I want numbers

[wolven7]

People who are smarter than I:

Talk to me about Coal. I want to know the processes of cleaning its emissions, during and after use to produce electricity. I want to know if "clean coal" is a meaningless phrase, needing a reshaping into "cleaner coal." Meaning cleaner than black-lung.

Tell me why electric cars aren't just hurting us on the far end, like gasoline hurts us at the outset.

These are things I need to know, and some of you are scientists, so you know thing like this.

So talk to me.

We're supposed to be talking about clean energy alternatives. I want to hear why one of the historically dirtiest fuels on the planet is seeing a resurgence.

I am underinformed, and I would like your assistance.

Comments

[benlehman.livejournal.com]

Let me be clear, clean coal is a bad idea. It's not clean, the mining process is polluting and dangerous, and we could be doing better things with the coal anyway.

But a general rule about power plants (which extends from the one in your car to the generator in the basement to a city-wide power plant) is that the larger they are, the more efficient they are. A coal-fired power plant (even an "unclean" one) is vastly more efficient than a car's engine, in terms of potential energy vs usable energy produced, and also (I believe, less confident about this) in terms of energy produced vs. pollution.

I don't know much about the actual "cleaning" process.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Thank you. This is very helpful.

davidsfoley pointed me here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthracite

Which leads to the spin into hasty generalization territory. Calculating the best way to get people to think "This Coal is Cleaner, all coal must be cleaner." So... Two issues, there.

And, yeah, I want to know about their filtering processes.

good data is hard to find

[plantyhamchuk.livejournal.com]

It's hard to find good data on the cleaner coal thing. A source I trust told me that the newest 'scrubbers' used in the process actually do remove a significant amount of the air pollution, however the matter of ensuring that coal companies actually spend the large amount of money to upgrade their equipment is problematic. I mean, there's already all kinds of things on the books that aren't being enforced on the matter, AFAI understand. Or companies just don't care, because it's cheaper to pay fines than to upgrade equipment.

Mostly it's making a resurgence because we have it, we already have the systems set up to use it, and the usual suspects make their profits. It's a mixed bag. Although I'm not sure I'd call this a resurgence, necessarily. Coal has already/always been an option on the table, after all it's the number one source of electricity here in the South.

Electric cars are problematic insofar as any vehicle manufactured for individual/2 person use is a massive waste of resources. It wouldn't be so bad if Americans were willing to drive the European cars, but really the whole thing is a waste. Better to use the resources towards mass transit of some kind. The problem with many of the alternative energy cars is fuel storage - batteries batteries batteries. These things are toxic as hell. The Prius requires a sick amount of energy and resources to produce one vehicle, and it's an extremely polluting one...

I could go on and on, sorry I don't have any hard data at my fingertips. These are controversial topics right now, with lots of propaganda coming from all sides.

Re: good data is hard to find

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and I just like trying to cut through the propaganda machines.

[ladylabyrinth.livejournal.com]

Please do not quote me, I do not have numbers, I do not have direct quotes, I am not a scientist.

But I am a person with a good memory, especially for things that surprise me, and things that concern me, such as the oil crisis (and anyone who says "it's not a crisis" is in some serious denial) and the environment.

Darling Husband(tm) said something to the effect of coal is becoming popular again because 1) it's cheap to get usable and 2) There's a metric fuck-ton of it. The numbers he gave were impressive. Something like (but not exactly, let me reiterate) were we to run out of oil and switch to coal (assuming just burning it, not actual uses of mind you) coal would get us another 100,000 years of modern manufacturing. Something like that. And it's significantly cheaper than oil right now. So that's why the resurgence, is my understanding of a situation with which I am not terrifically familiar.

This does not make coal clean, by any stretch of the imagination. You could make burning coal cleaner, via use of factory scrubbers and such-like, to remove the nasties it releases into the air (such as Sulfur Dioxide, if I recall my HS chemistry correctly, which combined with water in the air creates Sulfuric Acid....mmmm Acid Rain). But getting the coal, while cheap, is never clean. Fossil fuels (which is apparently a misnomer anyway, I believe your lovely chica provided that little tidbit of information) are by their very nature inherently unclean. Carbon based fuels just don't make for environmentally friendly burning. Would you use burning dead bodies as a fuel? Ok, that's some serious exaggeration, but still. Carbon + Fire = Not Good For Environment. There is, at present, no really good alternative for fossil fuels, however. Not that I'm aware of anyway. Perhaps someone else knows more about that than I. The trouble is, no one has (AFAIK) come up with a clean fuel that packs the same punch as far as fuel amount:energy produced ratios go.

Sorry about the wandering and vagueness. I know more than I know I know, but without the factual recall to back things up as I should in a real debate. I just remember what I've heard/read/whatever, and remember that others have backed it up. I saw their bibliography and footnotes, and that was good enough for me. Also, dredging up said information requires me wandering quite a bit. It's the whole tangent thing. A reminds me of A₁ which reminds me of B₂ which leads to D₄ etc... you know how that works.

Edited: your chica is lively, but what I meant was lovely...typo demons.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Precisely. The cheap seems to be the most persuasive argument used, right now, followed by an Ad Hoc "And [this kind of] It's Clean."

It's kind of disheartening, because SOME amount of Sulfur Dioxide is going to get into the air. And what do we do with what we HAVE scrubbed?

There are just too many by-product questions.

