit serious levels again, as smog blanketed the city. (Photo by Feng Li/Getty Images)

BEIJING, CHINA – Tiananmen Square, January 23, 2013 (Photo by Feng Li/Getty Images)

Forbes, here, and reports that China is building a 200 MW solar farm in the Gobi Desert (Clean Technica, here, IFL Science, here.

However, Chinese authorities plan for carbon emissions to peak in 2030 – that is to keep increasing until 2030. Bellona, here, reported that Chinese authorities plan to increase renewables to 20% by 2030. This will include 200 GW of Wind, 100 GW of Solar. The plan is also to increase burning of Natural Gas to 10% of their electricity capacity, and to focus on coal with carbon capture. (Apparently the Chinese authorities don’t seem to realize how much carbon sequestration really costs. It is, as they say in New England, “wicked expensive.”)

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Carbon Sequestration: A Surreal Carbon Solution

What was once a mountain. image courtesy of Appalachian Voices. AppVoices.org

Writing in the New York Times, here, Joe Nocera, says,

Sometime this summer, in Odessa, Tex., the Summit Power Group plans to break ground on a $2.5 billion coal gasification power plant. Summit has named this the Texas Clean Energy Project. With good reason.

The people behind this project want people to believe that the energy the plant produces is clean. Mr. Nocera continues.

Part of the promise of this power plant is its use of gasified coal; because the gasification process doesn’t burn the coal, it makes for far cleaner energy than a traditional coal-fired plant.

The plant doesn’t burn SOLID coal. It gassifies the coal, then burns the gas. It’s still burning the coal. Only this process uses energy to gassify the coal. It then uses more energy to capture and sequester 90% of the carbon. Think, Mr. Nocera, how can this make CLEANER? Answer: It Can’t and it Doesn’t. But it can – and does – make it more expensive.

And what about the Arsenic, Mercury, Uranium that are embedded in coal? And the processes that dig coal out of the ground? Refer to Appalachian Voices for more on mountaintop removal.

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Beyond Fuel – for the 21st Century – Cocoa Beach, Sept. 17

Tweet I will be presenting Beyond Fuel: From Consuming Natural Resources to Harnessing Natural Processes at the Space Coast Green Living Festival, Cocoa Beach, Florida, Sept 17, 2011. The festival is sponsored by the Cocoa Beach Surfrider Foundation and the Sierra Club Turtle Coast Group. It will be at the Cocoa Beach Courtyard by Marriott. Haley Sales, (Website / Facebook / Youtube),a local singer / songwriter, will perform.

Hayley Sales

Our current energy paradigm today is to fuel based. We burn oceans of oil and methane mountains of coal. And there are consequences. We suffer oil spills, polluted water, mercury, coal mine disasters, nuclear power plant melt-downs, we fight wars …

According to the DoE, in 2010 we burned 1,085,281 thousand short tons of coal and 15,022 thousand short tons of coke (here).

Wind and solar don’t burn fuel. The winds blow, the sun shines, you put a widget in the path of those moving particles in the air or those photons of light and you get electricity – without greenhouse gases, radioactive wastes, toxic wastes, and it costs less. So the question is not ‘Can we meet our energy needs with clean, sustainable renewable energy technologies?” The real question are How? How Much? And How quickly?

100% Clean Energy
100 Gigawatts Wind	$300 Billion
100 GW Marine Hydro	$300 B
50 GW Solar	$200 B
50 GW Geothermal	$200 B
200 GW Equiv Efficiency	$200 B
A Smart Grid	$100 B
500 GW or GW Equiv.	$1.3 Trillion

And we could do it within 25 Years if we wanted to.

Amory Lovins, of the Rocky Mountain Institute, coined the term “Negawatt” to mean energy you don’t need to buy, as in “The cheapest unit of energy is the one you don’t have to buy.” The next cheapest, the “nega-fuel-watt” is the unit of energy that doesn’t require fuel.

"Beyond Fuel" at the Space Coast Green Living Festival

Green Living Festival

Tweet I am presenting “Beyond Fuel: From Consuming Natural Resources to Harnessing Natural Processes,” a discussion of the hidden costs, or “economic externalities,” of nuclear power, coal, and oil, and the non-obvious benefits of wind, solar, marine hydro and efficiency at the Sp ace Coast Green Living Festival, Cocoa Beach, Florida, Sept 17, 2011.

