No Country For Clean Coal
The Reality Campaign has lured the Coen Brothers into making a commercial to mock the whole idea of “clean coal”:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFJVbdiMgfM[/youtube]
Their signature dry (and quirky) humor is on full display here, but I’m not so sure how well this works for a 30 second commercial. But they’ve also got a blog to help you keep up with the greenwashing.
The CEO of Centrica UK (utility company with holdings in the UK, Europe and North America) notes that carbon capture technology won’t be ready in the UK until 2030. This is due to the technology largely being nonexistent right now, but also apparently none of the local geology will support he current sequestration scheme.
Yesterday, a group of protesters (including Dr. James Hansen) blocked one of the gates to the Capitol Power Plant in DC. This plant is located in SE DC and used to generate electricity for buildings in the Capitol Complex. Now it generates steam for heat and chilled water for cooling buildings. But it is a very dirty plant, right up against a working class neighborhood that has been fighting the emissions (and other dirty elements) of this plant for a very long time. The good news here is that Pelosi and Reid endorsed switching this plant to natural gas some days before the protest.
One of the big lobbyist efforts over the next few years is going to be the attempt to greenwash coal — to make it look much cleaner than it actually is in order to be in the alternate energy game. Carbon sequestration doesn’t even exist as a serious bench scale demonstration yet (as far as I can tell) much less ready for the full scale demonstration pilot that coal supporters — and President Obama in the past — have supported. And even if you could make sequestration work in a couple of years, you still have the issues of extraction , which is very dirty and destructive as well as the disposal of fly ash which has reached a crisis stage at plants like Indian River. A hard line on cleaning up fly ash pools as well as on conversions to cleaner fuels is necessary and quickly.
Another great example of that cute English language game again that Orwell sorted out 60 years ago. Like “advanced interrogation techniques”, “pro-life”, “death tax”… I always loved that one best. It sounds so ominous and it is basically a bunch of pussy kids of rich people that want dough they apparently “earned” by accident of birth.
Carbon sequestration technology does not exist now and the geological strata at Indian River is not conducive if the fairytale ever comes to life. Even if conditions were optimum and the technology was available and economically feasible, by NRG”s own admission in my office over a year ago, they would still only be able to capture 60% of the emissions. To sum up, (as they left my office leaving unanswered those and many more questions that I posed, including “why if you are so interested in the jobs you pretend you will create are you still, (at that moment), fighting the EPA ordered cleanup that would create $300 million in jobs) Well to sum up, they gathered up their computer generated mockups of the purported geological terrain under the plant, gathered together their projections of job growth and “clean coal gasification” technology and slithered to the elevator without even a “thank you” for my “devil’s advocacy” and the last I heard was a response to my request for copies of those documents. “We’ll mail them to you Representative” They must have lost my address.
John Kowalko
Wow.
I would LOVE to see that presentation.
Hey John, you are simply amazing. Thanks for all that you do.