Russia doubles Georgia gas bill
Link to the entire story
http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=1626302006&format=print
Russia hits Georgia with huge rise in its gas bill
CHRISTOPHER STEPHEN
IN MOSCOW
RUSSIA deployed its energy weapon against Georgia last night, announcing it would double the cost for gas to its neighbour from 1 January.
The price rise comes a year after Ukraine faced a quadruple price rise from Moscow, and was announced amid continuing acrimony over Georgia's bid to join NATO. Gazprom, the Russian state gas monopoly, said it would charge Tbilisi £121 for 1,000 cubic metres of gas from 1 January, compared with £58 now.
Last month, Russia announced an economic blockade against Georgia after four Russian officers were arrested on spying charges. Yesterday's move is likely to send a shiver down the spines of Europe's politicians as Russia shows its willingness to use energy supplies against its rivals
Thursday, November 02, 2006
The scoop on the latest climate warming scare
Stern Review The dodgy numbers behind the latest warming scare.
BY BJORN LOMBORG
Thursday, November 2, 2006 12:01 a.m. (Wall Street Journal) The report on climate change by Nicholas Stern and the U.K. government has sparked publicity and scary headlines around the world. Much attention has been devoted to Mr. Stern's core argument that the price of inaction would be extraordinary and the cost of action modest.
Unfortunately, this claim falls apart when one actually reads the 700-page tome. Despite using many good references, the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change is selective and its conclusion flawed. Its fear-mongering arguments have been sensationalized, which is ultimately only likely to make the world worse off.
The review correctly points out that climate change is a real problem, and that it is caused by human greenhouse-gas emissions. Little else is right, however, and the report seems hastily put-together, with many sloppy errors. As an example, the cost of hurricanes in the U.S. is said to be both 0.13% of U.S. GDP and 10 times that figure.
The review is also one-sided, focusing almost exclusively on carbon-emission cuts as the solution to the problem of climate change. Mr. Stern sees increasing hurricane damage in the U.S. as a powerful argument for carbon controls. However, hurricane damage is increasing predominantly because there are more people with more goods to be damaged, settling in ever more risky habitats. Even if global warming does significantly increase the power of hurricanes, it is estimated that 95% to 98% of the increased damage will be due to demographics. The review acknowledges that simple initiatives like bracing and securing roof trusses and walls can cheaply reduce damage by more than 80%; yet its policy recommendations on expensive carbon reductions promise to cut the damages by 1% to 2% at best. That is a bad deal.
Mr. Stern is also selective, often seeming to cherry-pick statistics to fit an argument. This is demonstrated most clearly in the review's examination of the social damage costs of CO2--essentially the environmental cost of emitting each extra ton of CO2. The most well-recognized climate economist in the world is probably Yale University's William Nordhaus, whose "approach is perhaps closest in spirit to ours," according to the Stern review. Mr. Nordhaus finds that the social cost of CO2 is $2.50 per ton. Mr. Stern, however, uses a figure of $85 per ton. Picking a rate even higher than the official U.K. estimates--that have themselves been criticized for being over the top--speaks volumes.
Mr. Stern tells us that the cost of U.K. flooding will quadruple to 0.4% from 0.1% of GDP due to climate change. However, we are not told that these alarming figures only hold true if one assumes that the U.K. will take no additional measures--essentially doing absolutely nothing and allowing itself to get flooded, perhaps time and again. In contrast, the U.K. government's own assumptions take into account a modest increase in flood prevention, finding that the cost will actually decline sharply to 0.04% of U.K. GDP, in spite of climate change. Why does Mr. Stern not share that information?
But nowhere is the imbalance clearer than in Mr. Stern's central argument about the costs and benefits of action on climate change. The review tells us that we should make significant cuts in carbon emissions to stabilize the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide at 550 ppm (parts per million). Yet such a stark recommendation is not matched by an explicit explanation of what this would mean in terms of temperature.
The U.N. Climate Panel estimates that stabilizing at 550 ppm would mean an increase in temperature of about 2.3 degrees Celsius in the year 2100. This might be several degrees below what would otherwise happen, but it might also be higher. Mr. Nordhaus estimates that the stabilization policy would reduce the rise in temperature from 2.53 degrees Celsius to just 2.42 degrees Celsius. One can understand the reluctance of the Stern review to advertise such a puny effect.
Most economists were surprised by Mr. Stern's large economic estimates of damage from global warming. Mr. Nordhaus's model, for example, anticipates 3% will be wiped off global GDP if nothing is done over the coming century, taking into account the risk for catastrophes. The Stern review purports to show that the cost is "larger than many earlier studies suggested."
On the face of it, Mr. Stern actually accepts Mr. Nordhaus's figure: Even including risks of catastrophe and non-market costs, he agrees that an increase of four degrees Celsius will cost about 3% of GDP. But he assumes that we will continue to pump out carbon far into the 22nd century--a rather unlikely scenario given the falling cost of alternative fuels, and especially if some of his predictions become clear to us toward the end of this century. Thus he estimates that the higher temperatures of eight degrees Celsius in the 2180s will be very damaging, costing 11% to 14% of GDP.
The Stern review then analyzes what the cost would be if everyone in the present and the future paid equally. Suddenly the cost estimate is not 0% now and 3% in 2100--but 11% of GDP right now and forever. If this seems like a trick, it is certainly underscored by the fact that the Stern review picks an extremely low discount rate, which makes the cost look much more ominous now.
But even 11% is not the last word. Mr. Stern suggests that there is a risk that the cost of global warming will be higher than the top end of the U.N. climate panel's estimates, inventing, in effect, a "worst-case scenario" even worse than any others on the table. Therefore, the estimated damage to GDP jumps to 15% from 11%. Moreover, Mr. Stern admonishes that poor people count for less in the economic calculus, so he then inflates 15% to 20%.
This figure, 20%, was the number that rocketed around the world, although it is simply a much-massaged reworking of the standard 3% GDP cost in 2100--a figure accepted among most economists to be a reasonable estimate.
Likewise, Mr. Stern readjusts the cost of dealing with climate change. The U.N. found that the cost of 550 ppm stabilization would be somewhere around 0.2% to 3.2% of GDP today; he reports that costs could lie between -4% and 15% of GDP. The -4% is based on the suggestion that cutting carbon emissions could make us richer because revenue recycling could address inefficiencies in taxation--but the alleged inefficiencies, if correct, should be addressed no matter what the policies about climate change. The reason Mr. Stern nevertheless finds a very low cost estimate is because he only considers models with so-called Induced Technological Change. These models are known to reduce costs by about two percentage points because carbon cuts lead to an increase in research and development, which again makes further cuts cheaper. Thus Mr. Stern concludes that the costs are on average 1% of GDP, and in the summary actually claims that this is a maximum cost.
The Stern review's cornerstone argument for immediate and strong action now is based on the suggestion that doing nothing about climate change costs 20% of GDP now, and doing something only costs 1%. However, this argument hinges on three very problematic assumptions.
First, it assumes that if we act, we will not still have to pay. But this is not so--Mr. Stern actually tells us that his solution is "already associated with significant risks." Second, it requires the cost of action to be as cheap as he tells us--and on this front his numbers are at best overly optimistic. Third, and most importantly, it requires the cost of doing nothing to be a realistic assumption: But the 20% of GDP figure is inflated by an unrealistically pessimistic vision of the 22nd century, and by an extreme and unrealistically low discount rate. According to the background numbers in Mr. Stern's own report, climate change will cost us 0% now and 3% of GDP in 2100, a much more informative number than the 20% now and forever.
In other words: Given reasonable inputs, most cost-benefit models show that dramatic and early carbon reductions cost more than the good they do. Mr. Stern's attempt to challenge that understanding is based on a chain of unlikely assumptions.
Moreover, there is a fourth major problem in Mr. Stern's argument that has received very little attention. It seems naive to believe that the world's 192 nations can flawlessly implement Mr. Stern's multitrillion-dollar, century-long policy proposal. Will nobody try to avoid its obligations? Why would China and India even participate? And even if China got on board, would it be able to implement the policies? In 2002, China decided to cut sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions by 10%--they are now 27% higher despite SO2 being nationally a much bigger health and environmental problem than climate change.
Why does all this matter? It matters because, with clever marketing and sensationalist headlines, the Stern review is about to edge its way into our collective consciousness. The suggestion that flooding will overwhelm us has already been picked up by commentators, yet going back to the background reports properly shows declining costs from flooding and fewer people at risk. The media is now quoting Mr. Stern's suggestion that climate change will wreak financial devastation that will wipe 20% off GDP, explicitly evoking memories of past financial catastrophes such as the Great Depression or World War II; yet the review clearly tells us that costs will be 0% now and just 3% in 2100.
It matters because Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and Nicholas Stern all profess that one of the major reasons that they want to do something about climate change is because it will hit the world's poor the hardest. Using a worse-than-worst-case scenario, Mr. Stern warns that the wealth of South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa will be reduced by 10% to 13% in 2100 and suggests that effect would lead to 145 million more poor people.
Faced with such alarmist suggestions, spending just 1% of GDP or $450 billion each year to cut carbon emissions seems on the surface like a sound investment. In fact, it is one of the least attractive options. Spending just a fraction of this figure--$75 billion--the U.N. estimates that we could solve all the world's major basic problems. We could give everyone clean drinking water, sanitation, basic health care and education right now. Is that not better?
We know from economic models that dealing just with malaria could provide economic boosts to the order of 1% extra GDP growth per capita per year. Even making a very conservative estimate that solving all the major basic issues would induce just 2% extra growth, 100 years from now each individual in the developing world would be more than 700% richer. That truly trivializes Mr. Stern's 10% to 13% estimates for South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Last weekend in New York, I asked 24 U.N. ambassadors--from nations including China, India and the U.S.--to prioritize the best solutions for the world's greatest challenges, in a project known as Copenhagen Consensus. They looked at what spending money to combat climate change and other major problems could achieve. They found that the world should prioritize the need for better health, nutrition, water, sanitation and education, long before we turn our attention to the costly mitigation of global warning.
We all want a better world. But we must not let ourselves be swept up in making a bad investment, simply because we have been scared by sensationalist headlines.
Mr. Lomborg, author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist" (Cambridge, 2001), teaches at the Copenhagen Business School and is director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center.
Copyright © 2006 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Stern Review The dodgy numbers behind the latest warming scare.
BY BJORN LOMBORG
Thursday, November 2, 2006 12:01 a.m. (Wall Street Journal) The report on climate change by Nicholas Stern and the U.K. government has sparked publicity and scary headlines around the world. Much attention has been devoted to Mr. Stern's core argument that the price of inaction would be extraordinary and the cost of action modest.
Unfortunately, this claim falls apart when one actually reads the 700-page tome. Despite using many good references, the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change is selective and its conclusion flawed. Its fear-mongering arguments have been sensationalized, which is ultimately only likely to make the world worse off.
The review correctly points out that climate change is a real problem, and that it is caused by human greenhouse-gas emissions. Little else is right, however, and the report seems hastily put-together, with many sloppy errors. As an example, the cost of hurricanes in the U.S. is said to be both 0.13% of U.S. GDP and 10 times that figure.
The review is also one-sided, focusing almost exclusively on carbon-emission cuts as the solution to the problem of climate change. Mr. Stern sees increasing hurricane damage in the U.S. as a powerful argument for carbon controls. However, hurricane damage is increasing predominantly because there are more people with more goods to be damaged, settling in ever more risky habitats. Even if global warming does significantly increase the power of hurricanes, it is estimated that 95% to 98% of the increased damage will be due to demographics. The review acknowledges that simple initiatives like bracing and securing roof trusses and walls can cheaply reduce damage by more than 80%; yet its policy recommendations on expensive carbon reductions promise to cut the damages by 1% to 2% at best. That is a bad deal.
Mr. Stern is also selective, often seeming to cherry-pick statistics to fit an argument. This is demonstrated most clearly in the review's examination of the social damage costs of CO2--essentially the environmental cost of emitting each extra ton of CO2. The most well-recognized climate economist in the world is probably Yale University's William Nordhaus, whose "approach is perhaps closest in spirit to ours," according to the Stern review. Mr. Nordhaus finds that the social cost of CO2 is $2.50 per ton. Mr. Stern, however, uses a figure of $85 per ton. Picking a rate even higher than the official U.K. estimates--that have themselves been criticized for being over the top--speaks volumes.
Mr. Stern tells us that the cost of U.K. flooding will quadruple to 0.4% from 0.1% of GDP due to climate change. However, we are not told that these alarming figures only hold true if one assumes that the U.K. will take no additional measures--essentially doing absolutely nothing and allowing itself to get flooded, perhaps time and again. In contrast, the U.K. government's own assumptions take into account a modest increase in flood prevention, finding that the cost will actually decline sharply to 0.04% of U.K. GDP, in spite of climate change. Why does Mr. Stern not share that information?
But nowhere is the imbalance clearer than in Mr. Stern's central argument about the costs and benefits of action on climate change. The review tells us that we should make significant cuts in carbon emissions to stabilize the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide at 550 ppm (parts per million). Yet such a stark recommendation is not matched by an explicit explanation of what this would mean in terms of temperature.
The U.N. Climate Panel estimates that stabilizing at 550 ppm would mean an increase in temperature of about 2.3 degrees Celsius in the year 2100. This might be several degrees below what would otherwise happen, but it might also be higher. Mr. Nordhaus estimates that the stabilization policy would reduce the rise in temperature from 2.53 degrees Celsius to just 2.42 degrees Celsius. One can understand the reluctance of the Stern review to advertise such a puny effect.
Most economists were surprised by Mr. Stern's large economic estimates of damage from global warming. Mr. Nordhaus's model, for example, anticipates 3% will be wiped off global GDP if nothing is done over the coming century, taking into account the risk for catastrophes. The Stern review purports to show that the cost is "larger than many earlier studies suggested."
On the face of it, Mr. Stern actually accepts Mr. Nordhaus's figure: Even including risks of catastrophe and non-market costs, he agrees that an increase of four degrees Celsius will cost about 3% of GDP. But he assumes that we will continue to pump out carbon far into the 22nd century--a rather unlikely scenario given the falling cost of alternative fuels, and especially if some of his predictions become clear to us toward the end of this century. Thus he estimates that the higher temperatures of eight degrees Celsius in the 2180s will be very damaging, costing 11% to 14% of GDP.
The Stern review then analyzes what the cost would be if everyone in the present and the future paid equally. Suddenly the cost estimate is not 0% now and 3% in 2100--but 11% of GDP right now and forever. If this seems like a trick, it is certainly underscored by the fact that the Stern review picks an extremely low discount rate, which makes the cost look much more ominous now.
But even 11% is not the last word. Mr. Stern suggests that there is a risk that the cost of global warming will be higher than the top end of the U.N. climate panel's estimates, inventing, in effect, a "worst-case scenario" even worse than any others on the table. Therefore, the estimated damage to GDP jumps to 15% from 11%. Moreover, Mr. Stern admonishes that poor people count for less in the economic calculus, so he then inflates 15% to 20%.
This figure, 20%, was the number that rocketed around the world, although it is simply a much-massaged reworking of the standard 3% GDP cost in 2100--a figure accepted among most economists to be a reasonable estimate.
Likewise, Mr. Stern readjusts the cost of dealing with climate change. The U.N. found that the cost of 550 ppm stabilization would be somewhere around 0.2% to 3.2% of GDP today; he reports that costs could lie between -4% and 15% of GDP. The -4% is based on the suggestion that cutting carbon emissions could make us richer because revenue recycling could address inefficiencies in taxation--but the alleged inefficiencies, if correct, should be addressed no matter what the policies about climate change. The reason Mr. Stern nevertheless finds a very low cost estimate is because he only considers models with so-called Induced Technological Change. These models are known to reduce costs by about two percentage points because carbon cuts lead to an increase in research and development, which again makes further cuts cheaper. Thus Mr. Stern concludes that the costs are on average 1% of GDP, and in the summary actually claims that this is a maximum cost.
The Stern review's cornerstone argument for immediate and strong action now is based on the suggestion that doing nothing about climate change costs 20% of GDP now, and doing something only costs 1%. However, this argument hinges on three very problematic assumptions.
First, it assumes that if we act, we will not still have to pay. But this is not so--Mr. Stern actually tells us that his solution is "already associated with significant risks." Second, it requires the cost of action to be as cheap as he tells us--and on this front his numbers are at best overly optimistic. Third, and most importantly, it requires the cost of doing nothing to be a realistic assumption: But the 20% of GDP figure is inflated by an unrealistically pessimistic vision of the 22nd century, and by an extreme and unrealistically low discount rate. According to the background numbers in Mr. Stern's own report, climate change will cost us 0% now and 3% of GDP in 2100, a much more informative number than the 20% now and forever.
In other words: Given reasonable inputs, most cost-benefit models show that dramatic and early carbon reductions cost more than the good they do. Mr. Stern's attempt to challenge that understanding is based on a chain of unlikely assumptions.
Moreover, there is a fourth major problem in Mr. Stern's argument that has received very little attention. It seems naive to believe that the world's 192 nations can flawlessly implement Mr. Stern's multitrillion-dollar, century-long policy proposal. Will nobody try to avoid its obligations? Why would China and India even participate? And even if China got on board, would it be able to implement the policies? In 2002, China decided to cut sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions by 10%--they are now 27% higher despite SO2 being nationally a much bigger health and environmental problem than climate change.
Why does all this matter? It matters because, with clever marketing and sensationalist headlines, the Stern review is about to edge its way into our collective consciousness. The suggestion that flooding will overwhelm us has already been picked up by commentators, yet going back to the background reports properly shows declining costs from flooding and fewer people at risk. The media is now quoting Mr. Stern's suggestion that climate change will wreak financial devastation that will wipe 20% off GDP, explicitly evoking memories of past financial catastrophes such as the Great Depression or World War II; yet the review clearly tells us that costs will be 0% now and just 3% in 2100.
