Could Electric Cars Save the Coal Industry? (msn.com) 165
North Dakota has just 266 electric cars, the fewest of any state in America, reports the Washington Post. But the state's biggest booster for electric cars may be: the coal industry:
The thinking is straightforward: More electric cars would mean more of a market for the [lower carbon] lignite coal that produces most of North Dakota's electricity, and if a long-shot project to store carbon emissions in deep underground wells works out, it might even result in cleaner air as well. "EVs will be soaking up electricity," said Jason Bohrer, head of a coal trade group that has launched a statewide campaign to promote electric vehicles and charging stations along North Dakota's vast distances. "So coal power plants, our most resilient and available power plants, can continue to be online...."
In North Dakota, Wyoming, West Virginia — and in the nine other states where coal is the main fuel for electric power plants — electric cars will still rely on the combustion of ancient carbon-based deposits for their energy unless other sources of power come to the fore... [C]oal remains by far the main fuel for power plants worldwide, and a recent surge in its price suggests that demand is not waning. Without an intensive turn to carbon capture — a technically feasible but commercially unproven technology — electric vehicles may not be able to make that much of a difference in the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions... [A] carbon capture experiment at the Milton R. Young Generation Station adjacent to the BNI mine, devised by a partnership of scientists and the Minnkota Power Cooperative, could make coal more attractive in the clean-energy future — if it works. The idea, known as Project Tundra, is to scrub the carbon dioxide out of the plant's exhaust smoke, condense it and inject it into deep wells...
Carbon capture has been a popular idea within the coal, oil and gas sectors for years now. The technology is not out of reach. Plenty of pilot projects have been launched. But so far no one has been able to make it a paying proposition. A pioneering $7.5 billion carbon capture power plant in Mississippi was razed with dynamite on Oct. 9 after its owners wrote it off as an 11-year-old economic failure. North Dakota hopes to break through that last barrier, for both coal and oil... If Project Tundra can show that stuffing carbon dioxide back into the earth is economically feasible, he said, "it's opening the door for a CO2 economy. It gives the lignite [coal] industry a way to survive." His group has launched a promotional campaign called Drive Electric North Dakota, which sponsors promotional events, conducts public attitude surveys and lobbies for EVs in the state capital...
Clean-air advocates range from dubious to dismissive. The promise of electric vehicles wasn't that they would spur more coal mining — or oil extraction...
And unproven though it may be, critics contend, the publicity surrounding carbon capture has created a false sense of complacency that world-changing solutions are just around the corner.
The Post also reports that "the oil sector, too, is putting its chips on carbon capture... "
In North Dakota, Wyoming, West Virginia — and in the nine other states where coal is the main fuel for electric power plants — electric cars will still rely on the combustion of ancient carbon-based deposits for their energy unless other sources of power come to the fore... [C]oal remains by far the main fuel for power plants worldwide, and a recent surge in its price suggests that demand is not waning. Without an intensive turn to carbon capture — a technically feasible but commercially unproven technology — electric vehicles may not be able to make that much of a difference in the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions... [A] carbon capture experiment at the Milton R. Young Generation Station adjacent to the BNI mine, devised by a partnership of scientists and the Minnkota Power Cooperative, could make coal more attractive in the clean-energy future — if it works. The idea, known as Project Tundra, is to scrub the carbon dioxide out of the plant's exhaust smoke, condense it and inject it into deep wells...
Carbon capture has been a popular idea within the coal, oil and gas sectors for years now. The technology is not out of reach. Plenty of pilot projects have been launched. But so far no one has been able to make it a paying proposition. A pioneering $7.5 billion carbon capture power plant in Mississippi was razed with dynamite on Oct. 9 after its owners wrote it off as an 11-year-old economic failure. North Dakota hopes to break through that last barrier, for both coal and oil... If Project Tundra can show that stuffing carbon dioxide back into the earth is economically feasible, he said, "it's opening the door for a CO2 economy. It gives the lignite [coal] industry a way to survive." His group has launched a promotional campaign called Drive Electric North Dakota, which sponsors promotional events, conducts public attitude surveys and lobbies for EVs in the state capital...
Clean-air advocates range from dubious to dismissive. The promise of electric vehicles wasn't that they would spur more coal mining — or oil extraction...
And unproven though it may be, critics contend, the publicity surrounding carbon capture has created a false sense of complacency that world-changing solutions are just around the corner.