The festival is sponsored by the Cocoa Beach Surfrider Foundation and the Sierra Club Turtle Coast Group. It will be at the Cocoa Beach Courtyard by Marriott.

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Clean Energy, Good Jobs, and a Vibrant Economy … But

courtesy NASA (our tax dollars at work)

Tweet It sounds too good to be true:

*   100 gigawatts of offshore wind, $300 Billion,
*   100 gw of landbased wind, $200 Billion,
*   75 gw of solar, $300 Billion,
*   75 gw of geothermal, $200 Billion.
*   200 gigawatt equivalents of efficiency – $200 Billion.
*   100 & Clean, Renewable, Sustaianble Energy: 1.2 Trillion.
*   2.7 Million New Jobs and a Healthy Economy: Priceless!

This is happening, slowly, inexorably, by the “invisible hand of the market.” But it will happen faster if the “invisible mind of the community” acts. This means the government!

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Would Ayn Rand be Concerned about Climate Change? You Betcha!

Tweet On Ayn Rand, Objectivism, and Climate Change

Ayn Rand would not “believe” in climate change. She would try to objectively determine whether the theory correctly modeled the data. While it is legitimate to question both the conclusions of scientists and the methodologies by which data are gathered, denying objective validity of the data, which people who call themselves “Objectivists” are doing with respect to climate science, is well, in a word, anti-Objectivist, at least as described by Ayn Rand in 1962.

“The essence of my philosophy” she said, is:

Metaphysics Objective Reality
Epistemology Reason
Ethics Self-interest
Politics Capitalism

“Translated into simple language, ” she continued, “it would read:

“Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed” or “Wishing won’t make it so.”
“You can’t eat your cake and have it, too.”
“Man is an end in himself.”
“Give me liberty or give me death.” Continue reading →

Earth Day, 2011, Where Are We?

Earth from Space, courtesy of the American taxpayer. Reto Stöckli, Nazmi El Saleous, and Marit Jentoft-Nilsen, NASA GSFC

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Earth Day, 2010, I looked to the future on Popular Logistics. In 2009, I wrote about water pollution and agricultural waste in the Chesapeake. Today I am looking at the present and recent past. While a comprehensive look at where we are can be found on the web pages of the World Watch Institute, the New York Times, and the World Factbook of the Central Intelligence Agency, I want to make a few points.

Our energy policy is “when you flip a switch, the juice gotta flow.” It ain’t magic. It’s engineering and classical physics, with an understanding of radioactive fission and decay and a profound lack of long term thinking. It ain’t magic, but it might as well be. But we really need to base our energy policy on an understanding of ecological economics and sustainability.

We’ve had a few problems with nuclear power and fossil fuel in the last few years. Yet, there’s some light on the horizon.

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Why Cape Wind Still Matters

Tweet On May 25, 1961 President John Kennedy said, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” (Kennedy library and NASA)

Ten years ago, before Sept. 11, Jim Gordon and his team set out to build a small wind farm on the waters on which the young President, his wife, brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews sailed. Size is relative. It’s small compared to a large coal or nuclear power complex. The wind farm will be composed of 130 turbines and produce up to 430 megawatts of power (here).

In 2010 Jim Gordon and Cape Wind, LLC, finally, got their permits to build the wind farm. For a variety of reasons it took longer for Cape Wind, LLC to get the permits to build the wind farm than it took this nation to land a man on the moon and bring him home safely. Had the wind farm been built by the winter of 2004, Cape Wind would have provided power during the bitter January of ’04, the heat wave of ’05, and every day, especially the coldest days of winter and the hottest days of summer – when the winds are strongest and New Englander’s electricity needs are highest.