It matters because Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and Nicholas Stern all profess that one of the major reasons that they want to do something about climate change is because it will hit the world's poor the hardest. Using a worse-than-worst-case scenario, Mr. Stern warns that the wealth of South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa will be reduced by 10% to 13% in 2100 and suggests that effect would lead to 145 million more poor people.
Faced with such alarmist suggestions, spending just 1% of GDP or $450 billion each year to cut carbon emissions seems on the surface like a sound investment. In fact, it is one of the least attractive options. Spending just a fraction of this figure--$75 billion--the U.N. estimates that we could solve all the world's major basic problems. We could give everyone clean drinking water, sanitation, basic health care and education right now. Is that not better?
We know from economic models that dealing just with malaria could provide economic boosts to the order of 1% extra GDP growth per capita per year. Even making a very conservative estimate that solving all the major basic issues would induce just 2% extra growth, 100 years from now each individual in the developing world would be more than 700% richer. That truly trivializes Mr. Stern's 10% to 13% estimates for South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Last weekend in New York, I asked 24 U.N. ambassadors--from nations including China, India and the U.S.--to prioritize the best solutions for the world's greatest challenges, in a project known as Copenhagen Consensus. They looked at what spending money to combat climate change and other major problems could achieve. They found that the world should prioritize the need for better health, nutrition, water, sanitation and education, long before we turn our attention to the costly mitigation of global warning.
We all want a better world. But we must not let ourselves be swept up in making a bad investment, simply because we have been scared by sensationalist headlines.
Mr. Lomborg, author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist" (Cambridge, 2001), teaches at the Copenhagen Business School and is director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center.
Copyright © 2006 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Just add oxygen and you got clean coal technology!
This story ran on nwitimes.com on Wednesday, November 1, 2006 7:59 AM CST
Jupiter eyes clean-coal bonanza
BY KATHERINE LING Medill News Service
Jupiter Oxygen Corp. is a clean-coal technology developer named after the largest planet in the solar system, with ambitions to live up to its namesake's stature.
The key is whether its new technology could retrofit the more than 600 existing U.S. coal-fired power plants. They account for 18 percent of total U.S. nitrous oxide and more than 40 percent of total U.S. carbon dioxide emissions per year, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
But first, the six-year-old company, headquartered in Schiller Park with a plant in Hammond, must prove its technology can work on a commercial power plant because nobody wants to be first, President Dietrich Gross, Jupiter's founder and inventor of the process, explained.
"Wherever we go, we hear the same thing, 'Yes, we are excited. Show us, and we are right behind you,' " Gross said.
In September, Jupiter took a big step toward proving its worth by announcing an agreement with the Ohio Air Quality Development Authority for the world's first oxy-fuel clean-coal retrofit of an operating electric plant, on a 25 megawatt boiler in Orrville, Ohio.
This retrofit "means to us as much to the rest of the industry. They are all watching. And many people are knowledgeable about what we are doing," said Gross.
Jupiter's technology burns pure oxygen together with fossil fuels. This fuel-efficient process emits almost no nitrous oxide and compresses carbon dioxide for sequestration, according to Senior Vice President of Operations and General Counsel Mark Schoenfield.
The technology has great potential, according to William Simmons, a principal partner of Coalteck LLC, a clean-coal and biomass technology consulting firm based in Evansville.
Simmons, a former executive of Vectren Corp., an Indiana utility, and a technical adviser for the U.S. Department of Energy, says there's nothing that competes with oxy-fuel technology in emissions except nuclear energy, and oxy-fuel is likely the best technology to convert coal and natural gas into energy.
"Jupiter is probably going to be the leader of (oxy-fuel technology) from a funding point of view and (its) agreement with Orrville," Simmons said.
"They are going at a faster pace than their competitors."
Their competitors in oxy-fuel technology include Ohio-based Babcock and Wilcox Co., a subsidiary of McDermott International, Inc., and Stockholm-based Vattenfall AB, which announced this year it will construct the world's first oxy-fuel, carbon dioxide-free, coal-fired power plant in Germany.
But Vattenfall's technology is not as efficient as Jupiter's, according to Vattenfall's own estimates. The plant expects to have an efficiency of only 35 percent in converting coal to energy, whereas traditional coal plants report 45 percent efficiency. Jupiter expects a minimum of 51 percent efficiency, based on previous tests, Schoenfield said.
Simmons cautioned, however, that the Orrville test "is going to cost more money and take longer than (Jupiter) thinks."
Beside the retrofit, Jupiter worked with the Department of Energy on a new half-megawatt plant and is in negotiations to construct a 5-megawatt plant to be built in Hammond, according to Schoenfield. The Energy Department declines to comment on the project at this time, an official said.
There is considerable money to be generated from technology that could provide clean coal, a domestic fuel so abundant that the U.S. reserves will last at least 200 years at current-use levels. Utility companies like Exelon Corp. and Ameren Corp, are investing heavily in commercialization of various technologies, such as filters and gasification, to clean up coal's dirty emissions.
And the government is offering incentives for clean-coal technology, including a production tax incentive that would pay 34 cents per kilowatt-hour for energy generated from a retrofitted plant, which could add up to $89 million per year, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Jupiter has current revenue of $6.9 million, mostly in research funding and contracts with the government, Schoenfield said.
But even with the cleanest of technologies, there is still the issue of emissions, Simmons added. The technology "sounds real good for some decades, but eventually we will run out of places to put the carbon dioxide" that would be captured in the burning process.
According to Schoenfield, Jupiter's oxy-fuel technology captures 95 percent of carbon dioxide emissions and emits only .088 pounds of nitrous oxide per million British thermal units per day, and expects to achieve .05 in the next round of tests. That is below the Energy Department's current goal for the U.S. -- "to achieve an intermediate-term nitrous oxide target of 0.10 lb/million Btu by 2010."
"We hear a lot about regulatory uncertainty from businesses," Schoenfield said. "One of the advantages for ultimate users in terms of companies is that the investment (in Jupiter Oxygen technology) they make today should get them through (emission standards) for quite a while--longer than anybody could possibly project anything," he explained.
The process was originally developed by Gross for his aluminum company, Hammond-based Jupiter Aluminum, to cope with "skyrocketing" fuel prices in the mid-'90s.
"I was very angry," he explained, "and I tried to find a different means to stretch the gas supply. And I thought of oxygen, something you learn in school."
Gross said currently he has reduced fuel usage by 70 percent using the technology in his aluminum industrial boilers, which are similar but different from power plant boilers.
Illinois and Indiana public officials from both political parties, including U.S. Rep. Pete Visclosky, D-Ind., who's a member of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, have voiced support for the burgeoning company, according to Schoenfield. Visclosky could not be reached for comment on this story due to his election campaign.
Leslie Combs, district director for U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D- Ill., said the congresswoman was "impressed" with Jupiter and "is working to get more government support for clean-coal technology."
An environmentally minded company, Jupiter is also involved with the Alliance to Save Energy and the Business Council for Sustainable Energy.
Gross, Schoenfield and Thomas Weber, the company's vice president, have been representatives of the nongovernmental organization at the United Nations Climate Change conferences.
[EXTRAS]Business Profile:Company: Jupiter Oxygen Corp.President and CEO: Dietrich GrossBusiness: Developing clean-coal technologyU.S. headquarters: Schiller Park, Ill.Plant: HammondWeb site: http://www.jupiteroxygen.com/Gross Revenue: $6.9 millionEmployees: 7
This story ran on nwitimes.com on Wednesday, November 1, 2006 7:59 AM CST
Jupiter eyes clean-coal bonanza
BY KATHERINE LING Medill News Service
Jupiter Oxygen Corp. is a clean-coal technology developer named after the largest planet in the solar system, with ambitions to live up to its namesake's stature.
The key is whether its new technology could retrofit the more than 600 existing U.S. coal-fired power plants. They account for 18 percent of total U.S. nitrous oxide and more than 40 percent of total U.S. carbon dioxide emissions per year, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
But first, the six-year-old company, headquartered in Schiller Park with a plant in Hammond, must prove its technology can work on a commercial power plant because nobody wants to be first, President Dietrich Gross, Jupiter's founder and inventor of the process, explained.
"Wherever we go, we hear the same thing, 'Yes, we are excited. Show us, and we are right behind you,' " Gross said.
In September, Jupiter took a big step toward proving its worth by announcing an agreement with the Ohio Air Quality Development Authority for the world's first oxy-fuel clean-coal retrofit of an operating electric plant, on a 25 megawatt boiler in Orrville, Ohio.
This retrofit "means to us as much to the rest of the industry. They are all watching. And many people are knowledgeable about what we are doing," said Gross.
Jupiter's technology burns pure oxygen together with fossil fuels. This fuel-efficient process emits almost no nitrous oxide and compresses carbon dioxide for sequestration, according to Senior Vice President of Operations and General Counsel Mark Schoenfield.
The technology has great potential, according to William Simmons, a principal partner of Coalteck LLC, a clean-coal and biomass technology consulting firm based in Evansville.
Simmons, a former executive of Vectren Corp., an Indiana utility, and a technical adviser for the U.S. Department of Energy, says there's nothing that competes with oxy-fuel technology in emissions except nuclear energy, and oxy-fuel is likely the best technology to convert coal and natural gas into energy.
"Jupiter is probably going to be the leader of (oxy-fuel technology) from a funding point of view and (its) agreement with Orrville," Simmons said.
"They are going at a faster pace than their competitors."
Their competitors in oxy-fuel technology include Ohio-based Babcock and Wilcox Co., a subsidiary of McDermott International, Inc., and Stockholm-based Vattenfall AB, which announced this year it will construct the world's first oxy-fuel, carbon dioxide-free, coal-fired power plant in Germany.
But Vattenfall's technology is not as efficient as Jupiter's, according to Vattenfall's own estimates. The plant expects to have an efficiency of only 35 percent in converting coal to energy, whereas traditional coal plants report 45 percent efficiency. Jupiter expects a minimum of 51 percent efficiency, based on previous tests, Schoenfield said.
Simmons cautioned, however, that the Orrville test "is going to cost more money and take longer than (Jupiter) thinks."
Beside the retrofit, Jupiter worked with the Department of Energy on a new half-megawatt plant and is in negotiations to construct a 5-megawatt plant to be built in Hammond, according to Schoenfield. The Energy Department declines to comment on the project at this time, an official said.
There is considerable money to be generated from technology that could provide clean coal, a domestic fuel so abundant that the U.S. reserves will last at least 200 years at current-use levels. Utility companies like Exelon Corp. and Ameren Corp, are investing heavily in commercialization of various technologies, such as filters and gasification, to clean up coal's dirty emissions.
And the government is offering incentives for clean-coal technology, including a production tax incentive that would pay 34 cents per kilowatt-hour for energy generated from a retrofitted plant, which could add up to $89 million per year, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Jupiter has current revenue of $6.9 million, mostly in research funding and contracts with the government, Schoenfield said.
But even with the cleanest of technologies, there is still the issue of emissions, Simmons added. The technology "sounds real good for some decades, but eventually we will run out of places to put the carbon dioxide" that would be captured in the burning process.
According to Schoenfield, Jupiter's oxy-fuel technology captures 95 percent of carbon dioxide emissions and emits only .088 pounds of nitrous oxide per million British thermal units per day, and expects to achieve .05 in the next round of tests. That is below the Energy Department's current goal for the U.S. -- "to achieve an intermediate-term nitrous oxide target of 0.10 lb/million Btu by 2010."
"We hear a lot about regulatory uncertainty from businesses," Schoenfield said. "One of the advantages for ultimate users in terms of companies is that the investment (in Jupiter Oxygen technology) they make today should get them through (emission standards) for quite a while--longer than anybody could possibly project anything," he explained.
The process was originally developed by Gross for his aluminum company, Hammond-based Jupiter Aluminum, to cope with "skyrocketing" fuel prices in the mid-'90s.
"I was very angry," he explained, "and I tried to find a different means to stretch the gas supply. And I thought of oxygen, something you learn in school."
Gross said currently he has reduced fuel usage by 70 percent using the technology in his aluminum industrial boilers, which are similar but different from power plant boilers.
Illinois and Indiana public officials from both political parties, including U.S. Rep. Pete Visclosky, D-Ind., who's a member of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, have voiced support for the burgeoning company, according to Schoenfield. Visclosky could not be reached for comment on this story due to his election campaign.
Leslie Combs, district director for U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D- Ill., said the congresswoman was "impressed" with Jupiter and "is working to get more government support for clean-coal technology."
An environmentally minded company, Jupiter is also involved with the Alliance to Save Energy and the Business Council for Sustainable Energy.
Gross, Schoenfield and Thomas Weber, the company's vice president, have been representatives of the nongovernmental organization at the United Nations Climate Change conferences.
[EXTRAS]Business Profile:Company: Jupiter Oxygen Corp.President and CEO: Dietrich GrossBusiness: Developing clean-coal technologyU.S. headquarters: Schiller Park, Ill.Plant: HammondWeb site: http://www.jupiteroxygen.com/Gross Revenue: $6.9 millionEmployees: 7
Miners' emergency air packs may be recalled
Nov 1, 2006
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Dennis B. Roddy
W. Va. safety agency warns about failure of breathing units that have been exposed to heat
The state agency overseeing mine safety in West Virginia yesterday issued a warning that could result in the recall of potentially thousands of underground emergency breathing units because there is no way of knowing if they have been exposed to excessive heat.
Ron Wooten, director of the West Virginia Office of Miner Health Safety and Training, said early data from the first survey of self-contained rescuers at the state's coal mines revealed that 2,750 devices designed to supply an hour's worth of oxygen to trapped miners have no gauge or monitor that would show if they had been exposed to excessive heat that would render them useless.
That would amount to as much as one-fourth of the more than 10,000 air packs (known as self-contained self-rescuers) in use in the state.
The devices are damaged when kept in places such as hot automobiles or around heat-generating equipment. The notice advised miners to keep the units away from such things as hydraulic equipment, bulldozers and shower rooms.
The self-rescuers produce oxygen through a chemical reaction when they are activated. Excessive heat can cause the chemicals to degrade and cause the units to malfunction.
"SCSRs that are suspected by anyone of having been exposed to excessive temperature shall be withdrawn from service," Mr. Wooten said in a memo to the state's mine operators. "The safe care of SCSRs shall be emphasized in all future SCSR training."
Mr. Wooten's memorandum instructed mine operators to meet with employees to brief them on the safe handling and storage of the breathing devices.
The largest number of suspect SCSRs were 2,700 SR-100 models manufactured by Monroeville-based CSE prior to August 2004. They are the same model carried by miners who became stranded underground Jan. 2 at the Sago Mine after an explosion there. Twelve of the stranded miners died, and the lone survivor, Randal McCloy Jr., later complained that four of the units failed to function properly.
Later tests at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health showed that the devices were capable of generating oxygen.
Mr. McCloy has since sued CSE.
The inventory also found 67 air packs made by Draeger Safety, based in Pittsburgh, that lacked temperature sensors and another 15 made by Ocenco Inc., a Wisconsin firm, that had been damaged by heat.
West Virginia data found that of 4,300 CSE SR-100s with temperature indicators, 63 had been removed from service because of indications they had been exposed to excessive temperatures. CSE is the only manufacturer to install a heat indicator on its rescuers. Of 3,600 other models, called the EBA-6.5, about 15 had been taken out of service for the same reason.
Yesterday's memo and summary of the air pack survey findings, also included lengthy rebuttals by CSE, whose president complained that the inspections, performed using testing equipment manufactured by a competitor, was flawed in some of its findings.
One major revelation of the statewide inventory -- which came after OMHST discovered some of its own inspectors were carrying heat-damaged units -- was that some safety inspectors had ignored CSE's own warnings about keeping the units clear of excessive heat.
Scott Shearer, CSE president, noted this in his written response to the report.
"CSE relies on the operators and federal and state mine inspectors to assist the miners in identifying and removing damaged units in accordance with manufacturer inspections," Mr. Shearer wrote. "When OMHST ignores manufacturer warnings on temperature and physical damage resulting in carrying units that are so obviously damaged into mines, OMHST sends the wrong message to the industry."
Mr. Shearer also noted that CSE has incorporated a gauge in its models made since 2004 that shows when it has been exposed to too much heat
Nov 1, 2006
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Dennis B. Roddy
W. Va. safety agency warns about failure of breathing units that have been exposed to heat
The state agency overseeing mine safety in West Virginia yesterday issued a warning that could result in the recall of potentially thousands of underground emergency breathing units because there is no way of knowing if they have been exposed to excessive heat.
Ron Wooten, director of the West Virginia Office of Miner Health Safety and Training, said early data from the first survey of self-contained rescuers at the state's coal mines revealed that 2,750 devices designed to supply an hour's worth of oxygen to trapped miners have no gauge or monitor that would show if they had been exposed to excessive heat that would render them useless.
That would amount to as much as one-fourth of the more than 10,000 air packs (known as self-contained self-rescuers) in use in the state.
The devices are damaged when kept in places such as hot automobiles or around heat-generating equipment. The notice advised miners to keep the units away from such things as hydraulic equipment, bulldozers and shower rooms.
The self-rescuers produce oxygen through a chemical reaction when they are activated. Excessive heat can cause the chemicals to degrade and cause the units to malfunction.
"SCSRs that are suspected by anyone of having been exposed to excessive temperature shall be withdrawn from service," Mr. Wooten said in a memo to the state's mine operators. "The safe care of SCSRs shall be emphasized in all future SCSR training."
Mr. Wooten's memorandum instructed mine operators to meet with employees to brief them on the safe handling and storage of the breathing devices.