The Post also reports that "the oil sector, too, is putting its chips on carbon capture... "
can't work, won't work (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:can't work, won't work (Score:5, Interesting)
My impression is that we have run out of time on the emissions side. The Glasgow deal that was just signed is the first time that a global climate agreement explicitly mentioned fossil fuels (which, holy crap), but ignores coal. Even if everybody holds to the agreement, we'll still reach a rise in temperature of 2.4C above preindustrial levels. In reality, it will probably end up being worse than that.
These are the kinds of temperature increases which will result in half the world's population being regularly exposed to severe heat waves, substantial loss of arable land, a drastic increase in severe droughts, hundreds of millions of people will lose water availability, sea levels will continue to increase, which will result in widespread coastal flooding, and so on. We'll have hundreds of millions of climate refugees, even if we hold to the current agreements. Which we probably won't.
The thing is that fixing the problem on the emissions side requires everybody to cooperate, and act against their short-term self-interest. Carbon capture does not.
If we can't find a way to capture carbon, there's pretty much a 100% chance that we're screwed.
Re: can't work, won't work (Score:2)
If we can't find a way to capture carbon, there's pretty much a 100% chance that we're screwed If we DO find a way, who's gonna pay for it?
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Re:can't work, won't work (Score:5, Interesting)
It also doesn't help that they're greenwashing lignite.
Lower carbon content does not mean lower carbon emissions per unit energy generated. Lignite is generally seen as a particularly dirty coal. As is (correctly) summed up at the top of the Wikipedia article on lignite: "The combustion of lignite produces less heat for the amount of carbon dioxide and sulfur released than other ranks of coal. As a result, environmental advocates have characterized lignite as the most harmful coal to human health"
Lignite is not low-carbon because it's high-hydrogen; it's low carbon because its high in moisture and ash. These things don't make it burn cleaner and more energetically; they make it burn less cleanly and less energetically. As Wikipedia again (correctly) sums up: Primarily because of latent high moisture content and low energy density of brown coal, carbon dioxide emissions from traditional brown-coal-fired plants are generally much higher per megawatt-hour generated than for comparable black-coal plants, with the world's highest-emitting plant being Australia's Hazelwood Power Station[9] until its closure in March 2017.[10] The operation of traditional brown-coal plants, particularly in combination with strip mining, is politically contentious due to environmental concerns.[11][12]
Re:can't work, won't work (Score:5, Insightful)
Even the .gov link next to the misleading claim that lignite is low carbon explicitly says "Lignite has the lowest energy content of the four [coal] types.".
Most lignites are also higher in Sulfur (producing acid rain) and burning it results in much higher resulting amounts of fly-ash containing the toxic metals cadmium, copper, chromium, nickel, lead, mercury, titanium, arsenic, and selenium that now have to be managed as well.
https://www.env-health.org/wp-... [env-health.org]
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Right, The "clean coal" (ahem) smoke-and-mirrors has run its course and now they are hyping dirty coal as somehow something that might be a non-insane idea to produce electricity.
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Re: can't work, won't work (Score:2)
Carbon capture on the emissions side [Re: can'...] (Score:2)
The thing is that fixing the problem on the emissions side requires everybody to cooperate, and act against their short-term self-interest. Carbon capture does not.
The carbon capture discussed here is on the emissions side.
Carbon capture out of the atmosphere-- where the carbon dioxide conentration is low, at the hundreds of parts per million level-- is a pipe dream.
There will be time for population size to correct (Score:2)
Change will generally be slow enough for regions to depopulate by normal attrition. There is no need to sustain current population numbers which are the root cause of pollution.
Re: There will be time for population size to corr (Score:2)
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consider.
switching to decaf
I did years ago (Score:2)
Re:can't work, won't work (Score:4, Insightful)
We don't have the time to waste to develop and scale up this notion
The people working on CCS are not the same people working on other solutions to AGW. So CCS is not delaying progress.
Coal in general, and lignite in particular, is filthy stuff. But the reality is that we will be burning it for many years, so if we can use CCS to mitigate some of the harm, we should do so.
There are some advantages to CCS in North Dakota. In addition to lignite, ND has plenty of partially depleted shale oil fields. The CO2 from the lignite can be compressed into a supercritical fluid and injected into existing wellheads. The CO2 displaces the remaining oil and forces it upward where it can be recovered. The recovered oil can pay for the cost of CCS.
