Wow. You likely won’t see this covered on the actual Fox “News” Channel — at least not in these words — but somehow it made it onto their website yesterday [emphasis added]…
“Hey, they say carbon dioxide is a pollutant in the first paragraph!,” snarks the sharp-eyed and occasional BRAD BLOG contributor, D.R. Tucker. “Who let that one go through?!”
Who indeed?! After years of deriding the fact that carbon dioxide is a pollutant — “Hey, look! I just breathed out! I’m a polluter!” — Fox just admitted to what actual scientists and people who know stuff have been saying for years, even though the Bush Administration, way back when, spent years purposely not opening an email from their own EPA because they knew it contained the finding that, as FoxNews.com just admitted, carbon dioxide is a pollutant!
As Peter Sinclair has mocked the denialists, while debunking their silly notion that CO2, even too much of it, is merely “plant food”: “Plants use CO2. Therefore, more CO2 is good. It’s one of the hardy perennials of climate denialism.”
The rest of the Fox article goes on to describe the developing technology for “clean coal-powered cars.” We can’t speak to the feasibility of the technology, but, if it’s accurately described by Fox (how could it not be?!) it sounds quite interesting. Reportedly, it combines pulverized coal with iron-oxide pellets to create an “oxidation” process that produces heat “in a small chamber from which pollutants cannot escape.”
“The only waste product would be water and solid coal ash — no greenhouse gases,” the article by Gene J. Koprowski claims, adding that the same technology could possibly be used “as a replacement for old-fashioned coal power plants, which spew greenhouse gases.”
Oh, my! They just did it again!
The process is legit insofar as it enables easy and near-complete sequestration of the CO2 from coal used for energy.
But there is a serious question with the concept in that it doesn’t address exactly how we dispose, safely and permanently, of the over 2.2 billion tons of CO2 that energy from coal produces each year…
… and yeah, that’s a real good question.
I’d love to see the comments on the article, but I guess you can’t read the comments without logging in, and I sure as hell am not going to have an account with them. But if anyone on this thread can read the comments, I’d be interested to hear about them.
Zap –
Are you talking about the technology in the article? If so, it wasn’t clear to me that that process produces CO2. Am I wrong about that?
If you’re talking about the CO2 produced by coal fired power plants, of course, that’s a different matter.
Steve –
Wow. You’re right! Can’t even READ comments w/out signing it, it looks like. Never seen that! Wonder what they’re hiding? 🙂
BTW, you can use your Twitter, FB account, etc., rather than sign up for a Fox “News” account if you wish. But, be careful, it looks like if you do, you give them permission to post for you and add Friends, etc! (So, I passed, thanks.)
Zapkitty, this process is not “legit” in the way that you suggest in your first statement, and your second statement seems to hint that you understand that.
Maybe you are confusing the term “sequester” with “capture.” the original article is very misleading, in that it implies there is no net CO2 created in the subject process, but nothing could be further from the truth. The process under discussion produces CO2, just not in a chaotic way that combustion does, so that it can be captured into storage. but the storage is very limited, and must be emptied, and often, to allow the process to continue.
To sequester implies the CO2 is removed from the active carbon cycle, and the subject proposal does not address that in any way.
Although there may be some advantages to improving our use of coal in limited circumstances (such as by any of a number of oxidation processes), the ony feasible way to address CO2 sequestration will be by global scale processes that are at theoretical stages of development, which will somehow turn out to have no unintended consequences; or, of course, by leaving it in the sequestered state that it is now found before being used.
My first guess as to why Fox would bring this up would be that it is a red herring, a la the hydrogen-powered vehicle. Enough hype could distract to the point of delaying the regulatory push to electric vehicles and other environmental initiatives, just like the promise of the hydrogen vehicle distracted Californians to the point of discarding electric vehicle requirements 10 years ago.
For this reason, I think it is dangerous to in any way legitimize the Fox presentation. The only utility BradBlog saw here was to highlight the irony of their reporting, but that might just be counterproductive to the discussion of mitigating carbon inundation. Also, as is often the case with fox, they may be purposefully “throwing the dog a bone.”