The largest number of suspect SCSRs were 2,700 SR-100 models manufactured by Monroeville-based CSE prior to August 2004. They are the same model carried by miners who became stranded underground Jan. 2 at the Sago Mine after an explosion there. Twelve of the stranded miners died, and the lone survivor, Randal McCloy Jr., later complained that four of the units failed to function properly.
Later tests at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health showed that the devices were capable of generating oxygen.
Mr. McCloy has since sued CSE.
The inventory also found 67 air packs made by Draeger Safety, based in Pittsburgh, that lacked temperature sensors and another 15 made by Ocenco Inc., a Wisconsin firm, that had been damaged by heat.
West Virginia data found that of 4,300 CSE SR-100s with temperature indicators, 63 had been removed from service because of indications they had been exposed to excessive temperatures. CSE is the only manufacturer to install a heat indicator on its rescuers. Of 3,600 other models, called the EBA-6.5, about 15 had been taken out of service for the same reason.
Yesterday's memo and summary of the air pack survey findings, also included lengthy rebuttals by CSE, whose president complained that the inspections, performed using testing equipment manufactured by a competitor, was flawed in some of its findings.
One major revelation of the statewide inventory -- which came after OMHST discovered some of its own inspectors were carrying heat-damaged units -- was that some safety inspectors had ignored CSE's own warnings about keeping the units clear of excessive heat.
Scott Shearer, CSE president, noted this in his written response to the report.
"CSE relies on the operators and federal and state mine inspectors to assist the miners in identifying and removing damaged units in accordance with manufacturer inspections," Mr. Shearer wrote. "When OMHST ignores manufacturer warnings on temperature and physical damage resulting in carrying units that are so obviously damaged into mines, OMHST sends the wrong message to the industry."
Mr. Shearer also noted that CSE has incorporated a gauge in its models made since 2004 that shows when it has been exposed to too much heat
Cleaning up coal
The Futurists
Nov 1, 2006
Inc.com
Inc. Staff
From solar panels to clean coal, betting big on the future of energy.
CoalTek zaps out the moisture, making coal burn more efficiently
Most Americans agree that it would be ideal to retire coal as an energy source. But in a country that burns 1.1 billion tons of coal a year and relies on it for more than half of its electricity, the ideal is clearly a long way off. "Incremental change is better than no change at all," says Chris Poirier, president of CoalTek. Founded by an astrophysicist and oil and gas veteran, the Atlanta-based company uses low-frequency, high-power electromagnetic energy to zap the moisture out of low-grade coal, resulting in a sort of designer coal that is more fuel efficient and cleaner burning. This relatively simple process can increase BTU content by up to 33 percent while reducing sulfur dioxide and other impurities by up to 70 percent.
CoalTek kept a low profile until it had a facility up and running. It has that now in Calvert City, Kentucky, where it plans to process two million tons of coal per year. The company also has the distinction of being one of 10 clean energy start-ups chosen for California's $30 million Clean Energy Fund investment portfolio. Right now, the only competition in the coal-processing field is Evergreen Energy, a publicly traded company that produces a similar product using a different process. With a potential market so large, however, competition is not really a concern. "There could be a hundred of us and we would just be scratching the surface," says Poirier.
Get ready for "the TiVo of electricity"
One of the most troubling realities of the power industry is that it has to produce more than we need. There's no way to store electrons for later, so energy providers produce enough power for peak hours virtually 24 hours a day. Gridpoint of Washington, D.C., may have a solution. The company's CEO, 28-year-old Peter Corsell (whose resumé includes a stint with the CIA), calls his product a "thinking" power storage device. It's a refrigerator-size box that does three things. It provides homes and businesses with backup power, for use in an outage or when prices are high. It regulates that power, allowing customers to pick and choose when their house pulls in energy. And it eliminates the complex installations required by wind and solar--when the masses are ready for renewables, they'll have a plug-and-play appliance to link up with. Corsell also likes to call his product "the TiVo of electricity."
Gridpoint's early investors include Esther Dyson and former U.S. Senator Bill Bradley; more recently Goldman Sachs kicked in some $18 million. The big emissions payoff, however, will come when Gridpoint shifts its focus from selling to contractors and busts into the utility market. The plan: Power companies will lease the $10,000 Gridpoint boxes to customers the way Comcast leases its cable box, creating a smart grid of hundreds of thousands of nodes that can draw enough waste out of the system to preclude building more and more smokestacks.
The goal here is to make gasoline, not ethanol, the alternative fuel
Silicon Valley is placing some big bets on renewable energy, and Cilion, an ethanol start-up in Goshen, California, may well be the biggest one yet. Founded last June, the company has raised some $200 million from some of the industry's most powerful players, including venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, and Richard Branson's Virgin Fuels.
Khosla's goal is to make ethanol so prevalent that gasoline becomes an alternative fuel. By January 2008, Cilion plans to have three plants in California that will make ethanol from corn and other feedstocks, and they'll do so in a far more efficient manner than current plants. After the fuel is made, the distiller grain that's left over will be used to feed cows on California ranches. The company is led by CEO Kevin Kruse, former president of Western Milling, a California grain company, which co-founded Cilion in partnership with Khosla Ventures.
Cars in the state already are fueled by gasoline blended with 5.7 percent ethanol, creating demand for 900 million gallons of the fuel per year. Currently, less than 5 percent of that ethanol is produced in California, but Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger recently mandated that the state produce 20 percent of its own biofuels by 2010. When Cilion's plants are up and running, the company, which now has just 10 employees, could meet the governor's goal all by itself.
------------
Call it biosolids, sewage, or sludge. EnerTech calls it a new source of energy
Every year, North American wastewater treatment plants generate some 50 million tons of treated sewage. Municipal governments like to refer to it as "biosolids," but this sludge is primarily human waste matter that generally is used as fertilizer or sent to the landfill. Either way, it threatens to seep into the groundwater and contaminate local water supplies. "We just don't know where a lot of this stuff goes," says Kevin Bolin.
Bolin's company, Atlanta-based EnerTech Environmental, is looking to answer that question by creating an environmentally friendly way to dispose of biosolids--and generate energy in the process. The company's first commercial facility, set to open in 2008 in Rialto, California, will take some 675 tons of biosolids per day from three cities and two counties, apply heat and pressure, and convert the sewage into something called E-fuel, which EnerTech will sell as a clean replacement for coal in industrial settings like power plants and cement kilns, sharing sales revenue with its clients. The potential savings are huge: The city of Riverside projects that its 20-year contract with EnerTech will save $20 million from disposal costs alone.
This is as green as it gets. Slimy, too
At GreenFuel Technologies, it's all about the algae. The company uses the slimy stuff to create biofuels, while at the same time reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The technology captures the carbon dioxide-rich gas emitted from power plants and pumps it through algae-rich water. Aided by photosynthesis, the algae feeds on the carbon dioxide and other pollutants, cutting power plant emissions. And while it does this, the algae doubles its mass every few hours. The technology to turn it into biofuel has existed for some time.
Isaac Berzin founded the company while doing postdoctoral work in chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and GreenFuel, which is based in Cambridge, maintains close ties to the university. In fact, GreenFuel's first working bioreactor was on the roof of an MIT power plant. The company also has projects at power plants in upstate New York and in Arizona. "It's like using corn to make ethanol," says GreenFuel's president, Cary Bullock. "Except you don't have to wait to harvest your crop based on seasons; you can harvest it every day."
GreenFuel is in talks with a number of commercial power plants in the United States and hopes to begin construction on its first large-scale facility by 2008. But power plants are just the beginning; the technology can be deployed at any facility with a large carbon dioxide output--manufacturing plants, wastewater treatment facilities, and more.
The prototypical dot-com speed freak gets some sun
After launching dozens of companies, including NetZero, Citysearch, and WeddingChannel.com, Bill Gross, founder of the technology incubator Idealab, is turning his attention to solar energy. And as usual, he's approaching the problem differently than most of his peers.
Most solar systems use large, flat panels to capture the sun's energy, often using mirrors to concentrate that power. Energy Innovations, which is based in Pasadena, California, and backed by the VC firm Mohr Davidow, is focused on getting more juice out of less surface area. Its crucial design difference: more cheap mirrors, fewer pricey photovoltaic cells. The company's Sunflower 250 system uses a circle of 25 mirrors, each guided by a microprocessor directing two motors, to track the course of the sun as it moves through the day. The light is bounced directly at a thin, wedge-shaped solar panel suspended above the mirrors. The system remains under development, but when completed, it's expected to cost just two-thirds the price of a standard solar-energy system of the same size.
But won't all the dead bodies get in the way?
Imagine submerging 200 windmill turbines in New York's East River. The turbines would generate enough electricity to run 8,000 households through the power of the natural currents and tides. That's the grand plan for New York-based Verdant Power, and the company recently began installing two turbines as a test.
Verdant is using New York as a proving ground, but its bold longer-term goal is to fuel the rapidly expanding economies of countries like China, India, and Brazil. "The technologies have been there, but what's been missing is making them commercially viable," says Trey Taylor, a former marketing executive who co-founded Verdant in 2000. Verdant recently raised funds from Tudor Investment Corp. And the prospect of a new source of clean, renewable energy between Queens and Manhattan has inspired the State of New York to chip in some 30 percent of the cost of the project, along with engineering talent. The 30-employee company is also planning a project in the St. Lawrence River in Ontario, Canada.
------------
Introducing the PowerSheet, a solar panel as thin as foil
It's easy to get behind the idea of solar power, but solar panels themselves have been far from lovable. They're large, rigid, and expensive, and have to be mounted on rooftops or other exposed surfaces. But Nanosolar is making solar technology that anyone can love. Using nanotechnology, the company has created a kind of photovoltaic ink that can convert sunlight into electricity. The ink is coated onto sheets of foil with a printing-press-like device, a manufacturing process that costs a tenth of that of conventional solar cells. The company calls its cells PowerSheets.
Founded in 2002 by Martin Roscheisen, a 37-year-old serial entrepreneur who sold his last company, eGroups, to Yahoo for $450 million, Nanosolar has raised about $100 million from some powerful investors, including Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, and Jeff Skoll, founding president of eBay, as well as top-tier venture capital firms like Benchmark Capital and Mohr Davidow. The company is using that cash to build one of the largest solar cell factories in the world near its headquarters in Palo Alto, California. When completed, the factory will produce a million solar panels a year.
Coal is bad and dirty. Natural gas is nice and clean
What if you could take a lump of coal and transform it, via a nonpolluting process, into clean-burning pipeline-grade natural gas? That's what GreatPoint Energy is attempting at its test facility in Des Plaines, Illinois, and it has attracted a lot of believers, including some leading VC firms, among them Draper Fisher Jurvetson.
Converting coal into gas is not novel. But until now, the process has led to the creation of another dirty fuel called Syngas. GreatPoint's technology, on the other hand, converts coal directly into natural gas, and Andrew Perlman, the firm's CEO, believes the company will be able to produce the gas at roughly half the current market price. The impact could be huge, because coal isn't going away anytime soon. "If you want to do something in the next hundred years to deal with global warming and air emissions and mercury pollution and acid rain, you have to clean up coal," Perlman says. "You can't just wish it away."
How to solve the world's energy problems? Easy. Just change the hydrogen atom
Randell Mills is thinking big by thinking small. Really small. The founder and CEO of BlackLight Power, in Cranbury, New Jersey, is rethinking the hydrogen atom--and if he's right, he just might solve all of the world's energy problems.
This is heady, obscure stuff, and more than a little controversial. According to conventional physics, whenever an electron moves closer to a nucleus, energy is released. But the single electron in a hydrogen atom, physicists have long agreed, cannot get any closer to its nucleus. Mills argues that this is not the case. When you heat hydrogen into a plasma, and add a catalyst like potassium or argon gas, he says, you create a chemical reaction that forces the electron sphere to shrink, giving off up to 1,000 times more energy than conventional combustion. That means you could create a highly efficient energy source from mere water.
Most physicists are highly skeptical. But some chemists and engineers are intrigued. And so are some major financial players-- including Neil Moskowitz, CFO of Credit Suisse, and Michael Jordan, chairman of Electronic Data Systems--who have invested nearly $50 million in BlackLight. The payoff could be a ways off. Mills has been working on this for 15 years and estimates that it will be at least another two years before anything hits the market. It's about as big a long shot as there is. But if Mills is right, the upside is limitless.
The Futurists
Nov 1, 2006
Inc.com
Inc. Staff
From solar panels to clean coal, betting big on the future of energy.
CoalTek zaps out the moisture, making coal burn more efficiently
Most Americans agree that it would be ideal to retire coal as an energy source. But in a country that burns 1.1 billion tons of coal a year and relies on it for more than half of its electricity, the ideal is clearly a long way off. "Incremental change is better than no change at all," says Chris Poirier, president of CoalTek. Founded by an astrophysicist and oil and gas veteran, the Atlanta-based company uses low-frequency, high-power electromagnetic energy to zap the moisture out of low-grade coal, resulting in a sort of designer coal that is more fuel efficient and cleaner burning. This relatively simple process can increase BTU content by up to 33 percent while reducing sulfur dioxide and other impurities by up to 70 percent.
CoalTek kept a low profile until it had a facility up and running. It has that now in Calvert City, Kentucky, where it plans to process two million tons of coal per year. The company also has the distinction of being one of 10 clean energy start-ups chosen for California's $30 million Clean Energy Fund investment portfolio. Right now, the only competition in the coal-processing field is Evergreen Energy, a publicly traded company that produces a similar product using a different process. With a potential market so large, however, competition is not really a concern. "There could be a hundred of us and we would just be scratching the surface," says Poirier.
Get ready for "the TiVo of electricity"
One of the most troubling realities of the power industry is that it has to produce more than we need. There's no way to store electrons for later, so energy providers produce enough power for peak hours virtually 24 hours a day. Gridpoint of Washington, D.C., may have a solution. The company's CEO, 28-year-old Peter Corsell (whose resumé includes a stint with the CIA), calls his product a "thinking" power storage device. It's a refrigerator-size box that does three things. It provides homes and businesses with backup power, for use in an outage or when prices are high. It regulates that power, allowing customers to pick and choose when their house pulls in energy. And it eliminates the complex installations required by wind and solar--when the masses are ready for renewables, they'll have a plug-and-play appliance to link up with. Corsell also likes to call his product "the TiVo of electricity."
Gridpoint's early investors include Esther Dyson and former U.S. Senator Bill Bradley; more recently Goldman Sachs kicked in some $18 million. The big emissions payoff, however, will come when Gridpoint shifts its focus from selling to contractors and busts into the utility market. The plan: Power companies will lease the $10,000 Gridpoint boxes to customers the way Comcast leases its cable box, creating a smart grid of hundreds of thousands of nodes that can draw enough waste out of the system to preclude building more and more smokestacks.
The goal here is to make gasoline, not ethanol, the alternative fuel
Silicon Valley is placing some big bets on renewable energy, and Cilion, an ethanol start-up in Goshen, California, may well be the biggest one yet. Founded last June, the company has raised some $200 million from some of the industry's most powerful players, including venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, and Richard Branson's Virgin Fuels.
Khosla's goal is to make ethanol so prevalent that gasoline becomes an alternative fuel. By January 2008, Cilion plans to have three plants in California that will make ethanol from corn and other feedstocks, and they'll do so in a far more efficient manner than current plants. After the fuel is made, the distiller grain that's left over will be used to feed cows on California ranches. The company is led by CEO Kevin Kruse, former president of Western Milling, a California grain company, which co-founded Cilion in partnership with Khosla Ventures.
Cars in the state already are fueled by gasoline blended with 5.7 percent ethanol, creating demand for 900 million gallons of the fuel per year. Currently, less than 5 percent of that ethanol is produced in California, but Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger recently mandated that the state produce 20 percent of its own biofuels by 2010. When Cilion's plants are up and running, the company, which now has just 10 employees, could meet the governor's goal all by itself.
------------
Call it biosolids, sewage, or sludge. EnerTech calls it a new source of energy
Every year, North American wastewater treatment plants generate some 50 million tons of treated sewage. Municipal governments like to refer to it as "biosolids," but this sludge is primarily human waste matter that generally is used as fertilizer or sent to the landfill. Either way, it threatens to seep into the groundwater and contaminate local water supplies. "We just don't know where a lot of this stuff goes," says Kevin Bolin.
Bolin's company, Atlanta-based EnerTech Environmental, is looking to answer that question by creating an environmentally friendly way to dispose of biosolids--and generate energy in the process. The company's first commercial facility, set to open in 2008 in Rialto, California, will take some 675 tons of biosolids per day from three cities and two counties, apply heat and pressure, and convert the sewage into something called E-fuel, which EnerTech will sell as a clean replacement for coal in industrial settings like power plants and cement kilns, sharing sales revenue with its clients. The potential savings are huge: The city of Riverside projects that its 20-year contract with EnerTech will save $20 million from disposal costs alone.
This is as green as it gets. Slimy, too
At GreenFuel Technologies, it's all about the algae. The company uses the slimy stuff to create biofuels, while at the same time reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The technology captures the carbon dioxide-rich gas emitted from power plants and pumps it through algae-rich water. Aided by photosynthesis, the algae feeds on the carbon dioxide and other pollutants, cutting power plant emissions. And while it does this, the algae doubles its mass every few hours. The technology to turn it into biofuel has existed for some time.
Isaac Berzin founded the company while doing postdoctoral work in chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and GreenFuel, which is based in Cambridge, maintains close ties to the university. In fact, GreenFuel's first working bioreactor was on the roof of an MIT power plant. The company also has projects at power plants in upstate New York and in Arizona. "It's like using corn to make ethanol," says GreenFuel's president, Cary Bullock. "Except you don't have to wait to harvest your crop based on seasons; you can harvest it every day."