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We don't have the time to waste to develop and scale up this notion
The people working on CCS are not the same people working on other solutions to AGW. So CCS is not delaying progress.
Coal in general, and lignite in particular, is filthy stuff. But the reality is that we will be burning it for many years, so if we can use CCS to mitigate some of the harm, we should do so.
It's never been done on a large scale and would be complicated and expensive to retrofit. Is it actually cost-effective compared to filling ND with wind turbines, grid upgrades, and storage and simply not emitting the carbon other than that required for building that infrastructure (which of course needs to be accounted for, as well as not simply being divvied out over 50 years of production from windmills as it matters if there's a 'burp' from construction now, although CCS also needs construction).
Re:can't work, won't work (Score:5, Insightful)
Coal in general, and lignite in particular, is filthy stuff. But the reality is that we will be burning it for many years, so if we can use CCS to mitigate some of the harm, we should do so.
That only happens in dreams.
In reality the very first thing that will be done once carbon capture becomes viable is the building of new coal power plants until the total CO2 output succeeds current levels. It's unavoidable unless coal is severely limited or even banned by regulations.
Re:can't work, won't work (Score:5, Interesting)
All people depending on fossil fuel industry for a meal ticket will be in trouble. But the economy will be expanding all those with portable skills will move on. Owners of stranded assets, workers who are not in a position to move on will be very bitter. The climate agreements and all the green tech will be politicized for their votes.
I have no sympathy for the owners. But we can take care of the workers. There are just 50,000 coal workers left in America. We need their skill to properly close the mines safely, to stop mine subsidence, to stop random soccer teams from getting stranded deep inside etc.
TL; DR = Coal is not coming back. I would support government taking care of workers with stranded skillsets due to the transition. Let the owners win and lose money by the rules of freemarket.
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I don't mind the loss of the odd soccer team. Soccer is a scourge on the world. To this day, living in the relatively soccer-free zone of the USA, I still get asked what team I support and they can't process the response that I never like football and never supported a team.
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I agree with you on a somewhat longer time frame. But i'm afraid that in the coming few decades coal will in many cases be seen as a viable option.
In any case, i was talking about the dynamics of carbon capture and coal production, specifically whether carbon capture will reduce the CO2 output of burning coal.
I don't think it will as history shows that any such improvements only lead to more careless use of whatever it is we have improved. Cars, for instance, have become much more efficient over the years,
Fracking [Re:can't work, won't work] (Score:2)
ND has plenty of partially depleted shale oil fields. The CO2 from the lignite can be compressed into a supercritical fluid and injected into existing wellheads. The CO2 displaces the remaining oil and forces it upward where it can be recovered. The recovered oil can pay for the cost of CCS.
Just so that we all are using the same vocabulary, what you are proposing here is to do fracking, using CO2.
(Not necessarily a bad idea.)
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The people working on CCS are not the same people working on other solutions to AGW
The money going to develop carbon capture is not available to go to other solutions.
Trying and failing to make coal carbon-neutral means not building a whole lot of solar, wind and storage.
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Like the push for nuclear power, it isn't cheap and it's totally untested and unproven.
Nuclear is totally tested and proven though And while it's not cheap, it's not that expensive either considering it produces power 24/7 unlike solar/wind, which require supplemental power generation to keep your fridge on at night.
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Most fridges have a power management which switches them off regularly to melt off ice sheets and thus increase the effectiveness of cooling.
Ice can get down to well below the freezing temperature of water, it's while it's forming that it consumes energy and interferes with the cooling process. Preventing moisture intrusion is the job of the door seal. Frost-free freezers actually have heated door sealing surfaces (and possibly other heated surfaces) and they go through a frost melting phase in order to prevent the doors getting frozen shut. If you catch them in the heating phase you can actually feel the warmth around the seal area. If you keep
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Ever heard of winter? Or clouds? Or rain? Solar at best is a neat little trick to flatten peak demand during the day unless of course things are not in perfect alignment in which case it will do zip. At least wind has a chance of working most of the day and year, solar is by default useless roughly 50% of the time, and that's not even including bad weather conditions.
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Like the push for nuclear power, it isn't cheap and it's totally untested and unproven.
... it produces power 24/7 unlike solar/wind, which require supplemental power generation to keep your fridge on at night.
