Burning coal is not a climate solution
Burning coal creates carbon dioxide. These long-lasting emissions block the solar radiation from going back into space as infrared light, heating the planet.
Last week, “Coal addiction” said the Energy Policy Network, a fossil fuel lobbying group was given $250,000 from Wyoming taxpayers in 2020. Randy Eminger of Bella Vista, and the Arkansas Affordable Energy Association, the Arkansas branch of EPN, work to keep us burning coal.
Coal delusion
Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon wants to keep coal tax revenues, “The problem is we have suggested that a 100% renewable portfolio is somehow going to address climate change. It will reduce the amount of carbon we release in the atmosphere domestically… but it doesn’t take carbon out of the atmosphere. It doesn’t address climate change and that we can do with coal,” he said.
Gordon is trying to deceive the Biden administration by claiming burning coal is a climate solution.
Gordon says carbon dioxide emissions captured from coal-fired plants can be transported in pipelines and sold to oil and gas drilling companies. He claims injecting carbon dioxide near shale oil wells will increase their productivity. His claims are false.
No one knows how to capture carbon, high-pressure gas pipelines leak from head to tail, and injecting carbon dioxide to increase fracking pressure is guaranteed to create earthquakes!
Carbon capture and storage is a waste of money. Anyone can pass gas, but once the deed is done there is no going back. Every attempt has failed, from the $8 billion Kemper fiasco to the $1 billion Texas Petra Nova debacle put on hold last year. Over the last three years, Petra Nova was barely operational.
Carbon capture from power plants is a scam. Everyone keeps trying, they know it is not going to work, but as long as they invest millions of dollars and hire the best firms, it looks like they are going to succeed. After all, coal is a deception, not a climate solution. The Department of Energy and the U.S. Congress are in the game, they grant millions of dollars and tax benefits to the coal plants. All to maintain the illusion of energy independence with “clean” coal and methane.
There is nothing clean about coal. Coal miners wash dust from the coal, creating toxic radioactive sludge which is kept in ponds that spill when the pond fails. There is no safe place to store the sludge.
Designed for combustion
Coal-fired power plants have been around for many years, designed to burn coal with minimal concern for emissions and pollution. After all, investors don’t have to pay for damages to the climate, the environment, or public health. Electricity generation is all about profits.
When you look at the SWEPCO Flint Creek plant the first thing you notice is the 540 ft. chimney stack and the exhaust gases at high velocity coming from coal combustion. The chimney draws the flow out and keeps the coal burning. It is a key design consideration. The height of the stack is designed to disperse the exhaust pollutants over a large area.
The exhaust gases produced at coal power plants are a mix of carbon dioxide, water vapor, nitrogen, and oxygen. The exhaust also contains toxic air pollutants including particulate matter, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur oxides.
For example, here are the yearly emissions for the 1800-megawatt White Bluff Entergy plant: 11 million tons of carbon dioxide, 53 thousand tons of nitrous oxide, 39 tons of sulfur dioxide, and 581 lbs. of mercury. The total yearly emissions are equivalent to 2.16 million passenger vehicles.
Real solutions
Dr. James E. Hansen says we need to stop fossil fuel subsidies and put a significant price on carbon emissions. He says we need to reduce carbon emissions in the atmosphere to get back to 350 parts per million. His message has not changed since 1988, but the urgency has increased. Please see “James Hansen on irreversible climate change, fee and dividend, and the fossil fuel industry,” on YouTube, and his website, Climate Science Awareness and Solutions.
Dr. Luis Contreras
Here is the best source of information: Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions
The potential for Dr. Hansen and our group to communicate with decision makers and the public depends on maintaining our high scientific reputation and productivity. That is one reason it is important for us to continue to be at the forefront of climate research.
However, there is a more fundamental reason: good policymaking depends on a good realistic understanding of the science.
This is illustrated well by current paper (Assessing “dangerous climate change”: Required reduction of carbon emissions to protect young people, future generations and nature), in which we make a persuasive case that the popular target of limiting CO2 emissions to 1000 GtC (fossil fuel emissions through 2012 are 370 GtC) would actually be a prescription for disaster. Clearly this issue needs to be understood soon, before reality makes the larger emissions inevitable.
One of the strengths of Dr. Hansen’s research has been an ability to recognize the significance of new research opportunities when they arise and move quickly to interpret their significance…
https://csas.earth.columbia.edu
James Hansen on irreversible climate change, fee and dividend, and the fossil fuel industry
https://youtu.be/QnG5q_md78k
Update on Flint Creek Power plant, Gentry Arkansas
November 2020
SWEPCO, an American Electric Power company, will file its compliance plans this month for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Coal Combustion Residuals (CCR) rule.
The rule applies to the handling and storage of coal ash at each facility.
Flint Creek Power Plant in Gentry AR, will continue operations with the installation of a dry bottom ash handling system and other facilities that meet the CCR and effluent limitation guidelines requirements in 2023.
The existing ash pond at this site will be closed and the ash will be sold for beneficial reuse or moved to the plant’s regulated onsite landfill. SWEPCO owns 258 MW of the plant capacity.
https://www.eagleobserver.com/news/2020/nov/11/swepco-to-end-coal-operations-at-two-plants/
Can Wyoming Gov Mark Gordon save coal (and stop climate change)?
“Wyoming has the solutions for our climate,” Gordon told the trustees, according to a report in the Laramie Boomerang. “If you push as hard as you can to put a 100% renewable platform on this planet, you have done nothing to eliminate carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We can take our coal products and we can make them part of the solutions.”
Coal boosters tout the Integrated Test Center (ITC) north of Gillette as a cutting-edge laboratory for the solution to carbon dioxide emissions.
The Basin Electric Power Cooperative’s Dry Fork Station looms above the site, five pipes rise from the ground. On the east side of the plant another, larger, pipe hookup awaits.
The pipes connect to Dry Fork’s “stack.” The Dry Fork Station is the newest coal fired power plant in the country, and for many pollutants — sulfur, mercury, particulate matter — the cleanest. Both mercury and sulfur emissions out of the stack stay well below the levels prescribed in its environmental permit, according to an August, 2018 profile in industry publication Power Magazine.
But the stack at the Dry Fork Station still emits carbon dioxide, the principal global-warming gas of concern, unabated.
The empty pipe heads await a carbon-capturing savant.
https://www.wyofile.com/can-mark-gordon-save-coal-and-stop-climate-change/
Burning coal in 2021 is criminal – with Dark Money from Wyoming
“Eminger ended up with $500,000 in Wyoming money over two years, he explained. That money’s emergence in an Arkansas court case, though, wasn’t widely known until NPR’s report, and Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge told the national radio network that she was unaware of the connection when she filed a separate intervention agreeing with the Arkansas Affordability Coalition’s legal challenge. It also wasn’t common knowledge in Arkansas that the coalition and the Wyoming group are both led by Eminger.”
https://www.arkansasbusiness.com/article/133622/eminger-makes-case-for-keeping-wyoming-coal-flowing-to-arkansas