UPDATED - Obama, Harper Push Carbon Procrastination Tech

OTTAWA - U.S. President Barack Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper today agreed to promote the latest carbon procrastination technology. The agreement on a “clean energy dialogue” would allow the two countries to safely postpone common decisions on climate change – at least until enough people get tired of waiting for real results from carbon sequestration (capture and storage).

In fact, Obama has apparently fallen hard for carbon sequestration vapourware. A highly-placed government source said that under the plan, the U.S. would continue to burn its own coal and import oil from Alberta's tar sands. Harper, Prentice, Stelmach as well as the oil and coal industries would cheer. Meanwhile, Canada and the U.S. would talk about how to create the impression that a technological panacea for the climate mess is just around the corner.

The government source refused to comment on recently-released

“...ministerial briefing notes, initially marked 'Secret,' [which] say that just a small percentage of the carbon dioxide released in mining the [tar] sands and producing fuel from them can be captured.”

UPDATE February 22, 2009: The Harper government has dismissed the briefing notes as being out of date, because they did not take into account the repeal of Murphy's Law. Environment Minister Jim Prentice said:

"Since we repealed that old Liberal legislation, nothing can go wrong with carbon procrastination technology anymore!"

[Important Notice]

OPG testing biomass fuel in coal-fired power plants

Finally - a good idea from Ontario Power Generation:

Duncan Hawthorne, chief executive of nuclear operator Bruce Power, wants to build a new nuclear plant beside Nanticoke. It will create jobs and stimulate the economy, he argues. It will provide voltage support for the grid and more than replace the power lost when Nanticoke is mothballed (though we all know he wouldn't be able to build a new nuclear plant before 2014).

When Hawthorne proposed the new plant three weeks ago, Energy and Infrastructure Minister George Smitherman was quick to shoot him down. Smitherman has different plans for Nanticoke, and said in an interview last week he's "cautiously optimistic" it will work.

The idea: burn biomass instead of coal.

"It's an exciting option," says Smitherman, who in September directed the Ontario Power Authority to look at ways to add more renewables to the grid. He specifically asked the power authority to explore the potential of burning biomass in coal-fired plants. "I think it's going to be about 18 months before we have enough information to know what is possible."

Figuring out how to burn biomass such as wood or switchgrass pellets could solve many problems at once. The government could make good on its commitment to phase out coal. It could keep a sizeable amount of electricity generation in the area without having to build new transmission lines or plants, whether nuclear or natural gas.

It could continue to provide some much-needed voltage support for the grid, meaning less need to install expensive gear to compensate for the voltage losses.

It could keep local jobs and potentially create even more. That's because instead of importing coal, which is a flow of capital out of the province, OPG's need for biomass would stimulate a local industry for collecting wood or agricultural waste and turning it into fuel pellets. If an energy crop like switchgrass or poplar is chosen, it would also create opportunities for farmers that have seen markets for tobacco and ginseng disappear.

Most of all, it would lead to much cleaner power. Sulphur dioxide from biomass, particularly wood, only exists in trace amounts. There's no mercury. There are nitrogen oxides emissions, but far less than burning coal and some units at Nanticoke have selective catalytic reduction systems that can remove much of those emissions. Pollution-control equipment at Nanticoke that keeps soot and other particulates from entering the air can also be used for biomass.

That leaves greenhouse gases. When you burn wood or agricultural waste it releases the same amount of carbon dioxide as burning coal. The difference is that the CO2 that enters the air is theoretically carbon-neutral – that is, it gets reabsorbed in new plant growth. I say theoretically because it assumes biomass harvested is plant life that's replaced.

But, I wonder how much biomass you would need to replace all that coal? And where would it come from?

Toronto Star: Clean coal is no quick fix

A good piece on "clean" coal in the Toronto Star today.

TheStar.com Clean coal is no quick fix

Alberta and Saskatchewan are determined to clean up coal and pump carbon dioxide back into the ground, two achievements that would turn the world's dirtiest fossil fuels – coal and tar-sands oil – into a climate-friendly source of energy.

That's the theory.

...

The fossil-fuel folks often like to poke fun at wind, solar and conservation efforts by dismissing them as "playing at the edges." It also appears clear the federal government is putting disproportionate weight on the ability of clean coal and carbon-capture technologies to reduce Canada's greenhouse-gas emissions.

Not everyone in the industry is convinced, including Alex Pourbaix, president of energy at TransCanada Corp., a natural gas pipeline and power generation company headquartered in Calgary.

"The cost of these types of technologies are very, very uncertain," Pourbaix told investors in Toronto last week, explaining that they don't stack up well when compared to natural gas. Natural gas is costlier than coal, but emits half the CO2 and very little sulphur dioxide.

...

Their electrical demand, or what's often called parasitic losses, can range from between 10 per cent and 50 per cent of power being generated. In the United States, that means if all existing coal plants were converted to clean coal and their emissions were captured and sequestered, it would require 320,000 megawatts of new electrical generation to compensate for the parasitic losses – that is, for the extra power required to capture the CO2, compress it, and pipe it safely into permanent underground storage.