It’s also clear, from reading Cape Wind, by Wendy Williams and Robert Whitcomb, that the alliance to “Save Our Sound,” created an anti-wind rogue’s gallery, a bipartisan coalition of moneyed special interests which led Senator Edward M. Kennedy, D-MA, Governor Willard Mitt Romney, R-MA, Senator Ted Stevens, R-AK, Representative Dan Young, R-AK, Sen. Trent Lott, R-MS, Sen. John Warner, R-VA, and very wealthy residents of Cape Cod, including Bill Koch, the late Richard Egan, Rachel “Bunny” Lambert Mellon (Sen. Warner’s ex-mother-in-law), professional environmentalist Robert F Kennedy, Jr. to obstruct the regulatory and the legislative processes and which slowed the development of Cape Wind and offshore wind farms off of the mid-Atlantic and elsewhere.

For them to oppose this project or say “I favor wind power, as long as it’s somewhere else,” was and remains cynical. Given that we have combat troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, that Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006 described the mission in Iraq as a war for oil, was unpatriotic, perhaps traitorous.

Yet another bipartisan coalition rose up to challenge them and support Cape Wind: Ted Roosevelt, IV, who lives on the Cape, Rep. Jim Bass, R-NH, Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-ME, Sen. John McCain, R-AZ, Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-NM, Sen. Pete Domenici, R-NM, Matt Patrick, Massachusetts, Gov. Deval Patrick, Greenpeace, unions, Fox News’ Sean Hannity. What these politicians have in common is an understanding of the values of energy independence and renewable energy.

Popular Logistics is a policy blog, not a politics blog. However, it’s worth noting that several political campaigns were won in Massachusetts by Democrats who supported Cape Wind, including Matt Patrick, the 5-term Democratic Representative of the 3rd District of Barnstable, Cape Cod, and Deval Patrick who started his 2006 Gubenatorial campaign in front of the Hull, MA, wind turbine.

Mitt Romney, who signed Ted Kennedy’s health care plan into law in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, (also known as Obamacare 1.0) appears to be running for President in 2012. He lost in the 2008 Primary to John McCain. Mr. Romney signed on to the Kennedy-Koch-Egan-Mellon anti-Cape Wind jihad. Americans favor wind power. Will they support Romney in 2012?

Scott “Mitt-Lite” Brown, said (here) “While I support the concept of wind power as an alternative source of energy, Nantucket Sound is a national treasure.” Massachusetts voters favor Cape Wind 70 to 30. Will they support Brown in his re-election campaign in 2012? The Statue of Liberty is a “National Treasure,” as is the Constitution. I last visited Cape Cod when I was 7. Nantucket Sound is not a “National Treasure.” Getting America off coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear power, moving to clean, renewable, sustainable energy means our children and grandchildren will enjoy our national treasures.

In their book Williams and Whitcomb suggest that Senator Kennedy may have realized that he had made a bad decision in opposing Cape Wind, but that for a variety of reasons he refused to back down. They may be right. While I think Kennedy was wrong, I can’t speak to whether he came to that understanding. As I noted on this blog, back in August, 2009, (here) President Obama said of Ted Kennedy,”His ideas and ideals are stamped on scores of laws and reflected in millions of lives: in seniors who know new dignity; in families who know new opportunity; in children who know education’s promise; and in all who can pursue their dream in an America that is more equal and more just, including myself.”

Obama said “More equal and more just,” but he didn’t say “perfect.” America is not perfect. It is nation of men and women governed by the rule of law. The laws are not perfect, and neither are the men and women who make, enforce and interpret the laws.

Our energy policy is electricity flows when people flip a switch. Most of that electricity comes from burning fossil fuels and harnessing nuclear fission. We can pretend that the carbon we are pumping into the oceans and the atmosphere will have no effect, that we have unlimited supplies of fossil fuels, and uranium, that all the waste from coal mining, processing, transporting, and burning, and all the radiation leaks from nuclear plants (and radioactive waste from coal) are trivial or routine. Or we can get real. The choice is between coal, oil, methane, and nuclear, or wind, solar, tidal, and geothermal. I choose wind, solar, tidal and geothermal; for myself, for my backyard, not just for people who are my equal in the eyes of the law, whether they have more or less money than me.

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Index to the series that explores Offshore Wind and Politics:

Cape Wind, Leadership and Vision, here.
Why Cape Wind Still Matters, here.
Ted Roosevelt, IV, on Cape Wind (coming soon).

