Your tax dollars at work: DOE to spend $950M for 250MW "clean coal" plant

From the Randall Cunningham Memorial School of Energy, and the Halliburton School of Sandwich and Snack Economics, today's Wall Street Journal reports that the bankrupt United States Government plans to build, for $950M, a 250 MW coal plant that is advertised as providing for "clean coal."

Relying on general US ignorance of science the plant is advertised to provide fertilizers (from nitrogen oxides) and "soil enhancers" (sulfates, one supposes, hydrogen (from coal), oh yes, and CO2 that will be deep welled to "determine if it can be kept there indefinitely") since, according to the Wall Street Journal this gas is "thought" to be one of the major causes of global warming.


The plant, at 3.8 cents per watt, is so ridiculously priced as to even rival solar PV energy (generally reported, in solar "watts" as opposed to physicist watts) which comes in at just over 5 cents per "watt." (Caveat - solar PV plants have typical capacity loading that is much lower than any coal plant.)

Someone is going to great plunder from the treasury for this plant.

The concept of "clean coal," is a religious concept that is roughly comparable to the idea of the solar nirvana.

The Wall Street Journal does not provide free links, which is just as well, given that one really doesn't want to read this article anyway, not if one has no stomach for making things up if they don't agree with your fantasies.

If it's fossil fuel, it ain't clean. Period. It many not be as dirty, but it gives off just as much carbin dioxide.

reduced sulphur and mercury, or something else?
if so, how much reduction.

with that said, I wouldn't expect this supposedly
new stuff to be as cheap as a traditional coal plant.

are the cost numbers legit?
I kinda expect numbers like,
'clean' coal, $4000 per kilowatt,
solar PV, %5000 per kilowatt

exists.

This plant is for graft and nothing else.

"Clean coal" has never been demonstrated industrially and, ignoring the pollutant output won't be until there is a way to mine coal cleanly. A typical coal plant burns millions of tons of coal per year, producing millions of tons of CO2, and many thousands, if not millions, of tons of various oxides, sulfur and nitrogen. Moreover the transport of this coal costs greenhouse emissions, and certain mines will always leach heavy metals and acids.

As for the heavy metals themselves, even if one could remove them from the stacks (and one really can't do so comprehensively) one still has to dump them. As they are likely to be oxidized, dilute, and very massive, the dump will of course present its own problems. No one will care about the dump of course, since the word "nuclear" is not (at least from a press perspective) involved, but the dump will exist.

So will the carbon dioxide dump, if in fact it works at all. It is very unlikely that this dump will remain stable for hundreds of years, never mind eternity. Unlike so called "nuclear waste" which has defined maxima (relating to the equilibrium between the formation and decay rates) there is no theoretical or practical limit on the amount of carbon dioxide involved.

This plant is, again, for graft purposes, with PR and environmental window dressing being side products. It will not work, nor is it intended to work.

NBC did a study of several grants the DoE gave to promote clean coal. They were pretty much worthless garbage designed to suck up tax dollars without showing any real benifet. One of the "test projects" involved washing the coal in a slightly acidic bath and then breaking it into smaller pieces for which the company got tens of millions in grants. The "theory" was that breaking it into smaller pieces increased its surface area and thus made it easier to burn completely. Hardly any reduction in pollution was noted yet some how these fraudsters kept getting millions in government grants.

A complete waste of money.