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Is Clean Coal Feasible?
Patrick Tucker, The Futurist (magazine)
The world looks to carbon capture and storage for a cleaner energy future.
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A growing body of scientists, government officials, and even environmentalists are looking toward carbon capture and storage (CCS) as they best way to reduce the carbon emissions from power plants, including highly polluting coal-fired power plants, by as much as 90%.
“Carbon capture and storage has massive potential to allow us to meet our energy needs at the same time as cutting carbon emissions,” says United Kingdom Trade and Industry Secretary Alistair Darling, adding, “It opens up huge possibility, not just for Britain but also for the world.” The United Kingdom is sponsoring a competition to attract engineers and scientists to build the world’s first full-scale CCS demonstration plant.
According to Darling, the U.K.’s foray into carbon capture makes sense not just environmentally, but economically, as it positions private U.K. firms to provide CCS technologies to a global client base. “Rapid deployment of CCS technology in growth economies such as China and India will be vital,” he says.
…However, several obstacles stand in the way of wider implementation of CCS, such as where to put sequestered carbon. U.K. researchers are looking at pumped-out oil and gas fields in the shallow oceans surrounding the Kingdom as a potential depository. Other researchers point out that sequestering carbon in sea beds could increase ocean acidification.
“The risks of sequestering CO2 in the oceans are not well understood, and ocean sequestration is most certainly not in the mainstream of CCS,” says George Peridas, a science fellow at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The best candidates for sequestration are geological reservoirs, and in particular oil/gas fields and deep saline formations. These are typically thousands of meters underground, and trap CO2 in the rock. Many have trapped hydrocarbons and CO2 for millions to hundreds of millions of years.”
…An arguably greater challenge is reducing the high costs of capturing and storing CO2. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has estimated that the price of running a CCS plant can range from 10% to 40% higher for a conventional coal-burning plant.
“Once you add the cost of CCS, coal is no longer particularly cheap. Indeed, it’s expensive,” argues David Roberts, a writer with the online environmental magazine Grist.
…Government researchers are optimistic that the costs of CCS can be reduced through research and development.
(Novmember-December 2007 issue)
Documenting ravages of big oil
Kevin Griffin, Vancouver Sun
Imagine one of the most bio-diverse places on earth where there are more tree species than in all of North America. A place named a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve because of its variety of insects, birds, orchids, trees and animals. A place where a people called the Huaorani have lived in harmony with their environment for thousands of years.
The name of this place is Yasuni National Park, in Ecuador’s Amazon. Unfortunately, right under the bare feet of the Huaorani is an estimated billion barrels of oil. With crude at $80 a barrel and climbing, a potential jackpot of about $80 billion has drawn the interest of oil companies from around the world.
You’d think that the Huaorani, whose most sophisticated technology is a blowgun that shoots poisonous darts, wouldn’t have much of a chance against oil companies able to spend millions on public relations campaigns, soldiers and bribes.
But in the documentary Keepers of Eden, director Yoram Porath shows that the Huaorani are learning how power works.
(6 October 2007)
Novelist Wallace Stegner wrote story of Aramco in 1955
Full version now published for first time
Charles Matthews, San Jose Mercury News
For Wallace Stegner’s admirers, learning that he once accepted a commission to write a book for an oil company may come as a shock. The involvement with the likes of Texaco, Exxon, Mobil and Chevron seems a strange move for a man who later joined the board of directors of the Sierra Club. Stegner gained a reputation for integrity when he turned down an award from the National Endowment for the Arts to protest the politicization of the NEA. So this breach of the walls between art and commerce is as startling as if Philip Roth or Norman Mailer had agreed to flack for Halliburton.
To be fair, when Stegner was commissioned in 1955 by the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) to write a history of the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia, he hadn’t yet made a name for himself. He was teaching creative writing in the program he founded at Stanford University, but the Pulitzer Prize for “Angle of Repose” was 17 years away. “It was a time when his books were not selling well and he needed extra money,” comments journalist Thomas W. Lippman in his introduction to “Discovery!” And the project must have had a gut-level appeal to Stegner, a chronicler of new beginnings; in his book he calls it “purely and simply the story of a frontier.”
But Stegner’s narrative of the work of the pioneering American geologists and wildcatters who came to Saudi Arabia in 1933 is riddled with the author’s ambivalence, which is one reason why Aramco decided to shelve the completed manuscript.
It was dusted off in 1967 and published in the company’s in-house magazine, with some expurgation of Stegner’s ambivalences. In 1971, a year before Stegner’s Pulitzer, a paperback version was published in Lebanon, with limited distribution.
Now, the first American edition of “Discovery!” has been issued by Selwa Press, a small house whose publisher, Tim Barger, is the son of Thomas C. Barger, the late Aramco CEO and president.
Even when Stegner wrote it in the mid-1950s, it was clear that, as he says on the final pages of his book, “the American involvement in Middle Eastern economic, cultural, and political life . . . would grow deeper, more complicated, and more sobering. Not inconceivably, this thing they all thought of as ‘progress’ and ‘development’ would blow them all up, and their world with it.”
We hardly need to be reminded that Osama bin Laden and the great majority of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Saudis to recognize that if this was a chilling prophecy in 1955, it has only become more so with the passage of time.
But despite any uneasiness Stegner may have felt about the future, “Discovery!” is a celebration of American ingenuity and willingness to explore the unknown, or as he put it, “a demonstration not only of American skills but also of American culture.”
There is a kind of innocence in Stegner’s praise of “fantastic American energy and adaptability.” He does acknowledge those who “see Aramco and its sister corporations as a sinister force embroiling us, for dirty dollars, in the power struggles of the Middle East.” But he concludes that “American oil development in the Middle East has been, all things considered, responsible and fair.”
(7 October 2007)
Related:
The Arabian Adventure of Wallace Stegner (Stanford Magazine)
Discovery! The Search for Arabian Oil – Introduction (Saudi-US Relations Information Service)
