The Oil Drum

21 comments on Congressman Roscoe Bartlett's Peak Oil Special Order Speech May 1, 2008

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Engineer-Poet on May 9, 2008 - 10:36am

Of all the ignorant nonsense....

You have to lose energy to thermodynamic somewhere.

Quite right. A gas/steam turbine IGCC system loses 55-60%, but this is quite a bit less than a legacy steam turbine at 67-70%. Conversion to an SOFC or MCFC topping cycle would cut losses substantially.

Note that additional $0.045 doubles the electricity from coal price.

Yes it does. It makes it substantially more expensive than wind, but not as expensive as natural gas.

Additional $110/ton of coal doubles the wholesale coal price

This may still not internalize all its external costs.

2000 billion kWh/year is not goin to be enough in the future.

You're assuming the growth is going to be in coal rather than nuclear and wind. Given that coal supplies are depleting, this is debatable.

The only long-term stable way to capture CO2 make it back to coal

Limestone proves you wrong. Injection of CO₂ into e.g. sandstones will eventually create carbonates.

The unstable sequstration ways (underground) take half the energy

Chilled-ammonia capture allegedly takes 7% for a conventional coal plant. An IGCC plant which strips roughly 25% of the carbon in the syngas scrubbing would have even lower power requirements, and an IGCC plant which converts to a fuel cell topping cycle and routes the reaction gases straight to cooling and compression would have zero.

You do not need CO2 for squeezing oil from abandoned fields

Is that an ignorant falsehood, or a lie? There is a maximum amount of oil which can be pushed out of reservoirs with immiscible fluids like water (or gases) because the oil becomes immobile ("fractional flow"). Supercritical CO2 is a miscible solvent.

We cannot afford to sequester CO2. We will need every molecule above ground to foster the growth of biomass. Because when coal is gone, biomass is the only one we have left to live on.

Garbage on several levels.

People had food, firewood and everything else when atmospheric CO₂ was just 285 ppm of the atmosphere.
Our major renewable energy sources (by kWh/m²/yr) are going to be solar and wind, not biomass.

You sound like a coal-industry propagandist.

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Petrus on May 11, 2008 - 4:49am

Poetic Engineer,

You essentialy agree to all but last three points. Let's look at those.

Limestone proves you wrong.

You do not mean it seriously. It does prove my sentence "wrong", but to lock CO2 in Limestone, you would need lot of free Ca, CaO or CAOH and that is manufacturesd from Limestone using lots of head and releaseing same amount of CO2 it later seqesters. I cannot share your optimism for creation of carbonates with other elements than Ca, since most of the rock it finds will be SiO2 and Al2O3 which do not dissolve or react in weak Carbonic acid (pH > 3.5). You can at most find traces of other elements that would be willing to create carbonates.

Chilled-ammonia capture allegedly takes 7% for a conventional coal plant

- And how much energy requires production and chilling of ammonia?
- How many TONS of ammonia is needed to capture CO2 from mere 50lb of Coal?
- Do you indend to sequester this ammount of ammonia or is is only a transport agent and the sequestration can only begin after the ammonia is heated?

Is that an ignorant falsehood, or a lie? Supercritical CO2 is a miscible solvent.

Now you are talking! I am actually glad that you exposed this lie and falsehood for ignorants!
So CO2 is actually not quite meant to end up sequestered. It is meant to dissolve more oil locked underground and and then pumped with the not-so sequestered CO2 solvent to the surface, so that the all the "sequestered" CO2 plus carbon from the oil can be released to the atmosphere.
Now, I like that. I only oppose prepaying for this opposite to "sequestration" under the guise of sequestration before they pump the oil in my tank.

* People had food, firewood and everything else when atmospheric CO2 was just 285 ppm of the atmosphere.

Is this a lie or an ignorant falsehood? More people were startving to death throughout centuries when population was fraction of today's. Only in the last half of CO2 rich 20th century famine has been steadily declining.

Why on earth am I here exposing CO2-phobia if not so save lives lost to Global Warming delusion. Have you checked the corn prices lately?

* Our major renewable energy sources (by kWh/m²/yr) are going to be solar and wind, not biomass.
Absolutely Agreed. But let's classify all our sources:
- Solar energy is available when you use it directly - during daytime on some days.
- Wind is solar energy blowing more randomly.
- Biomass is concentrated stored solar energy with high water content usable round the clock, yet cannot be poured into fuel tanks.
- Coal is twice as concentrated stored solar energy that is hard to pour to fuel tanks.
- Oil is three times as concentrated stored solar energy in liquid form.

I LOVE solar energy. I always buy full tank of it.