[ladylabyrinth.livejournal.com]

You have to remember that sadly, most of modern humanity doesn't give two shits about whether or not a fuel is going to make the planet unlivable in the next 20 or 50 or 1,000 years. The question a fuel has to answer first and foremost is, "How is this going to affect my wallet?" If the answer is in the positive, than chances are that's what people will care about first. Fuck you, Jack. I got mine. Although in this case it's really Fuck you, grandkids. Granpaw got his.

If we can come up with a clean fuel that isn't going to cost companies an arm and a leg to convert to, then we'd be golden. Which basically means we need to come up with a clean fuel that burns in the exact same way as fossil fuels. Which is pretty much going to be impossible with modern technology. Perhaps even impossible from a basic chemical standpoint.

(I'm feeling chatty today, forgive me)

We're in the same pickle we've been in since the Industrial Revolution. How do we make things cheaply without wrecking our world? I don't know if we can. Which means before long we'll have an Industrial De-volution, throwing us back into approximately a Victorian Era society. We wouldn't go back too much further because we have enough knowledge of things like chemistry and physics that we could quite probably sustain ourselves at that level without oil or coal or any of their buddies. The hard part? Food. How do you grow and harvest enough food to feed 7,000,000,000 people when you've got no machines with which to plow, plant, care for, harvest and then ship said food? Oil's the thing that's really made this boom possible. Without it, there will be famine, food riots, chaos. And then, eventually, the planet will re-balance to what it can sustain without said technology, which depending on who you ask can be as little as 7,000,000 (dig it, that's 10% of current population, reverse decimation, wow) or something much closer to today's numbers. I've gotten way off topic here, and it's all your fault. I told you I tend to tangent-ize.

Cafe Intermezzo. 08/16/08, near Perimeter Mall. 10 p.m. I plan to be there, even if I'm only drinking water. We can pick this up there.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Chatty is good :)

And we'll try to be there.

[paosparti.livejournal.com]

I read an article recently where MIT came up with a new fuel cell for solar. I didn't read this exact article but when I did the oblig yahoo search this is the one that came up on it. This could be very good for the solar market. http://www.sltrib.com/business/ci_10062958?source=rss

If I wasn't currently in a breakup sort of situation with Stephen I would try to send him your way he has Some unique views on electric vs gasoline. He is also an Electronic Engineering major.

Coal is not clean as you've read before. and in all honesty one of the biggest problems in the energy vs environment market these days is that there is a lot of bias even in the science being produced, due to Who paid for the science research. It's like the cig companies having scientific fact that there was no correlation between smoking and lung cancer. And sadly its big on both ends even from someone who is pro-environment such as myself I get really really frustrated because a lot of the science coming out of the eco world is backed by propaganda and bias.

Also there is a LOT of emphasis on Carbon dioxide and the creation of ground level Ozone in the argument against gasoline and pro-biofuels. The big problem with this argument is that while ground ozone is a big problem in the summer months, CO2 isn't that big a problem because we at least have the respiration of plants to help reclaim and minimize the problem. While bio-fuels have their pros they also have their cones and one of the big pros being thrown around is the reduction in CO2 emissions but people neglect to mention that emissions of some greenhouse gases are much higher be believe but I'm not sure the one one that they were saying may cause the biggest problem was NOS which is not taken up by plants and is just as helpful in trapping warmth. Anotehr thing to be properly taken into account is that a diesel engine run on diesel fuel gets almost twice as many miles per gallon as does one run on bio-diesel. So if things are computed in GPM the numbers may not look as good than MPG

To tell you the truth I'm not really sure how much TRUTH is available on the matter is mostly what I'm saying. I'd go look up EPA reports on power plant emissions and scrubbers, and other such things. one pro on the coal side is that black lung in miners can be prevented if proper face masks and such are required in the mines. Also point source (power plant) emissions are not only easier to track, but are easier to clean than non-point source (cars) emissions.

One thing to keep in mind when looking at the ethanol, bio-diesel, gasoline argument that I feel is being underplayed by the anti-ethanol side is that here in the US we pay our farmers not to farm to keep the price of things like corn at an artificially high level. So the big OMG the price of corn if we use ethanol and bio-diesel will cripple our economy is somewhat over inflated. Because if we paid our farmers to farm fuel rather than just not to farm things may get better rather than worse IMO. And I really haven't seen US farm subsidies come up in any of the arguments about the economy of bio-fuels.



Eh my two cents... take it for what its worth.

[necrophonic.livejournal.com]

Interesting thing I read in Discover once was that we have all of these tire yards full of old tires, which are petroleum products. Burning tires versus burning coal is almost a 1:1 pollution ratio. Basically, you're burning the exact same thing and getting almost the exact same pollutants.

However, we have the tire yards just sitting there, causing pollution just by sitting there and degrading over time, making homes for mosquitos/spiders/other pests...

But we don't burn them because the environmentalists don't want to "set precedent" for burning trash. So, instead, we continue to have coal mines cave in and kill people while perfectly usable tires sit idle, occasionally turned into door mats or mulch or road substrate.

I'm all for "not setting precedent" but this is fucking ridiculous. I'd rather not set the precedent for sending people to their black-lungy demise in holes in the ground which we'd be better off using to make industrial grade diamonds, the same way I'd rather see petroleum turned into polyethelene and polycarbonate to make better stuff, and then find improved recycling methods, such as the startech plasma furnace which can turn it into hydrogen, which can be used to fuel small vehicles.

Go hydrogen!