GreenFuel is in talks with a number of commercial power plants in the United States and hopes to begin construction on its first large-scale facility by 2008. But power plants are just the beginning; the technology can be deployed at any facility with a large carbon dioxide output--manufacturing plants, wastewater treatment facilities, and more.
The prototypical dot-com speed freak gets some sun
After launching dozens of companies, including NetZero, Citysearch, and WeddingChannel.com, Bill Gross, founder of the technology incubator Idealab, is turning his attention to solar energy. And as usual, he's approaching the problem differently than most of his peers.
Most solar systems use large, flat panels to capture the sun's energy, often using mirrors to concentrate that power. Energy Innovations, which is based in Pasadena, California, and backed by the VC firm Mohr Davidow, is focused on getting more juice out of less surface area. Its crucial design difference: more cheap mirrors, fewer pricey photovoltaic cells. The company's Sunflower 250 system uses a circle of 25 mirrors, each guided by a microprocessor directing two motors, to track the course of the sun as it moves through the day. The light is bounced directly at a thin, wedge-shaped solar panel suspended above the mirrors. The system remains under development, but when completed, it's expected to cost just two-thirds the price of a standard solar-energy system of the same size.
But won't all the dead bodies get in the way?
Imagine submerging 200 windmill turbines in New York's East River. The turbines would generate enough electricity to run 8,000 households through the power of the natural currents and tides. That's the grand plan for New York-based Verdant Power, and the company recently began installing two turbines as a test.
Verdant is using New York as a proving ground, but its bold longer-term goal is to fuel the rapidly expanding economies of countries like China, India, and Brazil. "The technologies have been there, but what's been missing is making them commercially viable," says Trey Taylor, a former marketing executive who co-founded Verdant in 2000. Verdant recently raised funds from Tudor Investment Corp. And the prospect of a new source of clean, renewable energy between Queens and Manhattan has inspired the State of New York to chip in some 30 percent of the cost of the project, along with engineering talent. The 30-employee company is also planning a project in the St. Lawrence River in Ontario, Canada.
------------
Introducing the PowerSheet, a solar panel as thin as foil
It's easy to get behind the idea of solar power, but solar panels themselves have been far from lovable. They're large, rigid, and expensive, and have to be mounted on rooftops or other exposed surfaces. But Nanosolar is making solar technology that anyone can love. Using nanotechnology, the company has created a kind of photovoltaic ink that can convert sunlight into electricity. The ink is coated onto sheets of foil with a printing-press-like device, a manufacturing process that costs a tenth of that of conventional solar cells. The company calls its cells PowerSheets.
Founded in 2002 by Martin Roscheisen, a 37-year-old serial entrepreneur who sold his last company, eGroups, to Yahoo for $450 million, Nanosolar has raised about $100 million from some powerful investors, including Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, and Jeff Skoll, founding president of eBay, as well as top-tier venture capital firms like Benchmark Capital and Mohr Davidow. The company is using that cash to build one of the largest solar cell factories in the world near its headquarters in Palo Alto, California. When completed, the factory will produce a million solar panels a year.
Coal is bad and dirty. Natural gas is nice and clean
What if you could take a lump of coal and transform it, via a nonpolluting process, into clean-burning pipeline-grade natural gas? That's what GreatPoint Energy is attempting at its test facility in Des Plaines, Illinois, and it has attracted a lot of believers, including some leading VC firms, among them Draper Fisher Jurvetson.
Converting coal into gas is not novel. But until now, the process has led to the creation of another dirty fuel called Syngas. GreatPoint's technology, on the other hand, converts coal directly into natural gas, and Andrew Perlman, the firm's CEO, believes the company will be able to produce the gas at roughly half the current market price. The impact could be huge, because coal isn't going away anytime soon. "If you want to do something in the next hundred years to deal with global warming and air emissions and mercury pollution and acid rain, you have to clean up coal," Perlman says. "You can't just wish it away."
How to solve the world's energy problems? Easy. Just change the hydrogen atom
Randell Mills is thinking big by thinking small. Really small. The founder and CEO of BlackLight Power, in Cranbury, New Jersey, is rethinking the hydrogen atom--and if he's right, he just might solve all of the world's energy problems.
This is heady, obscure stuff, and more than a little controversial. According to conventional physics, whenever an electron moves closer to a nucleus, energy is released. But the single electron in a hydrogen atom, physicists have long agreed, cannot get any closer to its nucleus. Mills argues that this is not the case. When you heat hydrogen into a plasma, and add a catalyst like potassium or argon gas, he says, you create a chemical reaction that forces the electron sphere to shrink, giving off up to 1,000 times more energy than conventional combustion. That means you could create a highly efficient energy source from mere water.
Most physicists are highly skeptical. But some chemists and engineers are intrigued. And so are some major financial players-- including Neil Moskowitz, CFO of Credit Suisse, and Michael Jordan, chairman of Electronic Data Systems--who have invested nearly $50 million in BlackLight. The payoff could be a ways off. Mills has been working on this for 15 years and estimates that it will be at least another two years before anything hits the market. It's about as big a long shot as there is. But if Mills is right, the upside is limitless.
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Its getting better
Posted on Tue, Oct. 31, 2006
Kentucky has new stake in power plant
Louisville-based E.ON U.S. joins group governing FutureGen plant
By Andy MeadHERALD-LEADER STAFF WRITER
Kentucky missed out on an experimental near-zero-emissions power plant called FutureGen, but a Kentucky company will announce today that it's buying a piece of the action.
E.ON U.S., which owns Louisville Gas and Electric and Kentucky Utilities, will put up $25 million to become a FutureGen Alliance member.
Although the plant will probably be built in Texas or Illinois, company officials say lessons learned from the pilot project eventually will mean cleaner air in Kentucky.
"We will be able to take the technology from it and apply it to our own facilities," said Vic Steffieri, the chairman, CEO and president of E.ON U.S.
The technology might be retrofitted onto existing plants or used to build new plants, he said.
The company has not yet decided whether it will ask the Kentucky Public Service Commission for permission to pass some or all of its FutureGen investment to its customers in the state, or even how the commission would react to such a proposal, Steffieri said.
FutureGen is a non-profit partnership of 10 international power companies and the U.S. Department of Energy.
E.ON's $25 million investment will make it the 11th member of the partnership. The Department of Energy is putting up $700 million.
The FutureGen plant will generate 275 megawatts -- enough electricity to supply 150,000 average homes.
What makes it different from existing coal-fired plants is how it will turn coal into electricity, and what will happen to the pollution produced along the way.
The coal won't be burned; it will be heated under pressure and converted into hydrogen and carbon monoxide gases.
They will react with steam to produce more hydrogen and carbon dioxide. The hydrogen will be used to generate electricity.
The carbon dioxide, which today's power plants send up smokestacks, will be concentrated and pumped deep underground. Also known as CO2, it is a significant contributor to global warming.
The FutureGen Web site says 90 percent of the carbon dioxide will be captured initially, and all eventually will.
Sulfur and ash will be captured and sold for commercial use.
Kentucky was one of several states vying for the plant. State officials were touting a site near Henderson in Western Kentucky.
Kentucky was eliminated in July. Only sites in Texas and Illinois are still in the running.
Reach Andy Mead at 231-3319 or 1-800-950-6397, Ext. 3319; or at amead@herald-leader.com.
© 2006 Lexington Herald-Leader and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.http://www.kentucky.com
Posted on Tue, Oct. 31, 2006
Kentucky has new stake in power plant
Louisville-based E.ON U.S. joins group governing FutureGen plant
By Andy MeadHERALD-LEADER STAFF WRITER
Kentucky missed out on an experimental near-zero-emissions power plant called FutureGen, but a Kentucky company will announce today that it's buying a piece of the action.
E.ON U.S., which owns Louisville Gas and Electric and Kentucky Utilities, will put up $25 million to become a FutureGen Alliance member.
Although the plant will probably be built in Texas or Illinois, company officials say lessons learned from the pilot project eventually will mean cleaner air in Kentucky.
"We will be able to take the technology from it and apply it to our own facilities," said Vic Steffieri, the chairman, CEO and president of E.ON U.S.
The technology might be retrofitted onto existing plants or used to build new plants, he said.
The company has not yet decided whether it will ask the Kentucky Public Service Commission for permission to pass some or all of its FutureGen investment to its customers in the state, or even how the commission would react to such a proposal, Steffieri said.
FutureGen is a non-profit partnership of 10 international power companies and the U.S. Department of Energy.
E.ON's $25 million investment will make it the 11th member of the partnership. The Department of Energy is putting up $700 million.
The FutureGen plant will generate 275 megawatts -- enough electricity to supply 150,000 average homes.
What makes it different from existing coal-fired plants is how it will turn coal into electricity, and what will happen to the pollution produced along the way.
The coal won't be burned; it will be heated under pressure and converted into hydrogen and carbon monoxide gases.
They will react with steam to produce more hydrogen and carbon dioxide. The hydrogen will be used to generate electricity.
The carbon dioxide, which today's power plants send up smokestacks, will be concentrated and pumped deep underground. Also known as CO2, it is a significant contributor to global warming.
The FutureGen Web site says 90 percent of the carbon dioxide will be captured initially, and all eventually will.
Sulfur and ash will be captured and sold for commercial use.
Kentucky was one of several states vying for the plant. State officials were touting a site near Henderson in Western Kentucky.
Kentucky was eliminated in July. Only sites in Texas and Illinois are still in the running.
Reach Andy Mead at 231-3319 or 1-800-950-6397, Ext. 3319; or at amead@herald-leader.com.
© 2006 Lexington Herald-Leader and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.http://www.kentucky.com
Warning reading this article can really mess you up if you are a person not from the mountains and believes and accepts things as truth, when told by a person who says they are representing themselves as a person who knows right and wants to show you right, and you should listen and believe. You should believe because they are cloaked in a religious garment or have a white collar around their neck. Or they take people on environmental tours showing them things they believe harmful to the earth and mankind, and they want to get good folks to believe it also. But when you look a little longer at what these self appointed people who "feel" (because they couldn’t be thinking) they know best. They "feel" we who live here are all too stupid to know what is good for us and what is not. What is right and what is wrong! Any good hearted person, who will listen to these people for a spell, would come to the conclusion that all coal mining is bad and we need to stop it.
The only problem is these people who are pushing anti mining present half truths and right out lies. That’s a fine way to represent and hide behind two good causes. First it was the environmental movement that was taken hostage and now its religion. Today as evidenced by the article below where religious dogma is being used to pitch the lefty point across to un-suspecting and very trusting and for the most part good folks who might go to the Smokies once a year to experience the mountain life. Traffic jams and tourist traps and all. But folks who don’t have a clue nonetheless about central Appalachia and the topography we have here. The people you will read about below are those who would take this tourist out and show them active mine sites. Show them the dust, the big earth moving machines, the black coal that makes it all worthwhile. Then they leave and let them assume the land where an active surface mine is operating will stay as a industrial site with no grass or trees, forever a brown and black moonscape, where nothing will ever grow again. NOT TRUE. Liar liar, pants on fire. Shame, shame.
When we have recovered the coal and thus the energy that America demands and requires to maintain our current quality of life we reclaim to land in the name of nature and about 5000 state and federal laws. We are shaping the land back after its been mined, in most cases into dynamic land that is different and different in a better way. A place where things can now occur like homes, farming, shopping, and economic development. God has allowed us to change it and make it better. He has given us the knowledge to make houses warm at night and allowed people not to be required to be burning coal and wood in individual polluting home stoves and business establishments like we did a generation ago. To take it to central points where it can be converted into electrical power in a much cleaner manner with huge scrubbers and air pollution controls. There are also laws (a lot of laws) that insure the land is restored to a productive state. Remember that the lefty point of view hates that word, "productive". What we here in the mountains consider productive is newly developed level land as a results of surface mining where we can build shopping centers, schools, hospitals, banks etc... They consider this bad stuff. But wait they desire these things where they come from but it’s somehow bad when we build these things on former mine sites. Of course they drive back to their suburb or college campus to a warm heated home or apartment, heated at least 50% with coal. They enjoy a hot bath or shower that night with the water made hot with a couple of pounds of coal back at the electrical generation plant. I guess Granny would call that being a hypocrite. They use about 3 pounds of coal on their computers to order a book. They enjoy a ride in a car made with steel made from coal. Yet they come here and tell us to stop mining coal. When it’s their demand for it that makes us mine it in the first place.
I tell you what! If all the people who come in here and go on the "protest coal tour" would start first by looking in the mirror and change their evil ways of using electricity and give up the high quality of life they now enjoy, coal miners will pack err up by Friday and find new jobs. If you could bring those same people back in just a few short years after the mined site after it had been reclaimed they would not feel the same way they do after the short brain-washing session you will read about in the article below. If you could bring them back to show them the level land created in an area where the number one problem to economic development is the lack of level land that things can be built on and things can be grown like the grapes vines at the site in Wise County where wines are fermented named after local seams of coal. Or they would see the cattle on rolling fields where steep slopes existed before mining. It would shock those good folks coming in here to have their brains-washed if the facts were ever to surface.
Facts like VMA has agreements with groups like the National Wild Turkey Foundation (NWTF) that ask VMA coal producing and reclaiming members to re-plant the land with a seed mix of grass and shrubs purchase from and provided by the NWTF that encourage the wild turkey and other wildlife as well such as deer, game birds, and numerous other wild animals. It would shock them to know that anyone here in the mountains who hunt will tell you the most games are located on reclaimed mined lands.
One of the reasons for this for example is the needs of the wild turkey. They need water and a forest sure, but did you know they also need grassy areas where they can find the bugs they need to survive as well as feed their young? A reclaimed mine site offers this. This helps explain the comeback of the wild turkey in the mountain region of Southwest Virginia where they were extinct before the late 60's and early 70's when surface mining began in full force and there were no reclaimation laws that required anything to be re-planted at all and they still reclaimed themselves and brought the turkey back as well as deer to the region. Thanks to the newly open long benches ( and where the now unwelcome Autumn Olive) and open grass areas could thrive and create food for wildlife. We in the industry must read articles like the one below in order to face these people who would hide behind things like religion to attack us and the mining industry. They have already high jacked the true environmental movement away from the true environmentalist, like me and the thousands of good people who work in permitting and environmental areas in the mining industry who deal with environmental issues on a regular basis who live, hunt and fish here, as well as drink the water for goodness sake. We care people! We are as concerned about the earth and are as religious as these would be self appointed do good'ers. We just don’t try and put others down with it.
Who are these people? Well to start out with they are not elected to anything and represent no one in the community. They are a small group of people who support each other in their delusional world. They just look for groups who will listen to their dogma and delusion. They get good folks from "off" as Granny use to call them, bring them in here and preach their version of the Bible then send them back to churches all over the country to repeat the half truths and lies. They try and take the higher ground but I am telling you brothers, their version of higher ground is built on and is nothing but sand and it will not stand the test of truth. God put us here. When Adam and Eve took a bite of "the apple" from the tree of knowledge we were off to the races. Today we use technology to make the production of electricity these good folks demand cleaner and all our lives better. Really that’s what it boils down to. We got better homes, autos, education, schools etc... As a result of using knowledge to make the world a better place for us all man and nature. We have increased the span of life in one generation so as we now live one third longer than good folks did one generation ago. Stopping development and being hypocritical is not the answer good folks. Good folks who mean well and have all the good intentions in the world. Know the truth and the truth shall set you free. You coal miners hold your nose and read this just so you will know what they are selling to good folks who don’t live here and don’t have a clue as to what’s going on here. But are willing to listen to those who would call themselves religious people. Whilst all the time spreading a lie and encouraging others to do the same. I think Grand pappy would call them suckers.
You young kids in college who take these tours or come to protest us on the weekends read this wake up and don’t follow false know it all's.
My thots and comments are in this red though out the artical where I thot there a need. Man blogging is fun.......