That's a load of crap. Between high ultra high voltage power lines, smart grids, a highly integrated EU power gird, grid storage and cross continental energy trading the lights and refrigerators in Europe or anywhere else that uses renewables aren't going out anytime soon even with large quantities of renewable generators. Either way, coal is not going anywhere except into the dustbin of industrial history. Here's a bit of politically paradoxical news: https://www.energymonitor.ai/t... [energymonitor.ai] ... this trend is not
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Nuclear is totally tested and proven though And while it's not cheap, it's not that expensive either
Nuclear is literally more expensive than any other form of power. It costs more than coal power, and even coal costs more than PV+battery storage. It always costs much more than estimated to decommission a nuclear power plant, and The People generally wind up paying the lion's share of the "additional" (read: deliberately unbudgeted) costs.
considering it produces power 24/7 unlike solar/wind, which require supplemental power generation to keep your fridge on at night.
The wind is always blowing somewhere, and the sun is always shining somewhere when demand is highest (during the day.) What's needed is grid improvements and interconnect
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The wind is always blowing somewhere, and the sun is always shining somewhere when demand is highest (during the day.) What's needed is grid improvements and interconnection to permit shipping the power in from where it's being generated. This isn't free, but it's necessary for improvement of total system efficiency.
Keep your communist hands off my independent, freedom-loving, super-reliable self sufficient electrical grid lest I break out my double-barreled shotgun and blow your pink ass back to your Workers' Paradise! Now hold my beer while I go buy up all the generators at the local Home Depot.
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and even coal costs more than PV+battery storage.
PV is cheap... battery storage, I'd be curious to see your analysis.
(I will agree that if battery storage prices continue on their present downward trend, they will make PV+battery storage economical.)
...The wind is always blowing somewhere, and the sun is always shining somewhere when demand is highest (during the day.) What's needed is grid improvements and interconnection to permit shipping the power in from where it's being generated.
Yow. That would require wheeling power across a minimum of eight time zones both eastward and westward--pretty much circling the Earth. That amount of power transmission is going to be an amazing amount of infrastructure, and very expensive.
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Like the push for nuclear power, it isn't cheap and it's totally untested and unproven.
Nuclear is totally tested and proven though And while it's not cheap, it's not that expensive either
Actually it is.
You'd think it shouldn't be expensive, and there are people who argue that is shouldn't be expensive, but it turns out that in the real world, nuclear plants are expensive.
Maybe next-generation won't be. But we've heard that promise before.
considering it produces power 24/7 unlike solar/wind, which require supplemental power generation to keep your fridge on at night.
Yes, indeed it may be true that the optimal solution will be a combination. Next generation nuclear sounds very good, and the combination, solar wind when available, nuclear to fill in when needed, could be unbeatable if next gen lives up to its hype.
But
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Nuclear is totally tested and proven though
The people pushing nuclear as a solution to climate change are the ones pushing new reactor types. Because when the old designs were "proven", we found a lot of problems with them.
So when it comes to nuclear as a solution to climate change, it isn't. We're either building new designs, or we're going with old designs that still don't have a waste storage solution.
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After 75 years of development we are at a point where nuclear is
- One of the most expensive forms of energy.
- Still has a waste problem.
- Has unresolved safety issues, which like climate issues we are just kind of crossing our fingers on.
How many more decades does it need to sort things out?
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That's fine, where do you propose we transition to?
If you play stupid long enough, people will start to assume that you are stupid.
Stored wind/solar. We do not yet have a good solution for this
The EVs are the storage. If you have enough EVs that you have a hard time charging them, then you have enough EVs for their battery to be significant.
Batteries [Re:can't work, won't work] (Score:2)
The EVs are the storage. If you have enough EVs that you have a hard time charging them, then you have enough EVs for their battery to be significant.
No.
If you use the batteries of your EV for power during the night, your batteries won't be charged when you want to use the car in the morning.
So you'd need more batteries in the EV if you want to both power your home during the night and also drive your car in the daytime. But if you do get extra batteries, it makes more sense to take those extra batteries and just leave them in the house, rather than drag them as dead weight wherever you take your car.
So, you've just re-invented battery storage.
Now,
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If you use the batteries of your EV for power during the night, your batteries won't be charged when you want to use the car in the morning.
You don't use all of it, and you sell it back.