Nuclear Power and Cocaine

Asking a nuclear engineering professor “Is radiation bad?” is like asking Charlie Sheen “Is cocaine bad?”

On “Morning Edition” today, 3/30/11, Renee Montagne did just that when she interviewed Professor Peter Caracappa, a member of the faculty of the nuclear engineering department of RPI (Interview / nuclear engineering at RPI). As is typically the case, what was left out of the conversation could have been more interesting than what was in the conversation. My questions for Professor Caracappa are below: Continue reading →

Nuclear Power: What Future?

Smoke from nuclear plant. (C) Reuters

The men and women who design, build, and work at nuclear power plants are bright, dedicated people who work hard so that when we flip a switch the power flows, so we can use our computers, watch our tvs, refrigerate our food, microwave our dinners and our popcorn, heat, cool, and vacuum our homes, and jam on our electric pianos and electric guitars when we want to. The drive, dedication and service of the engineers at Fukushima is heroic.

Under normal conditions, nuclear power emits less pollutants than coal, and the waste from nuclear power is regulated. The wastes from coal are not.

Yet, radioactive materials are an intrinsic property of nuclear power; consequently meltdown and disaster are inherent dangers. The disasters at Fukushima Dai-ichi, Fukushima Diaini, and Onagawa, while not predictable, were not unexpected. We’ve seen Chernobyl in ’86, Three Mile Island in ’79. We’ve had fires at Brown’s Ferry. We have had, and continue to have leaks of radioactive material at Oyster Creek, Indian Point, Vermont Yankee, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and every other nuclear facility in the United States, Japan, France, and I am sure, the rest of the world.

And we learned what? To ‘harden’ the plants? To spare no expense in a fanatical devotion to safety and maintenance?

No. To cut corners and to defer maintenance. To extend to 60 years the life of plants designed to last 40 years.

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Wind Power and Noise

How Loud Is A Wind Turbine? Our friends at Treehugger re-published this graphic from GE, which builds wind turbines.

If a wind turbine spins in a forest do you hear it?

If you’re standing next to a utility scale wind turbine, then you’ll hear it. At 300 meters, which is as close to residences as we can build them, they are about as loud as a refrigerator. People report that a set of wind turbines – they tend to be built in sets – produce noise and subsonic vibrations, which can be irritating. But what should we do? PV solar modules are silent. However, they don’t produce power at night. Coal produces tons of toxic waste, from arsenic to zinc, including cadmium, mercury, lead, uranium, thorium – actually producing more radioactive waste than nuclear power. And coal produces carbon dioxide. Mining coal and uranium is dirty. We are converting mountains of natural beauty into mountains of toxic waste. (see Coal Tattoo, or I Love Mountains)

So how loud is a wind turbine? And if wind power is too loud, how should we turn on the lights?

Coal: More Radioactive Waste than Nuclear Power

Alex Gabbard at the Coal pile in front of the Oak Ridge National Lab

Strange and counter-intuitive as it may seem, burning coal produces more radioactive waste than nuclear fission. And it’s not regulated.

Back in 1993, Alex Gabbard, of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, published “Coal Combustion: Nuclear Resource or Danger” in ORNL Review. Gabbard built on the work of J. P. McBride, R. E. Moore, J. P. Witherspoon, and R. E. Blanco, also of Oak Ridge, in their article, “Radiological Impact of Airborne Effluents of Coal and Nuclear Plants,” Science, Dec. 8, 1978.

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Drill Baby, Drill – or Drill Baby, Oops

Second in a series (1, 2) that began on “Earth Day” (0).

“In order to make Policy, you have to be good at Politics.”

– Deborah Stone, “Policy Paradox”

President Obama, Official Photo

I like and respect President Obama. I think he’s a well educated lawyer and law school professor, with a good grasp of the Constitution, and the realities of Chicago machine politics and Inside-The-Beltway politics. He understands Stone. He’s also a moderate liberal. However, his economic advisors – Tim Geithner and Larry Sommers – only know what’s good for Wall Street, so every answer is “what’s good for Wall Street.” They don’t appear to know anything about ecological economics. Obama needs to listen to Herman Daly, Robert Costanza, Paul Krugman, Robin Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, and others with a long term view and a better understanding of what neoclassical economists call “externalities.”