October 28, 2006Taking On a Coal Mining Practice as a Matter of Faith
By NEELA BANERJEE
HALE GAP, Va. -
The windswept ridge that Sharman Chapman-Crane hiked to on arecent fall afternoon is the kind of place, she said, that she normally would avoid. From there, she could see what she loved about Appalachia and what it had lost, and she wanted her visitors to see it, too.The old rounded peaks of the mountains encircled the ridge, dense with trees smudged red and gold. (they always start with this romantic notion on the Appalachian Mountains, this neaqrly always sets the scene) But in the middle of the peaks, several stood stripped bare and chopped up, a result of an increasingly common and controversial coal mining practice called mountaintop removal.( ah here is where they leave out anything about reclaimation to a higher and greater use) "Doesn't it say in Scripture, 'Who can weigh a mountain, measure a basket of earth?' " Ms. Chapman-Crane said, recalling descriptions of God'somnipotence in Isaiah 40:12. "Well, only God can. (I guess you ignore what you want to in human development that has made all our lives a lot more easy thru the years and just pick on mining and us coal miners ) But now, the coal companies seem to be able to do it, too."Ms. Chapman-Crane, her colleagues at the Mennonite Central Committee Appalachia and other Appalachian Christians are trying to halt mountaintop removal, and at the heart of their work, they say, is their faith. (I would guess more their hate of working people and the ability God has give man to make it a better world) They are part of an awakening among religious people to environmental issues, said Paul Gorman, executive director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, an inter religious alliance. Increasingly,religious people across denominations are organizing around local issues, like preventing a landfill, preserving wetlands and changing mining. (and very ofetn not having one fact but just pure emotion )"People of faith are thinking afresh about human place and purpose in the greater web of life," Mr. Gorman said. "They are asking, What does it mean to be present in a crisis ( they need to have a crisis and they need fear to make their porject work,. this is a tried and true form of explotation of the people of our region by outside the region do gooders who think they mean well but really are so out of touch they think squirrels aint made for eating) of God's creation made by God's children?" (This is their attempt to say they are "of God" and superior to us un's here in the woods sort of like savages I reckon if we dont agree with them) Although Christian environmental activists (activists- this is their word for themselves and also makes them feel better than us mere mortals who just work all day long and dont have the time to invent these evils they perceive we are doing. In reality they have no clue to what is really going on ) speak out against mountaintopremoval at different levels of government, many believe that showing the practice's toll (but only one side which is why I am here doing this to show you the reader the other side) will persuade others to join them in seeking stricter regulation of it, (as if the thousands of current laws and regulations just are not enough) if not an outright ban. A new group, Christians for the Mountains, urges religious people to take upmountaintop removal "as a spiritual issue," and it has made a DVD that it isdistributing to churches and individuals, said Allen Johnson, an evangelical Christian and a founder of the group. The Rev. John Rausch, director of the Catholic (Catholic's are the best at this because guilt is a major part of the dogma and the Catholic church has the market cornered on guilt, well almost. I could be wrong I suppose others use guilt also. But I grew up a Baptist and fear was out big thing) Committee of Appalachia, has led tours of mountaintop removal sites since 1994. Mr. Rausch estimates that 400 people have taken his tour. They learn of the tours by word of mouth or from their churches, pay a few hundred dollars to stay in simple accommodations, ( I knew a donation need would show up sooner or later) hike several miles through forests and mined lands and talk to people whose lives have been affected by mountaintop removal. ( This means to people who dont work and dont want anyone else to) The Mennonite Central Committee Appalachia, based in Whitesburg, Ky., gave its first tour in October, focusing on a corner of southeastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia rich in coal and diverse forests.On the second morning of the four-day tour, the trip's leaders, Ms.Chapman-Crane and the Rev. Duane Beachey, marched their three-member group up the mile-long trail to Bad Branch Falls. Poplars, beeches, hemlocks and magnolias thatched together a canopy above the trail, and the rain on the leaves made a soft ticking sound. Wild ginseng (no way them mountain boys would leave ginseng beside a trail like that, no that would have been dug up long ago. this make me question even more the writer true sense of realism and shows me the un-facts in the artical) and wintergreen lined the path. Cottage-size boulders leaned forward over a rushing stream below the trail."Not every place on the mountains has waterfalls like Bad Branch," Ms.Chapman-Crane said. "But this is pretty much what it's like on the mountains here. (another misrepresentation) The forests of the Appalachian range are like a northern rain forest."Mary Yoder, who had volunteered to come on the trip for her congregation,Columbus Mennonite Church in Columbus, Ohio, asked, "So this is the kind of place that gets blown up in mountaintop removal? "Mr. Chapman-Crane replied, "This is what would be lost, is lost, when they blast a mountaintop.(not only that but they kill Babi and eat him) "The United States is rich with coal, and mountaintop removal has begun to replace underground mining in Appalachia as the preferred method of extraction (another misrepresentation or lie whichever you prefer) because of its efficiency and lower cost. Mountaintop removal involves leveling mountains with explosives to reach seams of coal. The debris that had once been the mountain is usually dumped by bulldozers and huge trucks into neighboring valleys, (creating leval land where there is none and the reason all the development has been beside the creek thus encouraging more stream pollution) burying streams (another lie, most are ditches that only hold water when it rains).The coal industry asserts that mountaintop removal is a safer way to removecoal than sending miners underground and that without it, companies would have to close mines and lay off workers. (duh if you shut down the mine people go home and are then out of work) Luke Popovich, a spokesman for the National Mining Association, a coal lobbying group, said that by fighting mountaintop removal religious groups might find their priorities colliding."They find themselves in a difficult position," Mr. Popovich said, "because they're expressing support for those who purport to protect nature, and, at the same time, that activism carries implications for the human side of the natural equation. Human welfare depends on the rational exploitation of nature.( I dont think i would have used those words but ok ) "Christianity runs wide and deep in Appalachia. At the Courthouse Cafe in Whitesburg, Mr. Beachey explained that as a Christian concern for his neighbors (whom he must think are too stoopit to make decisions on their own) drove his desire to rein in mountaintop removal. But as in much ofAppalachia, pastors and churchgoers here are reluctant to stir up trouble:many work for coal companies, (no kidding who would have thunk it? The other side is mentioned here but no real attempt is made by the writer to talk to any of theswe strange creatures) or the people next to them in the pew do. Others believe stopping mountaintop removal would eliminate the few jobs that remain. (6000 in virginia and they pay on average over $50,000.00 per year) Many understand their faith differently than Christian environmentalists do. (no kidding) One night, Darrell Caudill and several friends gathered to play their guitars for the environmental tour and sing traditional songs and hymns. Mr.Caudill, 57, works for a coal company and believes in being a good steward of the earth. (which is the way the thousands of good people feel who work in the mining industry feel about the work they do, they see themselves as good steward's of the land and try to make good decisions in respect of that) . But to him, he said, being a Christian means being saved and spreading the Gospel. There is no tension between being committed to his faith and supporting mountaintop removal."Why did God produce coal then and put it underground?" said Mr. Caudill,who attends a non-denominational evangelical church. "He produced things that we need on this earth. Without coal, you wouldn't have the warmth and light you have right now." (thats the other side folks in the entire artical you got what maybe three lines telling the other side in a very intentional weak argument ) Late in the trip, the tour group drove Lucious Thompson, 63, a former coalminer, to the horseshoe of peaks above McRoberts, where he lives. The peaks have been leveled. The woods where he had hunted are gone. (you must have the destruction of Eden to make the guilt trip stick ) The new grass on the new plateaus barely clings to the soil, (there is a violation of one of the thousands of laws dealing the reclaiming of the land to restore nature to its orginial or improved state) which means that McRoberts often floods now after hard rains, he said."I've been flooded three times since they started working on themountaintop," Mr. Thompson said. He talked of neighbors whose house foundations had been cracked because of the daily blasting, (but he left out the fact that a pre-blast inspection is performed on any house near the mine site and if there is any thing broken then there is a record of what it was like before and the law says it must be fixed or replaced if damaged, thats the law) of a pond lost to sludge and of respiratory ailments because of the coal dust flying from the coal trucks."The coal company says it's God's will," ( I dont remember seeing this on any company logo or in any official press release) he said. "Well, God ain't ever run no bulldozer. ( I guess you could say he is saying "God loves me but he cant stand you" ) "People like Mr. Thompson and the woods and mountains of Appalachia seemed to make the point the tour's organizers hoped for. After the tour, Ms. Yoder returned to Columbus to ( to spread the stoopitiy to others) tell her congregation of about 200 what she had learned. "My comment to the church was that I would do the tour with an open mind, (sure you did) "she said, "and my conclusion is there is no room for mountaintop removal in our country. (Oh I still want my power to come on each day when I flip the light switch and I have no other solution as to how to do that but what the heck I am just not that smart to see I cant have it both ways and that my electricity must be produced by some method. i prefer to just think it comes from the wall) "HomeWorld U.S. N.Y. / Region Business Technology Science Health Sports OpinionArts Style Travel Job Market Real Estate Automobiles Back to TopCopyright 2006 The New York Times Company
The only problem is these people who are pushing anti mining present half truths and right out lies. That’s a fine way to represent and hide behind two good causes. First it was the environmental movement that was taken hostage and now its religion. Today as evidenced by the article below where religious dogma is being used to pitch the lefty point across to un-suspecting and very trusting and for the most part good folks who might go to the Smokies once a year to experience the mountain life. Traffic jams and tourist traps and all. But folks who don’t have a clue nonetheless about central Appalachia and the topography we have here. The people you will read about below are those who would take this tourist out and show them active mine sites. Show them the dust, the big earth moving machines, the black coal that makes it all worthwhile. Then they leave and let them assume the land where an active surface mine is operating will stay as a industrial site with no grass or trees, forever a brown and black moonscape, where nothing will ever grow again. NOT TRUE. Liar liar, pants on fire. Shame, shame.
When we have recovered the coal and thus the energy that America demands and requires to maintain our current quality of life we reclaim to land in the name of nature and about 5000 state and federal laws. We are shaping the land back after its been mined, in most cases into dynamic land that is different and different in a better way. A place where things can now occur like homes, farming, shopping, and economic development. God has allowed us to change it and make it better. He has given us the knowledge to make houses warm at night and allowed people not to be required to be burning coal and wood in individual polluting home stoves and business establishments like we did a generation ago. To take it to central points where it can be converted into electrical power in a much cleaner manner with huge scrubbers and air pollution controls. There are also laws (a lot of laws) that insure the land is restored to a productive state. Remember that the lefty point of view hates that word, "productive". What we here in the mountains consider productive is newly developed level land as a results of surface mining where we can build shopping centers, schools, hospitals, banks etc... They consider this bad stuff. But wait they desire these things where they come from but it’s somehow bad when we build these things on former mine sites. Of course they drive back to their suburb or college campus to a warm heated home or apartment, heated at least 50% with coal. They enjoy a hot bath or shower that night with the water made hot with a couple of pounds of coal back at the electrical generation plant. I guess Granny would call that being a hypocrite. They use about 3 pounds of coal on their computers to order a book. They enjoy a ride in a car made with steel made from coal. Yet they come here and tell us to stop mining coal. When it’s their demand for it that makes us mine it in the first place.
I tell you what! If all the people who come in here and go on the "protest coal tour" would start first by looking in the mirror and change their evil ways of using electricity and give up the high quality of life they now enjoy, coal miners will pack err up by Friday and find new jobs. If you could bring those same people back in just a few short years after the mined site after it had been reclaimed they would not feel the same way they do after the short brain-washing session you will read about in the article below. If you could bring them back to show them the level land created in an area where the number one problem to economic development is the lack of level land that things can be built on and things can be grown like the grapes vines at the site in Wise County where wines are fermented named after local seams of coal. Or they would see the cattle on rolling fields where steep slopes existed before mining. It would shock those good folks coming in here to have their brains-washed if the facts were ever to surface.
Facts like VMA has agreements with groups like the National Wild Turkey Foundation (NWTF) that ask VMA coal producing and reclaiming members to re-plant the land with a seed mix of grass and shrubs purchase from and provided by the NWTF that encourage the wild turkey and other wildlife as well such as deer, game birds, and numerous other wild animals. It would shock them to know that anyone here in the mountains who hunt will tell you the most games are located on reclaimed mined lands.
One of the reasons for this for example is the needs of the wild turkey. They need water and a forest sure, but did you know they also need grassy areas where they can find the bugs they need to survive as well as feed their young? A reclaimed mine site offers this. This helps explain the comeback of the wild turkey in the mountain region of Southwest Virginia where they were extinct before the late 60's and early 70's when surface mining began in full force and there were no reclaimation laws that required anything to be re-planted at all and they still reclaimed themselves and brought the turkey back as well as deer to the region. Thanks to the newly open long benches ( and where the now unwelcome Autumn Olive) and open grass areas could thrive and create food for wildlife. We in the industry must read articles like the one below in order to face these people who would hide behind things like religion to attack us and the mining industry. They have already high jacked the true environmental movement away from the true environmentalist, like me and the thousands of good people who work in permitting and environmental areas in the mining industry who deal with environmental issues on a regular basis who live, hunt and fish here, as well as drink the water for goodness sake. We care people! We are as concerned about the earth and are as religious as these would be self appointed do good'ers. We just don’t try and put others down with it.
Who are these people? Well to start out with they are not elected to anything and represent no one in the community. They are a small group of people who support each other in their delusional world. They just look for groups who will listen to their dogma and delusion. They get good folks from "off" as Granny use to call them, bring them in here and preach their version of the Bible then send them back to churches all over the country to repeat the half truths and lies. They try and take the higher ground but I am telling you brothers, their version of higher ground is built on and is nothing but sand and it will not stand the test of truth. God put us here. When Adam and Eve took a bite of "the apple" from the tree of knowledge we were off to the races. Today we use technology to make the production of electricity these good folks demand cleaner and all our lives better. Really that’s what it boils down to. We got better homes, autos, education, schools etc... As a result of using knowledge to make the world a better place for us all man and nature. We have increased the span of life in one generation so as we now live one third longer than good folks did one generation ago. Stopping development and being hypocritical is not the answer good folks. Good folks who mean well and have all the good intentions in the world. Know the truth and the truth shall set you free. You coal miners hold your nose and read this just so you will know what they are selling to good folks who don’t live here and don’t have a clue as to what’s going on here. But are willing to listen to those who would call themselves religious people. Whilst all the time spreading a lie and encouraging others to do the same. I think Grand pappy would call them suckers.
You young kids in college who take these tours or come to protest us on the weekends read this wake up and don’t follow false know it all's.
My thots and comments are in this red though out the artical where I thot there a need. Man blogging is fun.......
October 28, 2006Taking On a Coal Mining Practice as a Matter of Faith
By NEELA BANERJEE
HALE GAP, Va. -
The windswept ridge that Sharman Chapman-Crane hiked to on arecent fall afternoon is the kind of place, she said, that she normally would avoid. From there, she could see what she loved about Appalachia and what it had lost, and she wanted her visitors to see it, too.The old rounded peaks of the mountains encircled the ridge, dense with trees smudged red and gold. (they always start with this romantic notion on the Appalachian Mountains, this neaqrly always sets the scene) But in the middle of the peaks, several stood stripped bare and chopped up, a result of an increasingly common and controversial coal mining practice called mountaintop removal.( ah here is where they leave out anything about reclaimation to a higher and greater use) "Doesn't it say in Scripture, 'Who can weigh a mountain, measure a basket of earth?' " Ms. Chapman-Crane said, recalling descriptions of God'somnipotence in Isaiah 40:12. "Well, only God can. (I guess you ignore what you want to in human development that has made all our lives a lot more easy thru the years and just pick on mining and us coal miners ) But now, the coal companies seem to be able to do it, too."Ms. Chapman-Crane, her colleagues at the Mennonite Central Committee Appalachia and other Appalachian Christians are trying to halt mountaintop removal, and at the heart of their work, they say, is their faith. (I would guess more their hate of working people and the ability God has give man to make it a better world) They are part of an awakening among religious people to environmental issues, said Paul Gorman, executive director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, an inter religious alliance. Increasingly,religious people across denominations are organizing around local issues, like preventing a landfill, preserving wetlands and changing mining. (and very ofetn not having one fact but just pure emotion )"People of faith are thinking afresh about human place and purpose in the greater web of life," Mr. Gorman said. "They are asking, What does it mean to be present in a crisis ( they need to have a crisis and they need fear to make their porject work,. this is a tried and true form of explotation of the people of our region by outside the region do gooders who think they mean well but really are so out of touch they think squirrels aint made for eating) of God's creation made by God's children?" (This is their attempt to say they are "of God" and superior to us un's here in the woods sort of like savages I reckon if we dont agree with them) Although Christian environmental activists (activists- this is their word for themselves and also makes them feel better than us mere mortals who just work all day long and dont have the time to invent these evils they perceive we are doing. In reality they have no clue to what is really going on ) speak out against mountaintopremoval at different levels of government, many believe that showing the practice's toll (but only one side which is why I am here doing this to show you the reader the other side) will persuade others to join them in seeking stricter regulation of it, (as if the thousands of current laws and regulations just are not enough) if not an outright ban. A new group, Christians for the Mountains, urges religious people to take upmountaintop removal "as a spiritual issue," and it has made a DVD that it isdistributing to churches and individuals, said Allen Johnson, an evangelical Christian and a founder of the group. The Rev. John Rausch, director of the Catholic (Catholic's are the best at this because guilt is a major part of the dogma and the Catholic church has the market cornered on guilt, well almost. I could be wrong I suppose others use guilt also. But I grew up a Baptist and fear was out big thing) Committee of Appalachia, has led tours of mountaintop removal sites since 1994. Mr. Rausch estimates that 400 people have taken his tour. They learn of the tours by word of mouth or from their churches, pay a few hundred dollars to stay in simple accommodations, ( I knew a donation need would show up sooner or later) hike several miles through forests and mined lands and talk to people whose lives have been affected by mountaintop removal. ( This means to people who dont work and dont want anyone else to) The Mennonite Central Committee Appalachia, based in Whitesburg, Ky., gave its first tour in October, focusing on a corner of southeastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia rich in coal and diverse forests.On the second morning of the four-day tour, the trip's leaders, Ms.Chapman-Crane and the Rev. Duane Beachey, marched their three-member group up the mile-long trail to Bad Branch Falls. Poplars, beeches, hemlocks and magnolias thatched together a canopy above the trail, and the rain on the leaves made a soft ticking sound. Wild ginseng (no way them mountain boys would leave ginseng beside a trail like that, no that would have been dug up long ago. this make me question even more the writer true sense of realism and shows me the un-facts in the artical) and wintergreen lined the path. Cottage-size boulders leaned forward over a rushing stream below the trail."Not every place on the mountains has waterfalls like Bad Branch," Ms.Chapman-Crane said. "But this is pretty much what it's like on the mountains here. (another misrepresentation) The forests of the Appalachian range are like a northern rain forest."Mary Yoder, who had volunteered to come on the trip for her congregation,Columbus Mennonite Church in Columbus, Ohio, asked, "So this is the kind of place that gets blown up in mountaintop removal? "Mr. Chapman-Crane replied, "This is what would be lost, is lost, when they blast a mountaintop.(not only that but they kill Babi and eat him) "The United States is rich with coal, and mountaintop removal has begun to replace underground mining in Appalachia as the preferred method of extraction (another misrepresentation or lie whichever you prefer) because of its efficiency and lower cost. Mountaintop removal involves leveling mountains with explosives to reach seams of coal. The debris that had once been the mountain is usually dumped by bulldozers and huge trucks into neighboring valleys, (creating leval land where there is none and the reason all the development has been beside the creek thus encouraging more stream pollution) burying streams (another lie, most are ditches that only hold water when it rains).The coal industry asserts that mountaintop removal is a safer way to removecoal than sending miners underground and that without it, companies would have to close mines and lay off workers. (duh if you shut down the mine people go home and are then out of work) Luke Popovich, a spokesman for the National Mining Association, a coal lobbying group, said that by fighting mountaintop removal religious groups might find their priorities colliding."They find themselves in a difficult position," Mr. Popovich said, "because they're expressing support for those who purport to protect nature, and, at the same time, that activism carries implications for the human side of the natural equation. Human welfare depends on the rational exploitation of nature.( I dont think i would have used those words but ok ) "Christianity runs wide and deep in Appalachia. At the Courthouse Cafe in Whitesburg, Mr. Beachey explained that as a Christian concern for his neighbors (whom he must think are too stoopit to make decisions on their own) drove his desire to rein in mountaintop removal. But as in much ofAppalachia, pastors and churchgoers here are reluctant to stir up trouble:many work for coal companies, (no kidding who would have thunk it? The other side is mentioned here but no real attempt is made by the writer to talk to any of theswe strange creatures) or the people next to them in the pew do. Others believe stopping mountaintop removal would eliminate the few jobs that remain. (6000 in virginia and they pay on average over $50,000.00 per year) Many understand their faith differently than Christian environmentalists do. (no kidding) One night, Darrell Caudill and several friends gathered to play their guitars for the environmental tour and sing traditional songs and hymns. Mr.Caudill, 57, works for a coal company and believes in being a good steward of the earth. (which is the way the thousands of good people feel who work in the mining industry feel about the work they do, they see themselves as good steward's of the land and try to make good decisions in respect of that) . But to him, he said, being a Christian means being saved and spreading the Gospel. There is no tension between being committed to his faith and supporting mountaintop removal."Why did God produce coal then and put it underground?" said Mr. Caudill,who attends a non-denominational evangelical church. "He produced things that we need on this earth. Without coal, you wouldn't have the warmth and light you have right now." (thats the other side folks in the entire artical you got what maybe three lines telling the other side in a very intentional weak argument ) Late in the trip, the tour group drove Lucious Thompson, 63, a former coalminer, to the horseshoe of peaks above McRoberts, where he lives. The peaks have been leveled. The woods where he had hunted are gone. (you must have the destruction of Eden to make the guilt trip stick ) The new grass on the new plateaus barely clings to the soil, (there is a violation of one of the thousands of laws dealing the reclaiming of the land to restore nature to its orginial or improved state) which means that McRoberts often floods now after hard rains, he said."I've been flooded three times since they started working on themountaintop," Mr. Thompson said. He talked of neighbors whose house foundations had been cracked because of the daily blasting, (but he left out the fact that a pre-blast inspection is performed on any house near the mine site and if there is any thing broken then there is a record of what it was like before and the law says it must be fixed or replaced if damaged, thats the law) of a pond lost to sludge and of respiratory ailments because of the coal dust flying from the coal trucks."The coal company says it's God's will," ( I dont remember seeing this on any company logo or in any official press release) he said. "Well, God ain't ever run no bulldozer. ( I guess you could say he is saying "God loves me but he cant stand you" ) "People like Mr. Thompson and the woods and mountains of Appalachia seemed to make the point the tour's organizers hoped for. After the tour, Ms. Yoder returned to Columbus to ( to spread the stoopitiy to others) tell her congregation of about 200 what she had learned. "My comment to the church was that I would do the tour with an open mind, (sure you did) "she said, "and my conclusion is there is no room for mountaintop removal in our country. (Oh I still want my power to come on each day when I flip the light switch and I have no other solution as to how to do that but what the heck I am just not that smart to see I cant have it both ways and that my electricity must be produced by some method. i prefer to just think it comes from the wall) "HomeWorld U.S. N.Y. / Region Business Technology Science Health Sports OpinionArts Style Travel Job Market Real Estate Automobiles Back to TopCopyright 2006 The New York Times Company
Monday, October 30, 2006
China spending 80 billion yuan in coal chemical programs
China's total investment in coal chemical programs under construction reached over 80 billion yuan (10.1 billion US dollars), the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) said Monday.