Dead batteries [Re:Batteries] (Score:2)
If you use the batteries of your EV for power during the night, your batteries won't be charged when you want to use the car in the morning.
You don't use all of it, and you sell it back.
Your car batteries are oversized if you can run your house overnight and in the morning have energy to run your car.
Essentially, you're proposing ordinary battery storage, but instead of leaving the batteries in the house, for some reason you think it makes sense to drag the discharged batteries around with you in the car. Why? They're not doing any good; you discharged them running your house overnight. Why should you carry the batteries you use to run your house around in your car after you've discharge
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In other words, if we switched completely to renewables tomorrow, it would halt additional global warming. But we'd still be stuck in our current state of elevated
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Carbon capture and sequestration is a pipe dream. Like the push for nuclear power, it isn't cheap and it's totally untested and unproven.
They are nothing alike. Nuclear power has legitimate and real cost and regulatory problems. Carbon Capture has problems in that it's not yet been achieved at scale.
One is a fantasy solution, the other is a technical problem to solve. The question is whether carbon capture works or turns more into fusion power (perpetually 20 years away).
We don't have the time to waste to develop and scale up this notion of just shoving our pollution under ground.
There are 7 billion people on this planet. I would argue the only true waste would be focusing on a single solution. Build wind, build solar, build green energy everywhere,
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Correction; the capture part is well tested. Every submarine has at least one CO2 scrubber. And I worked at a mining operation that used the Catacarb process to separate the carbon dioxide from the oxygen so they could reuse the oxygen. (It used pressure oxidation to oxidize pyrite to free the gold.)
Sequestration in not proven over long terms. And economically it seems hopeless unless you can use the CO2 to push heavy oil out of the ground, and that defeats the stated purpose.
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Carbon capture and sequestration is a pipe dream. Like the push for nuclear power, it isn't cheap and it's totally untested and unproven. We don't have the time to waste to develop and scale up this notion of just shoving our pollution under ground. We need to begin the transition away from coal now. Not just for the planet but to reduce the economic impact of stranded assets in the near future.
I agree wholeheartedly with everything you said, but I'm wondering if the stranded assets might be the kick in the ass we need to redefine and restructure the hell-spawn that we call "the economy". The stranding of those assets will be intensely painful and possibly deadly to some; but it might just be enough of a kick in the ass to force major economic reform. It would be nice to see the economy transformed from the fucking Vegas magic show / shell game that it currently is, into something sustainable, fai
It won't be competitive ... but (Score:2)
as a baseload backup, it's a much better option than all existing fission solutions.
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The problem with coal is that even if you fix the carbon it has a nuclear waste problem. While in theory you can solve the emissions problems with scrubbers, as it turns out most of them either don't work properly or aren't being operated properly and so a substantial portion of emissions escape. And in the case of coal that means thorium and uranium being distributed across the landscape, where it can subsequently be washed into rivers and streams, and into the water table as well.
So frankly it's a bit of
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LOL, if used? Coal is used big-time everywhere for the last 300 odd years.
CCS is the ultimate scrubber though. But that also makes it the most unworkable.
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Coal can't be used as a backup. It takes about 2-3 days for a coal plant to heat up and start operating.
A paying proposition? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, sure, coal is a finite resource. Estimates vary wildly as to how much is left - it could be as high as 100 years more supply, but the price will continue to rise, as it gets more complicated and expensive to extract it.
Another 100 years of coal used at scale, is game over. Heck, 30 years is game over for civilisation as we know it today. We end up over 2.5c by the end of the century.
The coal industry needs to be phased out as quickly as possible. The more we dither and delay with ideas of carbon capture, the longer it will persist.
These ideas are simply those of an industry under threat and we all know they'll present the idea and just keep on kicking the can down the road in terms of capturing that carbon at a scale that is affordable and prevents further global heating. It isn't going to happen.
Renewables are the future - and that absolutely includes nuclear power as a transitional "fix" whilst we work on better ways to harness safer renewable energy.
The more we screw around with "work-arounds" for coal, the less time there is to replace it with that renewable mix (including nuclear.)
As part of the change, jobs and livelihoods need to be considered. The coal industry employs a huge amount of people. The transition needs to include them.
Re: A paying proposition? (Score:2, Interesting)
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The coal industry employs a huge amount of people.
The coal industry in the US employs fewer people than Arby's. Arby's comes in at #15 in rankings of fast food restaurants [qsrmagazine.com].