Perhaps worse, his energy secretary, Steven Chu, is focused on carbon sequestration, nuclear power, and what we might as well call “Drill Baby, Opps.” Continue reading →

Fossil Fuels and a Walk on the Moon

Ships trying to Extinguish the Flames at the Deepwater Horizon Rig

The unfolding disaster at the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico, which promises to be an environmental catastrophe, (click here) the recent disasters at the Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia, and the Kingston, Tennessee fly ash retention pond demonstrate that fossil fuels are dirty and dangerous. Safety and environmental protection are expensive and cannot be guaranteed. The oil will adversely effect fisheries in the Gulf for years. If the oil gets into the Gulf Stream, it will curl around Florida and flow up the coast hitting Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virgina, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and if it flows around the Long Island Sound, Connecticut – all the original 13 states, then Maine and the Atlantic Provinces of Canada.

Rather than harnessing the Gulf Stream to push pollution from the Gulf of Mexico up the Atlantic coast of the United States, we should harness the Gulf Stream for clean renewable energy. (Here’s how.)

Solar and wind, which harness natural processes rather than consume natural resources, provide power without fuels, and without waste: with no arsenic, carbon dioxide, lead, mercury, methane, and other toxins, greenhouse gases or radioactive waste. These systems enable us to meet our needs and allow future generations to meet their needs – and flourish.

Rather than clinging to the dirty and hazardous infrastructure of the past, we must build the clean, renewable, and sustainable infrastructure of the future.

Cape Wind and the Staten Island Ferry solar array and the thousands of other solar and wind projects here in the U. S. and elsewhere on the globe are, to paraphrase Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, “small steps … yet giant leaps for mankind.”

This post is the First Installment of a series that will follow the unfolding catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico.

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The index is below:

Fossil Fuels and a Walk on the Moon, May 3, 2010.
Drill Baby Drill or Drill Baby Oops, May 7, 2010.
The Magnitude of the Spill, May 15, 2010.
One Month After The Spill BP Siphoning 3,000 Barrels Per Day, May 20, 2010.
Deep Water Horizon – The Chernobyl of Deepwater Drilling?, June 2, 2010.
The Deepwater Horizon: 40,000 Barrels Per Day or 70,000, June 13, 2010.
The Deepwater Horizon After the Macondo Well Explosion, June 19, 2010.
Deepwater Horizon – Bombs and Hurricanes, July 1, 2010.
Like a Bad High School Math Problem, July 14, 2010.
Crisis Management and the Gulf Oil Spill, July 16, 2010.
The Deepwater Horizon: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, October 7, 2010.

25 Dead in W. Virginia Coal Mine Accident

Police, Emergency, and Concerned Citizens

Monday, April 4, 2010, in West Virginia, at least 25 coal miners were killed and another four remain unaccounted for in a methane gas explosion in a coal mine owned by Massey Energy. As reported in the NY Times, “In the past two months, miners had been evacuated three times from the Upper Big Branch due to dangerously high methane levels, according to two miners who asked for anonymity for fear of losing their jobs. … the disaster has raised new questions about Massey’s attention to safety under the leadership of its pugnacious chief executive, Don L. Blankenship, and also why stricter federal laws, put into effect after a mining disaster in 2006, failed to prevent another tragedy.”

Is this a pattern of behavior? Does it establish a callous attitude or criminal intent?

In January, Charleston, W. Virginia, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. debated Massey CEO Don Blankenship.

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Kennedy argued again and again that the coal industry is indirectly subsidized by society. “Every single waterway in our country is contaminated with mercury,” and 70 percent of it is from coal-burning power plants, he said. (click here). Kennedy concluded by pointing out Massey’s own reports of 12,900 violations of the federal Clean Water Act in a single year, and asked, “Is it possible to do mountaintop removal mining without violating the Clean Water Act?” (here). Blankenship shrugged and responded that complying with regulations is too expensive.

We need to do is transform the coal industry into a wind and solar industry.

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