http://yosemite.epa.gov/ opa/ admpress.nsf/ names/ r07_2009-2-4_clean_air_lawsuit_westar

(Sorry about the Reuters mix up… It’s free to sign up for the Carbon Community.

http://communities.thomsonreuters.com/Carbon/209462

[JR: Can you post more on this? It is subscription.]

Coal could be clean if particulate and SOx scrubbing could be improved, post-combustion carbon capture developed, and CO2 cracking means discovered. The DOE’s old approach of chemical carbon capture (amine scrubbing) and underground dumping (”sequestration”) of CO2 must be abandoned and prevented from soaking up all available resources for solving these big problems standing in the way of truly clean coal.

It wins the coal industry no friends when they falsely claim they have everything all figured out.

It will take a moon shot effort to do what it takes, but there is simply no alternative to coal in the near term (before 2050) for keeping the lights on. Solar and wind (combined only 1% of US power) have no storage and they are intermittent, so they cannot be used for baseload power (except for concentrating solar, which can use thermal storage). Conservation is not enough, especially where demand is growing due to water shortages. China and India need to be shown how to clean, capture, and crack their coal emissions, and that there may be a profit in the cracking products. Any other solutions?

Could also add the early TVA press releases claiming it might take 2(?) weeks to clean it all up. Or that most of the station’s boilers were shut down due to “warm weather.” (and the avalanche / washout of their railhead)

Kentucky Utilities is paying a couple of millions in fines and mitigation projects, and forced to pay $135 million for scrubbers to clean up emissions by EPA (admittedly, they aren’t CO2 scrubbers, but it feeds into the clean coal is BS angle).

(A very sad story) China links coal use to a dramatic rise in birth defects.

And this project in NV, although it hasn’t been cancelled, it sounds like they’re not sure if they should proceed with a new regulations almost a certainty under Obama. The line I like is that they’ll use CCS when it becomes economically viable! Norway, the world’s leader in CCS, suggests that the price per ton will range from $25 to $110… Any price advantage for coal goes right out the window.

http://pepei.pennnet.com/ display_article/ 352293/ 6/ ARTCL/ none/ none/ 1/ NV-Energy-nears-decision-on-ultra-supercritical-coal-plant/