The transition issue is entirely a location problem. There's too many people living in coal country to have jobs in the replacement industries in those areas. Because the local political leaders spent the last few decades claiming they'd bring coal jobs back instead of building up replacement industries.
WV needed to do something like NC did when NC figured out tobacco, furniture and p
Re:A paying proposition? (Score:5, Insightful)
If all the $ pissed away on fusion were instead invested in extracting CO2 from the air ...
You are way overestimating the amount of money spent on fusion research.
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And also we're actually, finally getting to a point where magnetic-confinement fusion (such as tokamaks) is starting to look practical, thanks to the maturing of commercially-available high-temperature superconducting tapes. They really are a complete game-changer for tokamaks, stellerators, and other magnetic confinement technologies.
There's all sorts of fusion approaches that use various forms of confinement, but each has its reasons (with some technologies, many reasons) to question their near-term viab
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Although I support fusion energy research -- as other's point out it is not a huge drain on the world's research funds and has value for the very long term of human endeavor -- it should be frankly acknowledged that it offers no solution to decarbonizing the world power grid. Maybe it will start contributing to that grid someday, but it will not have been any part of solving the problem.
It shares the two fundamental economic problems of nuclear power that is preventing it from being a meaningful solution, o
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While I think ITER/DEMO2 is a terrible example (I'd point to something more like, say, SPARC (Commonwealth Fusion Systems)), I do agree that it's not the near-term solution. The near-term solutions are a combination of wind, solar, batteries, and HVDC linkages. But in the mid-to-long term, I think fusion is finally showing its commercial potential.
Pointing to any Tokamak design that doesn't rely on HTS tapes is pointing to something that's highly obsolete before it's even started. ITER is so huge, slow t
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My top hit for your search is "Plasma total homocysteine, B vitamins, and risk of coronary atherosclerosis". #2 is "Plasma total homocysteine levels in hyperthyroid and hypothyroid patients". #3 is "Changes in lifestyle and plasma total homocysteine: the Hordaland Homocysteine Study ". I don't think this is what you meant to link.
You probably were referring to plasma Q, the gain factor. Please point me to Q for a scale tokamak that uses HTS tapes. Which is the entire point of my post, that HTS tapes are
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If all the $ pissed away on fusion were instead invested in extracting CO2 from the air ...
You are way overestimating the amount of money spent on fusion research.
We'd probably need to spend as much on perfecting CCS as on fusion research and that still wouldn't build any actual capture.
I might not work ou the way they expect (Score:5, Interesting)
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You're in some pretty exclusive company then. Average folks can't afford solar arrays. Almost half of North America live in apartments. Just because you lead a very privileged life doesn't mean it is even close to being reality everywhere else. In fact, to the average person, you sound like you're smoking something.
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As fo
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Use some common sense. I never said the average person was doing this or that it was cheap. You inserted that requirement in you reply. I was simply relating my personal experience, about half of the BEV owners I know have solar panels. The fact is the price of solar panels is falling rapidly and like BEVs will become more affordable for the average person in time. My point was simple, not every new BEV on the road is going to automatically lead to an increase in average grid power consumption.
Re-read that. Because how it parses is: I'm rich. Most of the people I know are rich, and we don't see a problem here because averaged across our rich friends, things look great! You are not the average, or even the 75th percentile - you are more like the 90th percentile. Yeah sure it's true that not every new BEV will lead to a "100% of travel energy costs" net increase in grid power consumption - but given the tiny proportion of the populace who can erect their own off-grid energy infrastructure, it's muc
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Use some common sense. I never said the average person was doing this or that it was cheap. You inserted that requirement in you reply. I was simply relating my personal experience, about half of the BEV owners I know have solar panels.
Re-read that. Because how it parses is: I'm rich. Most of the people I know are rich, and we don't see a problem here because averaged across our rich friends, things look great!
You're not wrong, but you're also not right overall. It's not a surprise that new technologies come to the wealthy first. It would in fact be a surprise if they didn't. However, when the GP says "The fact is the price of solar panels is falling rapidly and like BEVs will become more affordable for the average person in time." they are absolutely correct on both counts. In fact, most people buy new cars on credit (85.5 percent of new cars are financed) and the TCO of an EV is lower than an ICEV even in Calif
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Poor [Re:I might not work ou the way they expect] (Score:2)
Both of you are talking at the extremes, but the reality is people in North Dakota are not as rich as coastal elites. They are unlikely to be able to afford EV's let alone solar panels.
