Cooled coal emissions would clean air and lower health and climate-change costs

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://portal.acs.org/portal/acs/corg/content?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=PP_ARTICLEMAIN&node_id=222&content_id=CNBP_030569&use_sec=true&sec_url_var=region1&__uuid=5d462b7a-7ee6-4682-8153-bae40c1bb83d

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Cooled coal emissions would clean air and lower health and climate-change costs[/font]

[font size=3]EUGENE, Ore. — (Aug. 27, 2012) — Refrigerating coal-plant emissions would reduce levels of dangerous chemicals that pour into the air — including carbon dioxide by more than 90 percent — at a cost of 25 percent efficiency, according to a simple math-driven formula designed by a team of University of Oregon physicists.

The computations for such a system, prepared on an electronic spreadsheet, appeared in Physical Review E, a journal of the American Physical Society.

In a separate, unpublished and preliminary economic analysis, the scientists argue that the "energy penalty" would raise electricity costs by about a quarter but also reap huge societal benefits through subsequent reductions of health-care and climate-change costs associated with burning coal. An energy penalty is the reduction of electricity available for sale to consumers if plants used the same amounts of coal to maintain electrical output while using a cryogenic cleanup.

"The cryogenic treatment of flue gasses from pulverized coal plant is possible, and I think affordable, especially with respect to the total societal costs of burning coal," said UO physicist Russell J. Donnelly, whose research team was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy for the work detailed in the published journal article.

...[/font][/font]

http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.86.016103

[Javaman]

1. How much energy is required to "cool" the plants? nt

[OKIsItJustMe]

3. That’s answered in the estimate

i.e. there is a 25% loss in efficiency

[font size=3]…

We discuss the possibility of capturing carbon dioxide from the flue gas of a coal-fired electrical power plant by cryogenically desublimating the carbon dioxide and then preparing it for transport in a pipeline to a sequestration site. Various other means have been proposed to accomplish the same goal. The problem discussed here is to estimate the “energy penalty” or “parasitic energy loss,' defined as the fraction of electrical output that will be needed to provide the refrigeration and that will then not be deliverable. We compute the energy loss (7.9–9.2% at 1 atm) based on perfect Carnot efficiency and estimate the achievable parasitic energy loss (22–26% at 1 atm) by incorporating the published coefficient of performance values for appropriately sized refrigeration or liquefaction cycles at the relevant temperatures. The analyses at 1 atm represent a starting point for future analyses using elevated pressures.

…[/font][/font]

[GliderGuider]

2. Hey, anything that lets us keep burning coal is just fine with me!

Not.

[OKIsItJustMe]

4. Take it as a given. We will burn coal for the foreseeable future.

I'm sorry, but that’s reality.

So, given that reality, shall we try to lessen it’s detrimental effects?

[GliderGuider]

5. Do what you wish. nt.

[pscot]

6. And what we can't burn ourselves

we'll export to China where it will fuel some of the dirtiest power plants on earth.