Due to price hikes in the international oil market, the coal chemical industry has been growing rapidly with the demand for fuel products.
The programs under construction would raise annual production capacity by 8.5 million tons of methanol, 900,000 tons of olefin and 1.24 million tons of coal-liquefied oil, said NDRC.
Total annual production would rise to 34 million tons of methanol, three million tons of olefin and three million tons of coal-liquefied oil.
The coal chemical industry also produces coke, calcium carbide and coal-developed fertilizers.
Last year, China's production of coke reached 232.83 million tons, calcium carbide 8.95 million tons and coal-developed fertilizers 25 million tons, all the highest in the world.
The NDRC issued a circular in July to stop ratification or registration of coal chemical programs to prevent possible over-production.
Source: Xinhua
China's total investment in coal chemical programs under construction reached over 80 billion yuan (10.1 billion US dollars), the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) said Monday.
Due to price hikes in the international oil market, the coal chemical industry has been growing rapidly with the demand for fuel products.
The programs under construction would raise annual production capacity by 8.5 million tons of methanol, 900,000 tons of olefin and 1.24 million tons of coal-liquefied oil, said NDRC.
Total annual production would rise to 34 million tons of methanol, three million tons of olefin and three million tons of coal-liquefied oil.
The coal chemical industry also produces coke, calcium carbide and coal-developed fertilizers.
Last year, China's production of coke reached 232.83 million tons, calcium carbide 8.95 million tons and coal-developed fertilizers 25 million tons, all the highest in the world.
The NDRC issued a circular in July to stop ratification or registration of coal chemical programs to prevent possible over-production.
Source: Xinhua
Oct. 30, 2006, 2:33PMShares of Coal Partners Feel a Chill
© 2006 The Associated Press
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NEW YORK — Shares of two coal property managers tumbled on Monday after an Citigroup analyst downgraded the stocks over concerns that they might eventually feel pressure from issues negatively impacting the broader industry.
Shares of Houston-based Natural Resources Partners LP fell $2, or 3.7 percent, to $52.35 in afternoon trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
try{OAS_AD('Middle');}catch(e){}
Shares of Alliance Resource Partners LP retreated 70 cents to $36.26 on the Nasdaq.
Analyst John Tysseland downgraded both limited partnerships to "Buy" from "Hold." He cut the target price on Natural Resources Partners to $55 from $65 and took Alliance Resource Partners to $36 from $41.50.
Tysseland observed that coal mining stocks, or shares of the companies that lease land from the limited partnerships in exchange for royalties, have significantly underperformed recently due to margin compressions and lower production volumes.
In recent months, most coal miners have faced higher production costs from factors such as rising equipment prices, more expensive labor and greater safety measures. Many have also faced unwanted production cuts because of mine issues, or have voluntarily slowed production to ease an inventory glut estimated at about 20 million tons.
Tysseland said limited partners could feel some of the effect.
"As this tough operating environment persists we are led to believe that the coal (partnerships) are likely to experience similar challenges, such as declining margins, lower royalties, and potentially lower production," he said in a research note.
In related downgrades, Tysseland also moved to "Hold" from "Buy" the subordinated units of Natural Resources Partners and Alliance Holdings GP-LP, the holding company for Alliance Resource Partners.
Shares of subordinated units of Natural Resources Partners fell $1.03, or 2 percent, to $51.88 on the NYSE. Shares of Alliance Holdings lost 55 cents, or 2.7 percent, to $20.04 on the Nasdaq. The stock has traded in a range of $18.55 to $26.25 since going public in May
© 2006 The Associated Press
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NEW YORK — Shares of two coal property managers tumbled on Monday after an Citigroup analyst downgraded the stocks over concerns that they might eventually feel pressure from issues negatively impacting the broader industry.
Shares of Houston-based Natural Resources Partners LP fell $2, or 3.7 percent, to $52.35 in afternoon trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
try{OAS_AD('Middle');}catch(e){}
Shares of Alliance Resource Partners LP retreated 70 cents to $36.26 on the Nasdaq.
Analyst John Tysseland downgraded both limited partnerships to "Buy" from "Hold." He cut the target price on Natural Resources Partners to $55 from $65 and took Alliance Resource Partners to $36 from $41.50.
Tysseland observed that coal mining stocks, or shares of the companies that lease land from the limited partnerships in exchange for royalties, have significantly underperformed recently due to margin compressions and lower production volumes.
In recent months, most coal miners have faced higher production costs from factors such as rising equipment prices, more expensive labor and greater safety measures. Many have also faced unwanted production cuts because of mine issues, or have voluntarily slowed production to ease an inventory glut estimated at about 20 million tons.
Tysseland said limited partners could feel some of the effect.
"As this tough operating environment persists we are led to believe that the coal (partnerships) are likely to experience similar challenges, such as declining margins, lower royalties, and potentially lower production," he said in a research note.
In related downgrades, Tysseland also moved to "Hold" from "Buy" the subordinated units of Natural Resources Partners and Alliance Holdings GP-LP, the holding company for Alliance Resource Partners.
Shares of subordinated units of Natural Resources Partners fell $1.03, or 2 percent, to $51.88 on the NYSE. Shares of Alliance Holdings lost 55 cents, or 2.7 percent, to $20.04 on the Nasdaq. The stock has traded in a range of $18.55 to $26.25 since going public in May
Look for the red and blue highlights.
U.S. coal plant boom poses big environmental, economic questions
STEVE QUINN
Associated Press
DALLAS - A building boom that would add scores of new coal-fired power plants to the nation's power grid is creating a new dilemma for politicians, environmentalists and utility companies across the United States.
Should power companies be permitted to build new plants that pollute more but are reliable and less expensive? Or should regulators push utilities toward cleaner burning coal plants, even if it means they will cost more and are based on newer, yet still unproven, technology?
How those questions are answered will have huge implications over the next few decades. It could determine how Americans light, heat and cool their homes and business, the rate of return on utility investments and the potential environmental impact of the new plants.
Nowhere do these competing interests play out with such force as in Texas, where 16 new coal-fired plants are proposed - 11 of them by Dallas-based TXU Corp., the state's biggest power company.
The scope of TXU's 5-year, $10 billion plan is considered bellwether and being closely watched by industry analysts, lawmakers, competitors and environmentalists across the U.S.
"TXU put its stake in the ground and said it will (build the plants) faster and cheaper than anyone else," said Daniele M. Seitz, analyst with investment firm Dahlman Rose. "So they have something to prove."
The company is hardly alone, however.
Some 154 new coal-fired plants are on the drawing board in 42 states. Texas and Illinois are the only states where 10 or more plants are planned, according to the National Energy Technology Laboratory.
Energy analysts say factors driving coal's resurgence are soaring power demands, volatile natural gas prices and a favorable investment market.
Coal now accounts for about 50 percent of the power generated in the U.S. By the year 2030, that share will increase to 57 percent, according to Energy Department forecasts.
The U.S. has the world's largest coal reserves, enough to last for the next 200 to 250 years, analysts believe.
Larry Makovich, managing director for consultant group Cambridge Energy Research Associates, said the urgency to bring more power-generating plants online cannot be understated.
"A fundamental reality of the power business is there is no single fuel of choice, so if you are going to survive in the long run, you need to have a good mix of fuels and technologies," he said. "If we are going to keep supply and demand in balance, you're looking at a five-year lead time, so you have to get started building these plants now."
The argument over how TXU should build power-generating plants plays out almost daily with critics and proponents weighing in on the potential merits and drawbacks of the company's plans.
TXU says the proposed plants will meet the state's growing demand for power, give a sorely needed economic boost to nearby small towns and will reduce toxic emissions by replacing older, less efficient plants.
"The coal plant of today is so much cleaner; it makes so much less emissions than what most Americans and Texans can conjure," said Mike McCall, chief executive of TXU's wholesale division. "It can be a good viable resource without really harming the environment.
McCall says Texas is growing at a rate requiring the company to bring two big power plants online each year just to stay even with demand.
Critics, however, counter the company is driven by profits and is rushing to beat more stringent federal restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions in an era of escalating concerns over global warming. Texas already produces more carbon dioxide than any other state, a fact that worries big city mayors downwind of the proposed plants.
The debate soon could end up in federal court. Dallas attorney Rick Addison recently announced plans to sue TXU, alleging potential violations of the federal Clean Air Act.
"It's remarkable and unnecessary the amount of pollutants they are going to put in the air," said Addison, a member of the Houston-based Locke Liddell and Sapp law firm. "The only way to get these issues resolved is at the highest level and reviewed under the appropriate law."
The battle lines were drawn April 20, when TXU Chief Executive John Wilder announced the company's plans shortly after much of Texas underwent a rolling power blackout. Since then, each side has assembled a team of backers comprised of affected residents, lawmakers, and lawyers.
In Colorado City, Texas, a town of 4,100 about 10 miles from where TXU wants to place one of the plants, civic leaders and lawmakers support the venture. They believe it will be an economic boon to the sleepy West Texas town, said Mayor Jim Baum.
Baum said TXU's project will provide the town a lifeline. He said he trusts TXU will be responsible to the area's environment, saying city officials would even support a second unit if TXU wishes.
"We know they will not do anything to come in here and harm the environment," he said. "(TXU Senior Vice President) Richard Wistrand's mother and childhood friends still live there. Do you think he would do something to harm them?"
But Dallas Mayor Laura Miller and Houston Mayor Bill White recently formed a coalition of 17 mayors opposing the TXU's 11 proposed plants and five others being considered by other Texas companies. The group has lined up law firms statewide bracing for a courtroom battle.
"Texas needs to be a leader on this issue and not where we are, which in my opinion is out of step and not aligned with people who are concerned about air pollution," Miller said.
Miller recently spent a week visiting existing TXU plants, as well as a coal gasification plant in Tampa, Fla., that turns coal into gas and removes the pollutants before the fuel is burned.
Coal gasification plants can cost up to 20 percent more to build than a conventional plant. But they also can be more efficient to operate and save utilities the hassle and expense of adding pollution-control devices.
Already, American Electric Power, of Columbus, Ohio, Minneapolis-based Xcel Energy Inc. and Charlotte-based Duke Energy Corp, are reviewing plans to implement this technology.
Mike Morris, chairman for American Electric Power, said the pressures on power companies to burn fuel in the cleanest way possible will only gain momentum in coming years.
"From our vantage point we think the technology for clean coal is there," he said. "It can be done, but there is a challenge."
Projects such as these have Miller, some Texas lawmakers and environmentalists asking why TXU can't consider the gasification option, even for just a few of its 11 new plants.
According to advocacy group Environmental Defense, TXU isn't doing enough to address carbon dioxide emissions.
The group says that if TXU proceeds with its building plan, annual emissions would jump from a level of 55 million tons in 2004 to 133 million tons by 2011 -- an increase equivalent to putting an extra 10 million Cadillac Escalades on the road.
For it's part, TXU says turning the coal into synthetic gas remains an unproven technology and not as reliable as burning pulverized coal -- the process the company's new plants would be designed to use.
Several analysts agree.
"For purposes of generating electricity, a pulverized system is well-proven," said John Mead, who heads the Southern Illinois University Coal Research Center in Carbondale, Ill.
"Gasification has much more limited commercial experience," Mead said. "There are still some unknowns as to just what the operating costs would be and how reliable would such a system be."
U.S. coal plant boom poses big environmental, economic questions
STEVE QUINN
Associated Press
DALLAS - A building boom that would add scores of new coal-fired power plants to the nation's power grid is creating a new dilemma for politicians, environmentalists and utility companies across the United States.
Should power companies be permitted to build new plants that pollute more but are reliable and less expensive? Or should regulators push utilities toward cleaner burning coal plants, even if it means they will cost more and are based on newer, yet still unproven, technology?
How those questions are answered will have huge implications over the next few decades. It could determine how Americans light, heat and cool their homes and business, the rate of return on utility investments and the potential environmental impact of the new plants.
Nowhere do these competing interests play out with such force as in Texas, where 16 new coal-fired plants are proposed - 11 of them by Dallas-based TXU Corp., the state's biggest power company.
The scope of TXU's 5-year, $10 billion plan is considered bellwether and being closely watched by industry analysts, lawmakers, competitors and environmentalists across the U.S.
"TXU put its stake in the ground and said it will (build the plants) faster and cheaper than anyone else," said Daniele M. Seitz, analyst with investment firm Dahlman Rose. "So they have something to prove."
The company is hardly alone, however.
Some 154 new coal-fired plants are on the drawing board in 42 states. Texas and Illinois are the only states where 10 or more plants are planned, according to the National Energy Technology Laboratory.
Energy analysts say factors driving coal's resurgence are soaring power demands, volatile natural gas prices and a favorable investment market.
Coal now accounts for about 50 percent of the power generated in the U.S. By the year 2030, that share will increase to 57 percent, according to Energy Department forecasts.
The U.S. has the world's largest coal reserves, enough to last for the next 200 to 250 years, analysts believe.
Larry Makovich, managing director for consultant group Cambridge Energy Research Associates, said the urgency to bring more power-generating plants online cannot be understated.
"A fundamental reality of the power business is there is no single fuel of choice, so if you are going to survive in the long run, you need to have a good mix of fuels and technologies," he said. "If we are going to keep supply and demand in balance, you're looking at a five-year lead time, so you have to get started building these plants now."
The argument over how TXU should build power-generating plants plays out almost daily with critics and proponents weighing in on the potential merits and drawbacks of the company's plans.
TXU says the proposed plants will meet the state's growing demand for power, give a sorely needed economic boost to nearby small towns and will reduce toxic emissions by replacing older, less efficient plants.