Interesting point. Verifying, North Dakota is actually the very last on the list of states by average wealth per capita. [personalcapital.com]
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Almost all EVs are new cars. Those "average folks" are not buying them. They're buying used cars.
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When a single mother says "I can't buy childcare, it is more expensive than the pay I make" do you respond with similar kindness or you blame her for her own plight?
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Is that 5 kw array sized for the 8 hours a day of usable sunlight in the winter? Does it also allow for a week of continuous overcast? And if your battery bank goes dead, where does the replacement power come from? A propane or diesel powered house generator?
Or do you expect someone else to pay for keeping the grid and all those other power stations on line to bail you out when your solar panels fail you? On the other hand, if you are willing to accept rolling blackouts like Texas and California as the cos
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5kW is a pretty slow charge --- 12 hours for a 60kWh battery (which is pretty common). And, you know, during the day --- one of the nifty advantages of BEVs is you can charge overnight while you're sleeping, which doesn't work for solar without a big house battery. With just the 5kW of solar panels and no battery, that could mean only being able to drive every other day.
It's hard to imagine that a significant number of EV owners will purchase an expensive solar array and a much more expensive home battery
No surprises there (Score:2)
If I were to pick some states that would somehow try to link cleaner cars to keeping old dirty power plants in operation, West Virginia and North Dakota would be at the top of the list. I'd also expect Alaska and probably Texas to join in, although those states might just try to sabotage electric vehicles directly.
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Texas to join in, although those states might just try to sabotage electric vehicles directly.
Teslas are made in Texas, but it is illegal to buy a Tesla in Texas.
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It's illegal to buy a Tesla in Texas?
Could you elaborate on that, I need a good laugh.
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That doesn't make it illegal to buy a Tesla, no matter how one twists the facts. It only makes it illegal for Tesla to sell them directly in showrooms. That's still ridiculous (protecting bullshit jobs that don't need to exist is not the best form of safety net) but also not what was claimed.
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The reason behind those laws was fears that the state would have no one subject to the state's laws that was responsible for following state regulations.
The idea that Texas could regulate what a Michigan company did was considered questionable until California did it.
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That doesn't make it illegal to buy a Tesla,
It doesn't make it illegal to buy a Tesla, just illegal to buy one in Texas.
You can still drive outside Texas and buy one in a neighboring state.
(or, you can buy a used one. The law only applies to new cars.)
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Kind of fits in with Elon Musk logic.
Well duh, Musk wold be thinking about that wouldn't he? He actually has to ship his Teslas out of Texas in order to sell them back to Texans because automakers can't sell directly to Texans thanks to franchise laws.
https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com]
Extract carbon from the atmosphere first. (Score:4, Interesting)
You can burn the amount of coal equivalent to the amount of CO2 you've extracted and permanently and securely sequestered. No more empty promises.
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There's some more immediate problems than global warming that coal burning cause, such as the literal millions of death it cause anually.
Closed loop might make sense (Score:2)
The advantage of oil, let's say diesel oil, is high power to weight ratio, ease of handling and storage, and relatively safe. Perhaps rather than lugging around 1/4 ton of lithium batteries to recharge, someone finds a cost-effective way to make diesel from atmospheric CO2 and some clean energy source. That would be closed loop. Of course, it doesn't help the coal mining or oil industries, but why on earth would anyone want to? If they didn't already exist, they would be banned on health and safety grou
Re: Closed loop might make sense (Score:2)
Re: Closed loop might make sense (Score:3)
I'm guessing: both. Crude oil industry has had a number of nothing short of impressive (in the negative sense) accidents, poisoning environment foe decades if not centuries. If we weren't already relatively proficient at handling it at scale, and dependent on it the way we are, we should probably think twice before getting into it.
However, in daily handling, I'd rather go with Diesel than with the equal energetical amount of fully charged lithium batteries. Maybe it's because we've developed strategies to d
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The advantage of oil, let's say diesel oil, is high power to weight ratio, ease of handling and storage, and relatively safe. [...] Of course, it doesn't help the coal mining or oil industries, but why on earth would anyone want to? If they didn't already exist, they would be banned on health and safety grounds long before climate change questions entered the frame.
I'm having difficulty reconciling the first & last sentences in your comment. Which is it, safe or unsafe?
