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China’s Coal Prices May Increase on Environmental, Safety Costs
Wang Ying, Bloomberg
Coal prices in China, the world’s largest producer and consumer of the fuel, are likely to rise as authorities strengthen regulations to improve environmental and safety standards at mines, a government official said.
“China’s low coal prices are the result of a neglect of environmental and safety issues in the past,” Hou Shiguo, a deputy director in charge of industry policies at the National Development and Reform Commission, said in a telephone interview in Beijing today. “We will step up efforts on the policy level to make our coal mines cleaner and safer, and that will accordingly increase companies’ production costs.”
The Chinese government has pledged to reduce accidents at pits that killed 4,746 people in 2006, making the country’s coal mining industry the most dangerous in the world. Prices of coal rose to a record last month at Qinhuangdao, China’s largest port for the fuel, because of increased use of air-conditioners. China burns coal for 78 percent of its power.
… China became a net coal importer for the first time in January, ending centuries of self-sufficiency …
(15 September 2007)
Rep. Bartlett questions Coal-to-Liquid at hearing
Staff, Rep. Roscoe Bartlett
The U.S. House of Representatives Science and Technology Committee Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment held a hearing today concerning The Benefits and Challenges of Producing Liquid Fuel from Coal: The Role for Federal Research.
During the question and answer portion of the hearing, Congressman Bartlett expressed several concerns about C-T-L. He noted that with the recent estimates by the National Academies of Sciences of U.S. coal reserves ranging between 100 years and 250 years – at current use rates – increasing use rates by adopting C-T-L and applying exponential growth would deplete reserves much more rapidly.
Congressman Bartlett said that steam from C-T-L is the same as steam from coal-generated electricity. He said that evaporation of water is a double sin – a waste of both water and heat. Congressman Bartlett urged as a higher priority than C-T-L pursuit of energy efficiency gains and the use of electricity as a source of energy for ground transportation through plug-in hybrids.
A key overlooked source of gains from energy efficiency, he said would be development of technologies for district heating and cooling – reducing water use and capturing rather than evaporating “waste” heat and distributing it during the winter and via an ammonia cycle, for air conditioning during the summer.
Congressman Bartlett cautioned that converting energy, such as coal to produce hydrogen, is inherently less energy efficient than directly burning the coal – calling into question the potential future contributions of hydrogen fuel cells. Congressman Bartlett said there is no substitute for liquid fuel for aviation, but noted the great majority of liquid fuels are used for ground transportation.
The Committee website has additional background information including video from the hearing.
(5 September 2007)
News Flash! New technology for carbon sequestration discovered!
Hans Noeldner, Energy Bulletin
Research scientists have discovered a breakthrough in carbon sequestration – one which guarantees that carbon, once removed from the atmosphere, will remain safely stored not merely for decades or centuries, but for millennia. The carbon is sequestered in a material which is solid at atmospheric pressures, nontoxic, and virtually insoluble in rainfall and groundwater – even when highly alkaline or rich in organic acids. In fact extensive tests prove the sequestered carbon material is one of the most stable compounds on Earth.
A detailed financial analysis indicates that this revolutionary sequestration method offers the lowest capital, operating, and maintenance costs of any yet proposed. Because the sequestered carbon material is stable, bulky, and widely dispersed, the needs for monitoring will be minimal. The material itself is not valuable or dangerous unless extracted in large, highly noticeable, easy-to-track quantities. Security experts are confident the new method offers terrorists few if any opportunities for sabotage, blackmail, or other forms of exploitation.
As side benefits, the new sequestration method supports fully-productive native ecosystems and agricultural land uses, and actually improves the performance of aquifers where the carbon is stored. The landscapes of sequestration areas appear so natural that community planning specialists expect many people will actually want to live on and near them. Most surprising of all, additional research and development are completely unnecessary because the method is already so well understood. This will be most welcome news to financially-pressed governments and businesses as they struggle to reign in CO2 emissions.
What is this breakthrough sequestration method? Coal! God and Mother Nature have already seen fit to sequester carbon in vast, climate-stabilizing quantities. And what must humanity do to exploit this incredible wealth of pre-sequestered carbon? LEAVE IT ALONE. The only thing left to discover is enlightened self-restraint.