"The coal plant of today is so much cleaner; it makes so much less emissions than what most Americans and Texans can conjure," said Mike McCall, chief executive of TXU's wholesale division. "It can be a good viable resource without really harming the environment.
McCall says Texas is growing at a rate requiring the company to bring two big power plants online each year just to stay even with demand.
Critics, however, counter the company is driven by profits and is rushing to beat more stringent federal restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions in an era of escalating concerns over global warming. Texas already produces more carbon dioxide than any other state, a fact that worries big city mayors downwind of the proposed plants.
The debate soon could end up in federal court. Dallas attorney Rick Addison recently announced plans to sue TXU, alleging potential violations of the federal Clean Air Act.
"It's remarkable and unnecessary the amount of pollutants they are going to put in the air," said Addison, a member of the Houston-based Locke Liddell and Sapp law firm. "The only way to get these issues resolved is at the highest level and reviewed under the appropriate law."
The battle lines were drawn April 20, when TXU Chief Executive John Wilder announced the company's plans shortly after much of Texas underwent a rolling power blackout. Since then, each side has assembled a team of backers comprised of affected residents, lawmakers, and lawyers.
In Colorado City, Texas, a town of 4,100 about 10 miles from where TXU wants to place one of the plants, civic leaders and lawmakers support the venture. They believe it will be an economic boon to the sleepy West Texas town, said Mayor Jim Baum.
Baum said TXU's project will provide the town a lifeline. He said he trusts TXU will be responsible to the area's environment, saying city officials would even support a second unit if TXU wishes.
"We know they will not do anything to come in here and harm the environment," he said. "(TXU Senior Vice President) Richard Wistrand's mother and childhood friends still live there. Do you think he would do something to harm them?"
But Dallas Mayor Laura Miller and Houston Mayor Bill White recently formed a coalition of 17 mayors opposing the TXU's 11 proposed plants and five others being considered by other Texas companies. The group has lined up law firms statewide bracing for a courtroom battle.
"Texas needs to be a leader on this issue and not where we are, which in my opinion is out of step and not aligned with people who are concerned about air pollution," Miller said.
Miller recently spent a week visiting existing TXU plants, as well as a coal gasification plant in Tampa, Fla., that turns coal into gas and removes the pollutants before the fuel is burned.
Coal gasification plants can cost up to 20 percent more to build than a conventional plant. But they also can be more efficient to operate and save utilities the hassle and expense of adding pollution-control devices.
Already, American Electric Power, of Columbus, Ohio, Minneapolis-based Xcel Energy Inc. and Charlotte-based Duke Energy Corp, are reviewing plans to implement this technology.
Mike Morris, chairman for American Electric Power, said the pressures on power companies to burn fuel in the cleanest way possible will only gain momentum in coming years.
"From our vantage point we think the technology for clean coal is there," he said. "It can be done, but there is a challenge."
Projects such as these have Miller, some Texas lawmakers and environmentalists asking why TXU can't consider the gasification option, even for just a few of its 11 new plants.
According to advocacy group Environmental Defense, TXU isn't doing enough to address carbon dioxide emissions.
The group says that if TXU proceeds with its building plan, annual emissions would jump from a level of 55 million tons in 2004 to 133 million tons by 2011 -- an increase equivalent to putting an extra 10 million Cadillac Escalades on the road.
For it's part, TXU says turning the coal into synthetic gas remains an unproven technology and not as reliable as burning pulverized coal -- the process the company's new plants would be designed to use.
Several analysts agree.
"For purposes of generating electricity, a pulverized system is well-proven," said John Mead, who heads the Southern Illinois University Coal Research Center in Carbondale, Ill.
"Gasification has much more limited commercial experience," Mead said. "There are still some unknowns as to just what the operating costs would be and how reliable would such a system be."
This link will take you to China and a story about the mining business there. Its not much different than the ones we get here. One sided. there's. Oh and its about 7 min and 30 sec long.
http://www.channel4.com/player/v2/player.jsp?showId=2423
http://www.channel4.com/player/v2/player.jsp?showId=2423
They open one coal fired power plant a day in China
China's leaders are worried.
At a major Communist Party meeting last week, they debated what to do about the yawning gap between the ever more prosperous cities and the impoverished countryside. They're also concerned about how rampant economic growth, fuelled by coal, is ruining the environment. And with new coal-fired power stations opening every 10 days in China - the impact of producing climate-changing gases will affect everyone.Since 1900 overall global carbon emissions have risen 13 per cent. Those in China have increased 47 per cent.China is now the second largest emitter of energy-related carbon dioxide emissions after the United States with 12.7% of the world's total, by 2025 China's share of world carbon emissions is expected to increase to 17.8%.Our China Correspondent Lindsey Hilsum travelled to Shanxi province, west of Beijing to the village of Shangma Huangtou, where coal is destroying a community.
China's leaders are worried.
At a major Communist Party meeting last week, they debated what to do about the yawning gap between the ever more prosperous cities and the impoverished countryside. They're also concerned about how rampant economic growth, fuelled by coal, is ruining the environment. And with new coal-fired power stations opening every 10 days in China - the impact of producing climate-changing gases will affect everyone.Since 1900 overall global carbon emissions have risen 13 per cent. Those in China have increased 47 per cent.China is now the second largest emitter of energy-related carbon dioxide emissions after the United States with 12.7% of the world's total, by 2025 China's share of world carbon emissions is expected to increase to 17.8%.Our China Correspondent Lindsey Hilsum travelled to Shanxi province, west of Beijing to the village of Shangma Huangtou, where coal is destroying a community.
That $40 per barrel of oil is the deal breaker. Congressman Boucher is looking at some bills that would insure this price not fall below this magic number that will allow companies to make money thru a federal tax to maintain the profit for these huge investments that are needed to make this work.
Coal-to-liquid plant has long path
By MIKE DENNISON - IR State Bureau - 10/17/2006
HELENA - As headlines early this month proclaimed the birth of a major energy project near Roundup, partners behind the coal-to-liquids plant are quite frank about what lies ahead: A long, expensive and difficult road.In fact, when you strip away the fanfare, the bird-in-hand at the Bull Mountain project is basically one thing: A preliminary agreement to perform a "feasibility study" on whether a coal-to-liquids refinery might work at this location.The study will look at the economics of the $1 billion to $1.5 billion plant, said Bethany Daley, spokeswoman for DKRW Advanced Fuels of Houston, the lead partner in the deal.Once that study is completed and the project looks possible, then the real heavy lifting begins, she says - such as lining up the money to finance an engineering study and the construction."We'll be the ones looking for the financing once the feasibility study is done," Daley said. "It's not just, 'Can we do Bull Mountain," but (the) need to look at what type of financing we need."Observers and industry officials say the final outcome can hinge on many factors, not the least of which is the cost of oil, which is a competing commodity.
Gov. Brian Schweitzer's top economic development official also says the project has many pitfalls to negotiate."There are a lot of show-stoppers in every deal," said Evan Barrett, chief business officer for the state. "When deals are announced, there are 10 different ways it might not happen. This is no different."Schweitzer, who's been promoting the coal-to-liquids technology as a possible economic boon for eastern Montana and the nation, held a news conference Oct. 2 in Helena to announce the Bull Mountain project plan.It calls for a coal-to-liquids refinery that would produce 22,000 barrels a day of diesel fuel, using coal from an expanded Bull Mountain mine south of Roundup. It also includes building a 300-megawatt electric power plant that would use "clean coal" technology.It offers the prospect of 800 construction jobs, several hundred permanent jobs at the plant, thousands of spin-off jobs in the area and millions of dollars in tax revenue.Schweitzer and others at the news conference acknowledged the project is at least four or five years down the road, possibly seven.In interviews with the Lee Newspapers State Bureau in the past week, partners in the deal talked more about the project details and how the pieces may fit together - or may not.Lead partner DKRW also is pursuing a similar plant near Medicine Bow, Wyo., in the south-central part of the state. It has licensing agreements with General Electric and Rentech Inc., which have developed the technology to "gasify" coal and convert that gas to diesel fuel.DKRW was founded nearly five years ago by a trio of former executives from Enron Corp., who were involved in renewable energy programs for Enron.Arch Coal Inc. of St Louis, the second-largest coal producer in the country, is a 25 percent partner with DKRW Advanced Fuels on the potential coal-to-liquid projects, contributing $25 million in cash this summer.The Montana partner is Bull Mountain Properties, which controls the Roundup-area coal mine that's supposed to provide the coal.Haley of DKRW said the Bull Mountain and Wyoming projects are separate projects, and are not dependent on each other in any way. One advantage of the Bull Mountain project is that it has an operating coal mine, while the Medicine Bow project has only coal reserves that aren't developed, she said.Among other things, the feasibility study will examine whether coal reserves at Bull Mountain are adequate to supply the CTL plant for many years, she said.Arch Coal has leases on the coal reserve in Wyoming, but has no coal interests at the Bull Mountain project, said spokeswoman Kim Link. Its interest in the Montana deal is only through its 25 percent partnership with DKRW Advanced Fuels, she said.Link said Arch believes the main hurdle for a CTL plant is ensuring the technology will work on an industrial scale, because it hasn't been tested at that scale anywhere in the United States.Loan guarantees or subsidies from the federal government may be needed to underwrite some of the risk, she said, and a new tax-incentive proposal before Congress is expected in November.Mark Koenig, director of investor relations for Rentech in Denver, said his company believes preparing the technology for large-scale production shouldn't be that difficult.Rentech has been working since the early 1990s on the process that converts natural gas (or gasified coal) into diesel fuel, and is building a plant in Commerce City, Colo., that will produce 10 barrels a day of diesel fuel, he said.The "reactor" used in that plant is six feet in diameter, and doubling its diameter would up the fuel output to more than 2,500 barrels per day, he said. A series of reactors would be installed in an industrial plant, and shouldn't be that hard a technical feat, he said."The tougher nut to crack is the (plant) permitting and the financing," Koenig said. "Those are items that can really slow down a project. And, of course, any change in commodity price."As explained by Koenig and others, any CTL plant will be competing with traditional oil refineries that manufacture diesel fuel. If oil prices drop, then a CTL plant looks less attractive. That could pose a financing dilemma, because a $1 billion to $1.5 billion investment needs a steady income stream over many years to recoup the investment."The problem is, can you make it at a competitive price?" Koenig said. "If oil gets into (the $40 per barrel range), you have to look at these projects real hard." Oil was selling in the high 50s per barrel last week.The permitting is up to state regulators, but it faces potential challenges from landowners, environmental groups or both who aren't enthusiastic about coal development.The CTL plant has been advertised as environmentally friendly, but skeptics point out that it still produces carbon-dioxide - a major greenhouse gas - and still is being used to crank out diesel fuel, which, when burned, doesn't help global warming, either.The developers and the Schweitzer administration have said the plant is committed to "capturing" or "sequestering" its CO2 emissions - a technology not in wide use right now.Barrett said while hurdles lie ahead, the fact that partners have signed agreements to examine the Bull Mountain site is a "major step."They'll be doing what any project developer would do at this point, he said, such as scrutinizing the availability of the coal they'll need, laying out a schedule for obtaining a permit, looking at plant design and figuring out how the technology adapts to the site."They just have to take all of these elements in place and tighten them all down as they proceed," Barrett said. "At what point does that bear fruit? You just keep going until you're stopped. That's the way business deals work."Rep. Alan Olson, R-Roundup, a longtime promoter of the Bull Mountain coal mine and related developments, said local supporters have been waiting years for various plant proposals to take off. They're prepared to wait some more, he said."I think (this one) is the real deal," he said in a recent interview. "But it's going to take time. (We've) been in here for the long haul. Projects like this don't happen in 20 months."
Coal-to-liquid plant has long path
By MIKE DENNISON - IR State Bureau - 10/17/2006
HELENA - As headlines early this month proclaimed the birth of a major energy project near Roundup, partners behind the coal-to-liquids plant are quite frank about what lies ahead: A long, expensive and difficult road.In fact, when you strip away the fanfare, the bird-in-hand at the Bull Mountain project is basically one thing: A preliminary agreement to perform a "feasibility study" on whether a coal-to-liquids refinery might work at this location.The study will look at the economics of the $1 billion to $1.5 billion plant, said Bethany Daley, spokeswoman for DKRW Advanced Fuels of Houston, the lead partner in the deal.Once that study is completed and the project looks possible, then the real heavy lifting begins, she says - such as lining up the money to finance an engineering study and the construction."We'll be the ones looking for the financing once the feasibility study is done," Daley said. "It's not just, 'Can we do Bull Mountain," but (the) need to look at what type of financing we need."Observers and industry officials say the final outcome can hinge on many factors, not the least of which is the cost of oil, which is a competing commodity.
Gov. Brian Schweitzer's top economic development official also says the project has many pitfalls to negotiate."There are a lot of show-stoppers in every deal," said Evan Barrett, chief business officer for the state. "When deals are announced, there are 10 different ways it might not happen. This is no different."Schweitzer, who's been promoting the coal-to-liquids technology as a possible economic boon for eastern Montana and the nation, held a news conference Oct. 2 in Helena to announce the Bull Mountain project plan.It calls for a coal-to-liquids refinery that would produce 22,000 barrels a day of diesel fuel, using coal from an expanded Bull Mountain mine south of Roundup. It also includes building a 300-megawatt electric power plant that would use "clean coal" technology.It offers the prospect of 800 construction jobs, several hundred permanent jobs at the plant, thousands of spin-off jobs in the area and millions of dollars in tax revenue.Schweitzer and others at the news conference acknowledged the project is at least four or five years down the road, possibly seven.In interviews with the Lee Newspapers State Bureau in the past week, partners in the deal talked more about the project details and how the pieces may fit together - or may not.Lead partner DKRW also is pursuing a similar plant near Medicine Bow, Wyo., in the south-central part of the state. It has licensing agreements with General Electric and Rentech Inc., which have developed the technology to "gasify" coal and convert that gas to diesel fuel.DKRW was founded nearly five years ago by a trio of former executives from Enron Corp., who were involved in renewable energy programs for Enron.Arch Coal Inc. of St Louis, the second-largest coal producer in the country, is a 25 percent partner with DKRW Advanced Fuels on the potential coal-to-liquid projects, contributing $25 million in cash this summer.The Montana partner is Bull Mountain Properties, which controls the Roundup-area coal mine that's supposed to provide the coal.Haley of DKRW said the Bull Mountain and Wyoming projects are separate projects, and are not dependent on each other in any way. One advantage of the Bull Mountain project is that it has an operating coal mine, while the Medicine Bow project has only coal reserves that aren't developed, she said.Among other things, the feasibility study will examine whether coal reserves at Bull Mountain are adequate to supply the CTL plant for many years, she said.Arch Coal has leases on the coal reserve in Wyoming, but has no coal interests at the Bull Mountain project, said spokeswoman Kim Link. Its interest in the Montana deal is only through its 25 percent partnership with DKRW Advanced Fuels, she said.Link said Arch believes the main hurdle for a CTL plant is ensuring the technology will work on an industrial scale, because it hasn't been tested at that scale anywhere in the United States.Loan guarantees or subsidies from the federal government may be needed to underwrite some of the risk, she said, and a new tax-incentive proposal before Congress is expected in November.Mark Koenig, director of investor relations for Rentech in Denver, said his company believes preparing the technology for large-scale production shouldn't be that difficult.Rentech has been working since the early 1990s on the process that converts natural gas (or gasified coal) into diesel fuel, and is building a plant in Commerce City, Colo., that will produce 10 barrels a day of diesel fuel, he said.The "reactor" used in that plant is six feet in diameter, and doubling its diameter would up the fuel output to more than 2,500 barrels per day, he said. A series of reactors would be installed in an industrial plant, and shouldn't be that hard a technical feat, he said."The tougher nut to crack is the (plant) permitting and the financing," Koenig said. "Those are items that can really slow down a project. And, of course, any change in commodity price."As explained by Koenig and others, any CTL plant will be competing with traditional oil refineries that manufacture diesel fuel. If oil prices drop, then a CTL plant looks less attractive. That could pose a financing dilemma, because a $1 billion to $1.5 billion investment needs a steady income stream over many years to recoup the investment."The problem is, can you make it at a competitive price?" Koenig said. "If oil gets into (the $40 per barrel range), you have to look at these projects real hard." Oil was selling in the high 50s per barrel last week.The permitting is up to state regulators, but it faces potential challenges from landowners, environmental groups or both who aren't enthusiastic about coal development.The CTL plant has been advertised as environmentally friendly, but skeptics point out that it still produces carbon-dioxide - a major greenhouse gas - and still is being used to crank out diesel fuel, which, when burned, doesn't help global warming, either.The developers and the Schweitzer administration have said the plant is committed to "capturing" or "sequestering" its CO2 emissions - a technology not in wide use right now.Barrett said while hurdles lie ahead, the fact that partners have signed agreements to examine the Bull Mountain site is a "major step."They'll be doing what any project developer would do at this point, he said, such as scrutinizing the availability of the coal they'll need, laying out a schedule for obtaining a permit, looking at plant design and figuring out how the technology adapts to the site."They just have to take all of these elements in place and tighten them all down as they proceed," Barrett said. "At what point does that bear fruit? You just keep going until you're stopped. That's the way business deals work."Rep. Alan Olson, R-Roundup, a longtime promoter of the Bull Mountain coal mine and related developments, said local supporters have been waiting years for various plant proposals to take off. They're prepared to wait some more, he said."I think (this one) is the real deal," he said in a recent interview. "But it's going to take time. (We've) been in here for the long haul. Projects like this don't happen in 20 months."
This is one way to do it! ....... I guess?