Dexter here, chiming in again, to help people understand the fraud of the subject article. From my reading, the article posted to fox is not just misleading, but blatantly misstating the case, via the quotes from the Ohio State University researcher. The quotes imply there is no CO2 created by his “Coal-Direct Chemical Looping” process.
here is his chemical equation from the researcher’s presentations:
Overall: Coal + Air → CO2 + H2O + Spent Air
Here is a DOE presentation, showing the CO2 going to a compressor, then otherwise unaccounted for, or gone to “sequestration:” (cut & paste, I don’t do links)
http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/proceedings/11/co2capture/presentations/3-Wednesday/24Aug11-Fan-OSU-Coal%20Direct%20Chem%20Looping.pdf
You’ll have to scroll down through the pdf to see their process flow diagrams.
It might be hard to find, but see if you can find any Big Oil fingerprints in the document.
[Ed Note: Commercial spam comment deleted.]
spam cleanup on #7
… Brad Friedman asked @ #3…
Yep, but that’s quite understandable as the wording of the article is very deceptive.
Understand: The work by the scientists at Ohio State is indeed legit. In short, they’ve developed a method of burning coal that still produces the CO2 and other pollutants but allows that waste to be easily captured.
The reason for the excessive noise, however, is that the carbonarchy believes this can be used to finally give justification to their claims of “clean coal.” Up until now their hired tools have basically been pulling all their yammering about “clean coal” straight out of their collective rectums. No one has been able to demonstrate economical CO2 capture, much less sequestration.
But while this new method does indeed enable CO2 sequestration the technique doesn’t address the question of exactly how to safely and permanently deal with the over 2.2 billion tons of gaseous CO2 that would be captured each year.
But this labeling of CO2 from
coal as pollution was probably not
an error… it’s just the new party line now that they believe they can keep their coal profits.
And it’s not just been Faux News going off half-cocked with this… almost the entire spectrum of climate change deniers have been going apeshit since the Ohio State researchers announced they were going to the pilot plant stage of their research.
… sorry about the italics. A closing tag is missing in my post at #9
I love how CO2 is/isn’t a pollutiant. It’s a poollutant, just feeding the grass and trees, all that carbon must be bad, makes food for you and me. So it has to be bad.
My question is if it is bad for the earth, then how do they get past the lack of co2 creating dead zones in plant cycles. Shown very nicely in Greenhouses. Where they have to suppliment CO2 into the atmosphere, or the plants die. Something wrong here in the calculations. You see like all good things, lack of abundance, creates a problem also. Like no people.
Jim B @#11, “they” (I presume you mean scientists) don’t have to “get past” anything. Read the article at SkepticalScience.com to review the basic science of how the natural carbon cycle works.
In short, living things (plants, animals) are carbon neutral — returning to the air the C02 that was already there to begin with — and therefore have no net long term impact, unlike digging up and burning millions of years’ worth of sequestered carbon and dumping the waste into the atmosphere over the span of mere decades, reintroducing additional carbon to the cycle at a very great speed, far faster than natural carbon sinks can absorb it. That is not part of the natural carbon cycle, and it is raising atmospheric C02 levels, accelerating the greenhouse gas effect. Hope that helps you understand the basic concepts we’re discussing here.
From my own experience, every ‘CO2 is life’ supporter that I have meet refuses to rise to the challenge to prove it.
My challenge:
If CO2 = life, then put a plastic bag over your head for 24 hours and report back to me on how CO2 is life.
They all laugh at me… They doth project too much.
Thanks so much, Zap and Dexter, for expanding on the actual technology and caveats to the misleading Fox News article! It was notable for their acknowledgement of CO2 as a greenhouse gas, but the article, as you note, simply doesn’t add up.
Imagine the speed of innovation we might see, if only the fossil fuel and climate change denial industry would put their energy and money into solving man-made climate change rather than trying to find ways to extend the life of dying dinosaur industries like coal.
Desi said:
Oh, I see what you did there.