(16 September 2007)
King Coal Resumes its Crown
Rolf Westgard, Energy Bulletin
The electric traffic light flashes green, and I drive toward my air conditioned condo with its view of the town and its attractive lights. It’s cool to roll up to the garage, hit a button and the door opens to my underground parking space. I enter the elevator, electric motors whisk me up, and I soon smell dinner cooking in the electric oven. I use the TV remote for the evening news. During commercials, I read the Times, printed earlier on big electrically powered presses.
We rarely think about all those electrons, zipping along wires toward us from some remote power plant, so they can do all that work. That plant burns something to make steam to drive turbines which turn generators to start the whole process.
They tell us we need coal powered Big Stone II and other new coal plants to keep up with electric power demand. The U.S. has a fourth of the world’s coal reserves, making us the Saudi Arabia of coal. Our Energy Information Administration says that coal’s share of electric energy fuel is going to increase from 50% today to 57% by 2030. But it’s pretty dirty stuff that coal, spewing out global warming CO2 and making millions of tons of coal ash full of nasty elements like mercury, sulfur, and arsenic.
Solar panels work pretty well on buildings in sunny climates, but they aren’t practical for large power plants.
How about nuclear power? It takes a 100 car hopper train with ten thousand tons of coal every day to feed a 1000MW coal plant. A 1000MW nuclear plant fissions just
seven or eight pounds of uranium 235 each day. But there’s all those fission products in the spent fuel, radiating us for thousands of years.
How about cleaner natural gas? Unfortunately, there’s not enough of it, except for the imported liquified stuff(LNG) that can explode when they try to regasify it. And the Middle East is going to charge us plenty for LNG.
There’s the wind that our legislature loves. Denmark looks like a pincushion with those 5300 giant wind turbines, and they say it gets 20-30% of its electricity from wind. But those are just turbine name plate numbers. Most of Denmark’s wind power can’t be used by its grid at the time it’s generated. And there is no way to store it. So it has to be dumped off to other countries like Norway and Sweden at a financial loss. Those countries have hydro,and they can use the excess power to pump water back up behind the dams.
The actual contribution of wind to Denmark’s grid is less than 7%. And the big U.S. off shore $700 million Ocean Wind Park in New Jersey has just been cancelled by the Long Island Power Authority because of high costs.
In New England, Cape Wind, another big off shore project, has seen its estimated cost balloon from $300 million to $811 million. The cost per kilowatt hour from its planned 130 giant turbines is now projected at 29 cents. That’s about four times what we pay using our coal and nuclear plants.
Minnesota doesn’t have mountains for hydropower, but we have lots of corn. Let’s burn some of that ethanol from those giant stills which dot our rural landscape.
It would take 1.5 million gallons of ethanol a day to run the boilers at 630MW Big Stone II, or a fuel cost of about $3 million/day. The 60 daily hopper cars of subbituminous coal will cost Big Stone less than one tenth of that.
A University of Utah study showed that annual world consumption of carbon from oil, gas, and coal is 400 times the carbon sequestered by all the worlds annual plant growth.
Coal replaced wood as our dominant energy source in the mid-1880s. It remained the leader until after WWII when oil and natural gas consumption began its sharp rise. But now, the energy wheel is bringing cheap, dirty, and plentiful coal back into view as energy demand grows and production of oil and gas peaks. Coal can also be converted into synthetic oil and gas. All this suggests that research into coal emissions control and capture should have priority over programs which attempt to substitute food for fuel.
Rolf E. Westgard, 25189 Moonrise Tr., Deerwood, MN 56444 218-678-3447
(writer is a professional member of the Geological Society of America, American Association of Petroleum Geologists, and a regular speaker to civic groups on Peak Oil and Alternate Energy)
(12 September 2007)
Also appeared in some Minnesota newspapers, according to Rolf.
King coal constrained
Katharine Sanderson , Nature
Nature 449, 14-15 (6 September 2007) | doi:10.1038/449014a; Published
online 5 September 2007
Sustained high oil prices won’t be enough to make coal liquefaction economically viable without large-scale public investment.
Turning dirty coal into a clean-burning liquid fuel remains something of a challenge for the energy industry. As scientists heard last month at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society in Boston, Massachusetts, the process behind coal liquefaction might be well known – but its large-scale adaptation could still be some time off.
(5 September 2007)
Behind a paywall.
