Why not use wind to crack coal emissions? O2 for oxyfuel combustion would be one useful product, and another might be carbon nanotubes. CO2 would effectively serve as a storage medium for wind energy.

Truly clean coal would involve a closed loop oxyfuel process, in which pollutants and contaminants in the coal end up in the CO2 stream. Jupiter Oxygen Corporation has patents on this, available on Google Patents.

If this CO2 was sequestered by mineral carbonation, and ended up as a carbonate, and if all of the lead and mercury and so on were effectively immobilized in that carbonate, then this would constitute truly clean coal combustion.

Clean coal mining is another question, and I doubt that truly clean coal mining is possible.

We need to turn away from coal, and just leave it in the ground. If we need to turn away from capitalism to socialism in order to do this, that’s what we will have to do, in order to survive.

The CCS technology of “clean coal” though, applied to biocarbon, is actually the best solution to the entire climate crisis, I believe.

Here’s a Canadian company producing biocarbon from insect killed trees:

http://www.bioenergymagazine.ca/ article.jsp?article_id=341&article_title=Biomass+-%3E+Biocarbon+-%3E+Bioenergy&q=&page=2

The graph in this article shows that the fuel density of biocarbon (carbonized biomass) is equal to, or slightly greater than coal. This makes biocarbon as transportable as coal.

What I envision is small satellite plants, hooked to the electrical grid, which transform biomass into biocarbon. Some useful energy is produced in this step. The resulting gases from this carbonization process could be burned to produce some electricity, and that electricity dumped into the grid.

The biocarbon would be shipped from these small satellite plants to coal fired power plants, by rail, mostly. It might also be possible to construct “biocarbon log” pipelines to transport massive amounts of biocarbon long distances to the coal plants. Finally, it might be possible to transport biomass as carbon monoxide, piped hundreds of miles to coal plants.

Once at the coal fired power plants, biocarbon could be burned just like coal.

The coal fired powerplants could be converted to oxyfuel combustion, one form of carbon capture, and the one I favor because it has higher Carnot efficiency than air combustion.

The resulting nearly pure stream of CO2 could be deep injected into the earth.

Long term, we need to develop carbon sequestration by mineral carbonation, and permanently transform the CO2 into carbonate minerals.

If we did this worldwide and immediately, we could start putting something like 5 billion tons of carbon per year back underground.

At this rate, it would take 60 years to undo the damage caused by the industrial revolution.

The hope of clean coal is certainly worth pursuing, however, because coal is absolutely necessary for reliable electricity, at least in the next 20 years, which is all the time we have to make a difference.

The Green Team looks like a bunch of grinches when they pitch austerity for the US and China. Not gonna happen.

According to a recent FAO report, about 20–30% of land area is not in current production (not even pasturage or forested). These are typically degraded, former agricultural lands. Such are well suited to a variety of biofuel crops, especially those not requiring irrigation. There is plenty of room for both food and fuel.

That appears to be the case. People have a gut reaction to CCS, and that reaction is most often negative.

But oil companies have been quietly using deep injection of CO2 for secondary recovery of oil from oil fields for years. Several projects around the world are currently pumping fairly large amounts of CO2 into geological deposits, without apparent bad effects, at least yet.

http://www.princeton.edu/ mae/ people/ faculty/ socolow/ socdoc/ buryglobalwarming.pdf

If the CO2 comes from biomass, leakage into the air is not much of a problem, because that’s where the CO2 came from in the first place. So the process would still be carbon negative, just a little less so, depending on the leakage.

I agree that burning fossil fuels and then deep injecting the CO2 is a bad idea- it takes carbon out of the ground, and then puts most of it back into the ground in a less stable form.

But taking biomass carbon and putting it into the ground is completely different; this actually transfers carbon from the air to the ground, and if some of it leaks, well that’s better than the “100% leakage” we would get from just burning the biomass. So even if leakage occurs, biomass/CCS is still carbon negative, just less so than if there were no leakage.

CCS should be a temporary measure, until we can develop economic geological sequestration as a carbonate. Deep injection of CO2 should be reserved strictly for biomass derived carbon, and should NOT be used for secondary oil recovery.

I also think the coal plants should be seized, and forcibly converted, to take any profit motive out of this picture.

I think we have to realize that there are tradeoffs, and relative risks involved here. We have to more intensively manage the forests to keep them from burning, We have to harvest biomass from the forests, even though we don’t want to. We have to get our hands dirty seizing the coal plants. We have to deep inject CO2, even though we don’t want to.

We should massively replant the forests, and plant new forests, even as we harvest them for biomass, of course.

Eventually, we may be forced to a decision: do we want runaway global warming or do we want biomass/CCS? My only worry is that by the time we are forced to this decision, it will be too late to stop runaway global warming, even with biomass/CCS.

Biomass/CCS at least gives us some breathing room, decades perhaps, to develop carbon sequestration by mineral carbonation.

CO2 is toxic at >5% concentration in air. Why are we so sure that pumping CO2 into the ground is good? Will it stay there? I have asked these questions of coal experts at lectures I have attended and not received answers I trust. Earthquakes, underground water movements, etc., make me nervous. This technology of underground sequestration has only recently been considered seriously and remains untested.

The main difficulty for all forms of biofuels is the lack of water. For some algae, sea water is required and then the problem is lack of suitable sea coast; otherwise the water has to be pumped inland.

[JR: Could be part of the solution if it proves workable, affordable, and scalable. Announcements like these are currently dime a dozen. Seems like a complicated process but making gasoline rather than ethanol is obviously a much better idea. Still, biomass is not a very good way of converting solar energy into moving a vehicle. Presumably it would be carbon neutral.]

No, just leaving the coal in the ground is carbon neutral, and does not produce any energy. Certainly, leave the coal in the ground. But it’s looking like we are actually going to have to actively pump CO2 out of the air and into the ground, to turn this runaway feedback climate crisis around.

What we need are carbon negative forms of energy production, and one form of this would be to transform existing coal fired power plants to biomass/biocarbon, oxyfuel combustion, and CCS, while developing CO2 sequestration as a carbonate on an emergency basis.

No other plan that I know of could use existing power plants, and actively pump carbon back underground, while generating useful power, displacing fossil fuels, helping to control wildfires, and minimizing methane production from landfills at the same time.

Nobody likes CCS. I don’t like CCS. I’m afraid we will have to use biocarbon/CCS to save the biosphere, and that we will hesitate too long to use it.