Coal provides half of America"™s electricity generation and more than twice as much as the next-highest contributor "” nuclear. Just as modern life is unimaginable without electricity, so is the notion that we could meet our growing energy needs without coal.
The United States has more coal than any other fuel. A quarter of all of the known coal in the entire world is here in America, and large coal deposits can be found in 38 states. In fact, we"™ve got more coal than the rest of the world combined has oil. At the current rate of consumption, we are capable of meeting domestic demand for more than 200 years.
Today, energy companies are working with the federal government to develop, demonstrate, and deploy the next generation of advanced technologies that will make it possible to reduce regulated emissions even further (to near-zero levels) and capture and store greenhouse gases.
......Ban oil imports now....elect a president who is already oily....
I'm all for cleaner, better fuel sources, I wish the gov't would make it happen already, newer nuclear plants, more people die from coal power process than nuclear, which in the US I believe has never taken a life. If we can produce clean coal cheaply, let's do it, more nuclear makes sense, more solar, more wind, though I hate wind/solar farms, I think we should put a small wind/solar generator on every house/building etc....also why not turn lights off at night? Better star observing anyway.
For years environmentalists touted the fluidized combustion of coal. Coal was ground up with limestone and injected into the flame. This new technology was tried at the Mount Storm, WV power plant. It worked out just fine. However, the technology cannot be used to run coal fired power plants.
Reason; the boilertubes are left coated with something like a ceramic and cannot be cleaned. Boilertubes are cleaned by running detonation cord down thetube with spacers to keep the cord in the middle of the flue. With straight coal as a fuel, the soot is blown loose from the boiler tube. Not so with the ceramic like build up from fluidized combustion: The tubes have to be replaced-big expense.
I work for a power company and we are getting ready to build a Coal Gassification Plant. Basically you mix the coal with several chemicals and inject oxygen then heat it up and it gives off a gas that is burned. It is suppose to replace the plant I am currently working. It is suppose to be "clean" technology. Not too many of them in the US,mostly Europe.
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Tuco....formerly known as Honcho12
"Who ever double crosses me and leaves me alive, he understands nothing about Tuco....Nothing"
Dink a.k.a bloodcrick....learned how to be a Bully from me.
I work for a power company and we are getting ready to build a Coal Gassification Plant.Â* Basically you mix the coal with several chemicals and inject oxygen then heat it up and it gives off a gas that is burned.Â*Â* It is suppose to replace the plant I am currently working.Â* It is suppose to be "clean" technology.Â* Not too many of them in the US,mostly Europe.Â*
Strange how the wheel of irony spins 'round. The so called Gaslight Era was powered and lit by gasses extracted from coal that was being heated to produce coke, prior to finding a use for those gasses they were simply vented into the air, then somebody found out that they could make a buck from them.
I read years ago about an inventor who had developed a pyrolisis process for breaking down used tires into their original componts cheaply, tires are notoriously difficult to recycle, which would be a boon to communities plagued by the millions of discarded tires that are produced each year. The process was close to hitting the break even point, but was unlikely to ever generate significant profits. Has anyone seen such an operation in their area? No, because there wasn't money to be made doing it. It could have been utilized by municipalities to at least partly clean up their landfills cheaply by eliminating those same pesky tires, but nobody wanted their taxes raised to pay for it. Average cost to the taxpayer for such a plant? About $3 per year.
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Kevin Haendiges
NAHC Life Member
NRA Member
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http://hunting-indiana.com
Kevin, you bring up a good point about the used tires.They have a Goodyear plant in Lawton: It looks like their QC is not good or something. Every dayoneor truck loads of new rubber is hauled from that place to the Lawton landfill-what a waste.
Our very smart scientist sitting on the supreme court have studied Al Gore's movie and consulted the UN and determined that CO2 is polution and secretely have decided to shut down all coal power plants by 2010.
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John Adams “The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.”
Ronald Reagan: 'Everybody that is for abortion has already been born'
"I never said I was worth it. I only said I wouldn't do it for less " William F. Buckley Jr.
I work for a nuclear fuel fabricator. Work is going on at a FAST pace to bring new nuclear power plants online in the US. It won't come quickly, but it is coming as quickly as possible. As energy costs skyrocket in the coming years, people will be begging for nuclear power. Mark my words.
Our modern high standards of living require very high energy consumption per capita. It could be argued that our standard of living is directly proportional to per capita energy consumption. When we used little energy per capita, most people -- 97% of human beings? -- were directly involved in agricultural production. If we somehow drop the ball on energy and have to dramatically roll back energy consumption . . . get ready to go back to the farm, y'all! Hopefully this won't happen, but it is worth considering that this is our fate if we every "run out" of energy.
I welcome all research and advances in the energy field. Clearly oil is a non-renewable resource, as far as we can tell. It would seem natural gas is a non-renewable resource, although one ecentric scientist has argued for a theory that natural gas comes from immense reserves trapped in the interior of our planet during early formation. Coal is also a non-renewable resource, although we in the US are lucky to have perhaps a 200 year reserve of coal at our command, or is it an illusion to consider it to be at "our command" any more than the oil in the middle east is at the command of the masses? I don't own shares in the Wyoming coal belt. Won't the owners sell their coal to the highest bidder if energy gets tight in the future? So in that scenario, the coal is no more mine than it is Pierre living in Paris or Boris living in Moscow or Wing living in Beijing.
It is also worth considering that energy is not a static thing. Coal was used to fire boilers of battleships during WW-I. I filled a coal hopper to heat my family's furnace when I was a kid, up to going to college in 1975. Soon after my father converted the furnace to burning fuel oil. Until about 1875 petroleum was not deliberately mined or extracted from the earth (if memory serves me right, I'm too lazy to open another window and find out when the first oil strike at Titusville, Pennsylvania occured). Steam power was generated by coal and wood. The main need for fuel was for illumination. Before oil, various odd fuels were employed for illumination, including gas light extracted from coal (as indicated by an earlier post on this thread) and burning whale oil lamps , hence the major whaling industry. The complete reliance on petroleum extends from about 1920 or even later. It seems inevitable that petroleum will also exit the energy stage at some point.
Location: On an Island in the west coast of New England
Posts: 13,132
RE: making coal a clean energy source
I vote to go as much nuclear as possible. Why we haven't built any new plants in 25 years is a mystery to me. We are way behind Europe and ***an when it conmes to energy self sufficiency. Apparently there are some starting through the permit process now. It can't happen fast enough for me.
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Too busy with fishing to spend much time here.
making coal a clean energy source
