Saturday, October 11, 2008

Exposing the Bi-Partisan Myth of Clean Coal

Exposing the Bi-Partisan Myth of Clean Coal.

"As energy columnist Joseph Romm points out, a recent study by the California Public Utility Commission ‘puts the cost of coal gasification with carbon capture and storage at a staggering 16.9 cents per kWh.’ Compare this with the current US average retail price of electricity of 9.5 cents per kWh. Romm also points out that making even a modest dent in global CO2 emissions using CCS would ‘require a flow of CO2 into the ground equal to the current flow of oil out of the ground,’ a staggering amount that, from an engineering point of view, doesn’t pass the laugh test."

1 comment:

DKB said...

As the article says, large-scale carbon sequestration may be "a decade" away. The most promising things I've seen use the CO2 from fossil-fuel processes to grow algae that's used to make biofuels, fertilizers, etc. I'm sure it would take years to get that technology up to commercially viable levels, but it has an appealing "full cycle" aspect.