Pembrokeshire guards its coal
17/10/2006
Pembrokeshire County Council and the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park Authority are taking steps to safeguard the county's coal reserves.A new draft guide seeks to safeguard the area's coal reserves and ensure that any coal related developments consider the protection of the environment and the principles of sustainable development. The Authorities are seeking public comment on the draft guide and inviting the residents to complete a questionnaire.Anyone applying for planning permission for coal developments will have to show how they have taken account of the advice, or their planning application could be refused. Copies of the document and a questionnaire to help people comment on it are available on the County Council's website at www.pembrokeshire.gov.uk and the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park Authority website at www.pcnpa.org.uk, or can be obtained by phoning the Council on 01437 764 551 or the National Park on 0845 345 7275. The consultation period runs until 5pm on Friday 8th December.
Source:
Pembrokeshire County Council
Web Link
Pembrokeshire guards its coal
17/10/2006
Pembrokeshire County Council and the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park Authority are taking steps to safeguard the county's coal reserves.A new draft guide seeks to safeguard the area's coal reserves and ensure that any coal related developments consider the protection of the environment and the principles of sustainable development. The Authorities are seeking public comment on the draft guide and inviting the residents to complete a questionnaire.Anyone applying for planning permission for coal developments will have to show how they have taken account of the advice, or their planning application could be refused. Copies of the document and a questionnaire to help people comment on it are available on the County Council's website at www.pembrokeshire.gov.uk and the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park Authority website at www.pcnpa.org.uk, or can be obtained by phoning the Council on 01437 764 551 or the National Park on 0845 345 7275. The consultation period runs until 5pm on Friday 8th December.
Source:
Pembrokeshire County Council
Web Link
Nuclear 'unaviable till coal price rises' Australia says
Matthew Warren18oct06
NUCLEAR power is too expensive to be developed in Australia and would only become viable through a massive spike in future coal and gas prices or a significant government-imposed impost on carbon emissions.Energy generators claim current nuclear technology is between 50 to 100 per cent more expensive than conventional coal-fired power, and faces a range of political and technical hurdles before the first nuclear plant could be built.
Opposition resources spokesman Martin Ferguson yesterday accused the Howard Government of playing wedge politics between sections of the Labor Party by suggesting Australia could start building nuclear plants within a decade.
John Howard this week deliberately put nuclear power back on the political agenda as a potential low greenhouse-emissions energy solution, a month before his taskforce is due to report its draft findings on nuclear energy, reprocessing and uranium mining.
Mr Ferguson told The Australian that nuclear power was a distraction from the Government's unwillingness to properly engage in the energy security debate.
"There's no doubt the Prime Minister's fancy with nuclear power has been consistent with his 11 years of wedge politics," he said. "If he's not careful he's going to wedge himself because nuclear power does not stack up in Australia."
At an international nuclear conference in Sydney yesterday, Energy Supply Association chief executive Brad Page said that while nuclear power might be part of Australia's future energy mix, it would require either a significant rise in coal and gas prices or a regulatory constraint on carbon to be viable.
The Howard Government has consistently opposed carbon regulation without Australia being part of a global scheme.
Mr Page said as well as overcoming relatively higher costs, an Australian nuclear industry would need the support of the community and governments, the development of a skilled nuclear workforce and an established regulatory regime. He said energy investors would also want to minimise the political risk of investing in an expensive and politically sensitive investment such as a nuclear power plant.
"The assets that our industry builds are fixed in nature, very long-lived, and they cost billions of dollars when you are building base-load (power generators)," he said. "You cannot afford for an investment of that size to become stranded for what is seemingly an arbitrary political act."
Mr Page said a more rational perspective on nuclear energy was that it was one of a number of higher-cost, low-emission technologies and might be available by about 2030 as part of a composite of energy solutions to climate change.
"You'd be a very brave person today to say there was a silver bullet to greenhouse and it was any individual technology," Mr Page said.
Globally there are about 30 new nuclear plants under construction and more than 200 planned or proposed, with the World Nuclear Association forecasting a doubling of uranium demand by 2020. Australia holds the world's largest uranium reserves.
privacy terms © The Australian
I bet they dont have near the NIMBY's (not in my back yard) we do here.
China to build new nuke power plant with USA dollars
BEIJING: China will build a new nuclear power plant in the central province of Hunan with an investment of 7.5 billion US dollars. The plant, designed with six nuclear reactors with installed capacity of six million kW, will be located at the Xiaomoshan Hill in Yueyang City, an official with the Hunan provincial department of commerce said. The Xiaomoshan Hill, about 184 km south of the Hunan provincial capital of Changsha, was picked as the plant site in April last year by the State Power Design Institute and other authorities concerned, a news agency reported. The project was approved by the State Development and Reform Commission, the top planning body, in November last year and a feasibility study covering 26 subjects was then started, the report said. So far 23 subjects in the feasibility have been completed and the remaining three are expected to be completed by the end of this month. A report on environment effect and another on security analysis will also be finished by the end of this month, the report said. The plant will be built in three phases and all the initial preparatory work has been going on smoothly, the official said. China's power consumption has increased rapidly as a result of fast economic growth. The electricity consumption in the first quarter this year reached 624.98 billion kWh, a year on year rise of 11.81 per cent. Currently, China has nine nuclear generators in commercial operation with a total capacity of about seven million kW. China has decided to develop nuclear power projects in its inland regions and plans to increase the installed capacity to 58 million kW by 2020.
China to build new nuke power plant with USA dollars
BEIJING: China will build a new nuclear power plant in the central province of Hunan with an investment of 7.5 billion US dollars. The plant, designed with six nuclear reactors with installed capacity of six million kW, will be located at the Xiaomoshan Hill in Yueyang City, an official with the Hunan provincial department of commerce said. The Xiaomoshan Hill, about 184 km south of the Hunan provincial capital of Changsha, was picked as the plant site in April last year by the State Power Design Institute and other authorities concerned, a news agency reported. The project was approved by the State Development and Reform Commission, the top planning body, in November last year and a feasibility study covering 26 subjects was then started, the report said. So far 23 subjects in the feasibility have been completed and the remaining three are expected to be completed by the end of this month. A report on environment effect and another on security analysis will also be finished by the end of this month, the report said. The plant will be built in three phases and all the initial preparatory work has been going on smoothly, the official said. China's power consumption has increased rapidly as a result of fast economic growth. The electricity consumption in the first quarter this year reached 624.98 billion kWh, a year on year rise of 11.81 per cent. Currently, China has nine nuclear generators in commercial operation with a total capacity of about seven million kW. China has decided to develop nuclear power projects in its inland regions and plans to increase the installed capacity to 58 million kW by 2020.
.The Mine Safety
and Health Administration (MSHA)
this week kicked off its annual Winter
Alert campaign,
which is designed to
promote increased awareness among
mine operators and miners of the
hazards that lead to fatal accidents in
both underground and surface mines
due to the onset of colder weather.
MSHA’s Winter Alert campaign runs
annually from October through March.
This year’s theme of “Don’t Let Safety
Slip” reminds mine operators and
miners to be alert for environmental
hazards such as slippery walkways
and icy mine access roads, MSHA said
in an Oct. 25 press release. MSHA
personnel will distribute Winter Alert
posters, hard-hat stickers, and decals to
mine operators and miners displaying
MSHA’s safety practices for working
in underground and surface mines
during wintertime. More information
on the campaign is available at:
www.
msha.gov/Alerts/WinterAlert2006/
WinterAlert2006homepage.asp...
and Health Administration (MSHA)
this week kicked off its annual Winter
Alert campaign,
which is designed to
promote increased awareness among
mine operators and miners of the
hazards that lead to fatal accidents in
both underground and surface mines
due to the onset of colder weather.
MSHA’s Winter Alert campaign runs
annually from October through March.
This year’s theme of “Don’t Let Safety
Slip” reminds mine operators and
miners to be alert for environmental
hazards such as slippery walkways
and icy mine access roads, MSHA said
in an Oct. 25 press release. MSHA
personnel will distribute Winter Alert
posters, hard-hat stickers, and decals to
mine operators and miners displaying
MSHA’s safety practices for working
in underground and surface mines
during wintertime. More information
on the campaign is available at:
www.
msha.gov/Alerts/WinterAlert2006/
WinterAlert2006homepage.asp...
You tell them and you tell them!
The coal industry has been saying this for years.
The public is sometimes like a kid they have to learn the hard way I reckon.
New study warns nation facing electricity crisis
without quick action by Congress, states
A report released last week by the North
American Electric Reliability Council
(NERC) warned that the reliability of
the nation’s electricity grid will decrease
dramatically without immediate federal
and state action targeted at ensuring
adequate supplies are available to meet
an expected massive surge in electricity
demand.
In its first assessment of the electricity grid
since being established as the country’s
independent electric reliability overseer,
NERC cautioned that U.S. electricity
demand is set to spike 19 percent over the
next 10 years, while projecting only a 6
percent increase in supply and a 7 percent
increase in transmission lines, raising the
specter of widespread power shortages
and blackouts.
NERC’s 2006 Long Term Reliability
Assessment Report analyzes the adequacy
of the North American electricity supply
and transmission system through 2015
and includes 22 recommendations aimed
at rectifying generation, transmission,
fuel supply, and delivery and demand
response problems identified in the
report. Previously, NERC existed as a
voluntary industry organization but took
on the role of an independent Electric
Reliability Organization as mandated by
the Energy Policy Act of 2005. NERC’s
report projected that capacity margins
are expected to drop below minimum
target levels in the mid-Atlantic region,
the Midwest, New England, the Rocky
Mountain area and Texas, within the
next two to three years. The report
warned that other parts of the Northeast,
Southwest and Western U.S. will also fall
below minimum capacity levels before
2015.
“Our economy and quality of life are
more reliant on electricity ever y day,
yet the operation and planning for a
reliable and adequate electricity system
is becoming increasingly difficult,”
NERC President and CEO Rick Sergel
said in an Oct. 16 statement. These
convergent trends require industry and
government to work together to adopt a
longer-term, more coordinated planning
strategy. This report is intended to
provide a factual basis for implementing
such a strategy,” he said.
The report concluded that coal and gasfired
generating capacity additions will
account for all of the electricity resource
additions between now and 2015 and
emphasized the need to strengthen coal
and gas delivery infrastructures. NERC
also said firming up gas supply and
deliver y contracts would help reduce
the potential for electricity shortages
due to fuel disruptions. Elsewhere, the
report called for the addition of power
generation facilities; new and upgraded
transmission facilities; more “demandside”
measures such as business and
consumer energy-efficiency programs;
and efforts to address the electric
industry’s aging workforce.
“A reliable and adequate electricity
system depends on a combination of
adequate generation and transmission,
diversified fuel sources, energy efficiency,
demand response, and other industrycustomer
programs,” said Sergel. “This
will require a concerted and cooperative
effort by industr y, government, and
customers.”
A copy of NERC ’s report can be
accessed at:
ftp://www.nerc.com/pub/sys/
all_updl/docs/pubs/LTRA2006.pdf.
ftp://www.nerc.com
The coal industry has been saying this for years.
The public is sometimes like a kid they have to learn the hard way I reckon.
New study warns nation facing electricity crisis
without quick action by Congress, states
A report released last week by the North
American Electric Reliability Council
(NERC) warned that the reliability of
the nation’s electricity grid will decrease
dramatically without immediate federal
and state action targeted at ensuring
adequate supplies are available to meet
an expected massive surge in electricity
demand.
In its first assessment of the electricity grid
since being established as the country’s
independent electric reliability overseer,
NERC cautioned that U.S. electricity
demand is set to spike 19 percent over the
next 10 years, while projecting only a 6
percent increase in supply and a 7 percent
increase in transmission lines, raising the
specter of widespread power shortages
and blackouts.
NERC’s 2006 Long Term Reliability
Assessment Report analyzes the adequacy
of the North American electricity supply
and transmission system through 2015
and includes 22 recommendations aimed
at rectifying generation, transmission,
fuel supply, and delivery and demand
response problems identified in the
report. Previously, NERC existed as a
voluntary industry organization but took
on the role of an independent Electric
Reliability Organization as mandated by
the Energy Policy Act of 2005. NERC’s
report projected that capacity margins
are expected to drop below minimum
target levels in the mid-Atlantic region,
the Midwest, New England, the Rocky
Mountain area and Texas, within the
next two to three years. The report
warned that other parts of the Northeast,
Southwest and Western U.S. will also fall
below minimum capacity levels before
2015.
“Our economy and quality of life are
more reliant on electricity ever y day,
yet the operation and planning for a
reliable and adequate electricity system
is becoming increasingly difficult,”
NERC President and CEO Rick Sergel
said in an Oct. 16 statement. These
convergent trends require industry and
government to work together to adopt a
longer-term, more coordinated planning
strategy. This report is intended to
provide a factual basis for implementing
such a strategy,” he said.
The report concluded that coal and gasfired
generating capacity additions will
account for all of the electricity resource
additions between now and 2015 and
emphasized the need to strengthen coal
and gas delivery infrastructures. NERC
also said firming up gas supply and
deliver y contracts would help reduce
the potential for electricity shortages
due to fuel disruptions. Elsewhere, the
report called for the addition of power
generation facilities; new and upgraded
transmission facilities; more “demandside”
measures such as business and
consumer energy-efficiency programs;
and efforts to address the electric
industry’s aging workforce.
“A reliable and adequate electricity
system depends on a combination of
adequate generation and transmission,
diversified fuel sources, energy efficiency,
demand response, and other industrycustomer
programs,” said Sergel. “This
will require a concerted and cooperative
effort by industr y, government, and
customers.”
A copy of NERC ’s report can be
accessed at:
ftp://www.nerc.com/pub/sys/
all_updl/docs/pubs/LTRA2006.pdf.
ftp://www.nerc.com
Coal 1 point, Nuke's zero!
Nuclear plan a drain on water supply Kevin Meade30oct06
NUCLEAR power plants could worsen the effects of drought by placing increased pressure on the nation's water resources.An independent study commissioned by the Queensland Government found that a nuclear power station would use 25 per cent more water than a coal-fired plant.
Addressing the New Zealand Labour Party conference in Rotorua yesterday, Queensland Premier Peter Beattie used the study's findings to attack John Howard's push to investigate the use of nuclear power in the future.
Mr Beattie said smarter and more environmentally friendly options were needed around the world to combat the effects of drought and climate change.
"At a time when our farming communities are hurting badly, it is folly for Mr Howard to be entertaining the thought of nuclear power stations in Queensland or anywhere else," he said.
"Many towns and shires in our state are struggling to get enough drinking water, let alone enough to satisfy the amount a nuclear station would need to guzzle."
The study focused on the coal-fired Stanwell power station in central Queensland. The plant produces up to 1400 megawatts of electricity a year and uses about 19,500 megalitres of water.
A nuclear power station producing the same output would need about 25,000 megalitres of water.
"That is the equivalent of at least an additional 5000 Olympic-sized swimming pools a year," Mr Beattie said. "It is water that we simply cannot afford when drought and climate change are drying up water supplies."
The study's findings fit neatly into the Premier's push for clean coal technology -- rather than nuclear power -- as a solution to global warming.
Queensland is enjoying a coal boom amid huge demand for the mineral to fire new power stations in China and steel plants in India.
Mr Howard established a review headed by former Telstra chief Ziggy Switkowski in June to investigate the future use of nuclear power.
Mr Beattie said a nuclear power station would need to have a strong connection to the electricity grid to address safety concerns with reliable transmission. The water supply would also have to be guaranteed.
"To meet these requirements, a nuclear power plant would have to be located close to the eastern seaboard," he said. "Where is Mr Howard planning to put it? Is it Townsville or Mackay or perhaps further down along the coastline on the Sunshine Coast or Gold Coast?
"We need to be smarter about the way we use our available resources. We need to be looking at less energy-dependent resources such as clean coal technology, geothermal energy and coal seam gas."
privacy terms © The Australian
Nuclear plan a drain on water supply Kevin Meade30oct06
NUCLEAR power plants could worsen the effects of drought by placing increased pressure on the nation's water resources.An independent study commissioned by the Queensland Government found that a nuclear power station would use 25 per cent more water than a coal-fired plant.
Addressing the New Zealand Labour Party conference in Rotorua yesterday, Queensland Premier Peter Beattie used the study's findings to attack John Howard's push to investigate the use of nuclear power in the future.
Mr Beattie said smarter and more environmentally friendly options were needed around the world to combat the effects of drought and climate change.
"At a time when our farming communities are hurting badly, it is folly for Mr Howard to be entertaining the thought of nuclear power stations in Queensland or anywhere else," he said.
"Many towns and shires in our state are struggling to get enough drinking water, let alone enough to satisfy the amount a nuclear station would need to guzzle."
The study focused on the coal-fired Stanwell power station in central Queensland. The plant produces up to 1400 megawatts of electricity a year and uses about 19,500 megalitres of water.
A nuclear power station producing the same output would need about 25,000 megalitres of water.
"That is the equivalent of at least an additional 5000 Olympic-sized swimming pools a year," Mr Beattie said. "It is water that we simply cannot afford when drought and climate change are drying up water supplies."
The study's findings fit neatly into the Premier's push for clean coal technology -- rather than nuclear power -- as a solution to global warming.
Queensland is enjoying a coal boom amid huge demand for the mineral to fire new power stations in China and steel plants in India.
Mr Howard established a review headed by former Telstra chief Ziggy Switkowski in June to investigate the future use of nuclear power.
Mr Beattie said a nuclear power station would need to have a strong connection to the electricity grid to address safety concerns with reliable transmission. The water supply would also have to be guaranteed.
"To meet these requirements, a nuclear power plant would have to be located close to the eastern seaboard," he said. "Where is Mr Howard planning to put it? Is it Townsville or Mackay or perhaps further down along the coastline on the Sunshine Coast or Gold Coast?
"We need to be smarter about the way we use our available resources. We need to be looking at less energy-dependent resources such as clean coal technology, geothermal energy and coal seam gas."
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