You had trouble because you ignored the next to last sentence. Also, there are different kinds of safety. There's the kind where it's unlikely to spontaneously combust, and there's the kind where it's okay to emit the byproducts into the atmosphere. Coal and oil (and even refined diesel fuel) have the first kind but not the second. And then there's the kind where it's safe (or not) to produce it.
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Clean coal! (Score:2)
Lower carbon lignite coal. (Score:2)
Even a woodland bumpkin should know that you get more heat out of the same mass/volume of dry wood than if you burn wet wood, which is why it's not a bad idea to let the wood dry for about 2 years before you use it. If your firewood is dry then the amount of wood-tar produced will be a lot lower as well, reducing one potential and difficult to see fire-hazard in your chimney, and thus requiring less maintenance for the firep
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You get higher temperatures because the heat isn't going into changing the state of water, but you get the same amount of heat energy out. When the cresote forms on your chimney that heat energy is going into the pipe and then presumably into your room. Most people only have a short stovepipe to radiate so they need a high delta T in order to get effective heating of the room. But does any of that matter in the case of steam generation?
My take on it is conservation. What if we find a use for that coal later
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If you measure the total mass then dry wood does have a higher energy density, because less of the mass is wasted on the inert water. Energy density can be improved further by turning wood into charcoal and charcoal into coke. Of course every step involves a lot more work.
This is also not a new principle as it was already known in the times of steam engines, where they preferred the high energy density bituminous coal for train engines over anything else.
W
Advanced technology (Score:2)
Dumb and dumber (Score:2)
Companies have been throwing billions at carbon capture for the past 20 years and it is really expensive and inefficient. It's just really really dumb, it's a bit like trying to prove the health benefits of smoking.
Solar and wind are great technologies however they're only a bit part of the solution. Storage for the off periods is hard, expensive infrastructure needs to run 24/4 to be economic, you can't run a smelter for 6 hours a day and still make a profit. This is the at the heart of the solar and wind
Maybe it could, but why would we want it to? (Score:2)
That's like saying "better privacy protection could save Facebook from getting ripped apart by new legislation", but why the hell would we want to save it? Some things are just better if we take them behind the shed and put them out of their misery.
Coal is literally the worst thing to burn (Score:5, Informative)
1) It is a solid, so we can't pipe it anywhere. We have to truck or rail it. So we burn gasoline to move coal. Incredibly stupid. (Note movement by sail ship is the cheaper than pipeline if the coal is at the shore and the coal plant is also at the shore. Only time pipeline is not the cheapest way to move stuff.)
2) It is also old and found underground. So heavy impurities seep into it and get released when we burn it. The main ones we care about are Mercury and radioactive materials. Lead as well. No other fuel that we burn has these in quantity.
3) It has no Hydrogen, just carbon and impurities. Hydrogen burns into water. Carbon burns into carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. One is a deadly poison, the other a major green house gas. All other fuel has Hydrogen, so it is better.
4) Coal processing is far more dangerous (both immediate and long term risk of cancer) than any other fuel extraction. You are more likely to die from radioactive poisoning if you are a coal miner than a Uranium miner.
Coal is just about the single worst way to get energy that anyone has ever thought of, unless you care about whales, then whale oil is the worst and coal is 2nd worst.
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3) It has no Hydrogen
27% of hydrogen produced commercially comes from coal. [coalage.com] (According to the coal industry. Other article say more like 18%)
Hydrogen is the second-most prevalent element in coal, after carbon.
Fuck off with "clean coal" bullshit (Score:2)
Subsidies (Score:2)
North Dakotan EV Owner checking in (Score:2)
I primarily charge at home, which is coal-power.
Every day you can see BNSF rail trains running through the state carrying coal.
Solar panels don't work as well in North Dakota due to the weather (snow and ice covering them, hail, tornadoes, destroying them), and you have to own them 7-15 years to get a return on investment. During that time, you've had one of the weather-induced failures happen.
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Carbon is currently about 0.04% of the atmosphere, and we need to get it down to 0.03% or 0.0275%.
Oxygen is around 20%.
We're not in any danger of depleting the stuff.
Oxygen [Re:Carbon Capture is a pipe dream] (Score:2)
Oxygen is around 20%. We're not in any danger of depleting the stuff.
Unless we are just in the appears-to-be-linear section of exponential growth.