Yikes. That's about 10 Ontario electricity systems. Or about 600 more coal plants. Certainly a good way to keep a dinosaur industry from going extinct, isn't it?

Manufacturing LCD Screens - Worse than Coal?

A recent study says that nitrogen trifluoride, a chemical that is used in manufacturing LCD screens and semiconductors, is a very powerful greenhouse gas, which "... could cause more global warming than coal-fired power plants...." This years' emissions of nitrogen trifluoride would equal all the global-warming emissions of Australia, for example. But

"...nitrogen trifluoride and some dozen other gases [were not included in the Kyoto Protocol], in part because they weren't produced at a scale large enough to cause significant harm."
[...]
"However, LCD televisions are often painted as eco-friendly because they consume less power than plasma and older rear-projection sets."

(Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-9983744-54.html?tag=cd.blog. Accessed: 2008-07-05. Archived by WebCite^® at http://www.webcitation.org/5Z4wBRlHT)

It would be interesting to find out how much net global warming is caused by making LCD screens, when you take the global savings from burning less coal for electricity into account.

Also, as some of the comments to the cnet story suggest, it might be easier to control industrial emissions of a gas (e.g. nitrogen trifluoride) that is used in a well-defined number of factories than emissions at millions of point sources that are owned by millions of people and companies (as in CO2).

I'd love to dig deeper into this (starting with finding the original study) when I have the time.

In any event, perhaps it's time to review the list of gases under Kyoto or at least the next international agreement after Kyoto.

[Disclosure: This blog is written using an LCD screen. I also use a couple of LCD screens for work (I telecommute full-time). Our TV is a modest-sized CRT (relatively recent model, Energy Star compliant). All of these devices are bulfrogpowered with renewable electricity as mentioned in the sidebar on the right.]

[Important Notice]

Discuss this on your own Blogger blog! Click here for a permalink in the Address Bar > highlight any text for quoting > click BlogThis!

McGuinty's Climate Change "Plan rests on technology, cash" - TheStar.com - sciencetech

Here's a good summary of the trouble with McGuinty's Climate Change Plan (besides missing the Kyoto deadline by a couple of years): TheStar.com - sciencetech - Plan rests on technology, cash

I will try to provide a more detailed analysis when I have more time.

[Important Notice]

Electric Cars and Other Green Tech - Government of Ontario, Canada Sees the Light

Apparently, a public talking-to by Al Gore, plus an impending election, have sharpened the mind of Ontario Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty. He is now promising to lift the ridiculous ban on Neighbourhood Electric Vehicles (NEV) such as the ones being made by Ontario-based ZENN Motor Co. McGuinty also promises big money to attract electric car manufacturers and other green technology makers to Ontario, Canada, starting with ZENN (now being assembled in Quebec), and on to GM's proposed Chevy Volt (currently rumoured to go to GM's Cobalt assembly plant in Ohio, USA).

The carrot, according to the Toronto Star:

"Grants from the five-year, $650 million fund will be available to both carmakers and other types of manufacturers, sources say.
"These include generators of clean energy, such as solar and wind power, and makers of cleaner fuels, among other products.
"The fund is a cornerstone of McGuinty's platform for the Oct. 10 provincial election.
"'I'll be saying to Detroit and I'll be saying to Japan ... let's partner and let's make them cleaner than they've ever been made before,' McGuinty said yesterday at a meeting of the Toronto Star editorial board. 'We know there are global markets to be exploited here.'"

Better late than never, I suppose. In McGuinty's case, though, "late" has had a tendency to turn to "later and later". The delays in his promised closing of Ontario's coal power plants, from 2007 to 2009 and then 2014, are notorious by now (see "The Trouble with Coal" sidebar story in the Toronto Star -- scroll down on the right side of this page).

Even this late in the game, though, McGuinty could have chosen to run on a better record instead of on promises. The quote from the NDP at the end of this article suggests that McGuinty may have been able to pass many of his "green" measures -- had he chosen to send them to the Legislature instead of to the Press:

"New Democrat MPP Peter Tabuns (Toronto-Danforth) said McGuinty's plan is electioneering that 'falls short on credibility' because it's based on his twice-broken promise to close coal plants.

"'There's an election coming. I think that's why you're seeing it today. If he's serious, if this is just not an election promise, recall the Legislature, put the measures before the Legislature and let's vote on them,' said Tabuns" [emphasis added].

Realistically, what happens after the election is what will count. Perhaps one day we would actually catch up to the innovative spirit in places like Ontario, California.

[Important Notice]

Bush: Don't worry, be happy!

From the New York Times:

A day after the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government had the authority to regulate heat-trapping gases, President Bush said he thought that the measures he had taken so far were sufficient.

But the court’s ruling was being welcomed by Congress and the states, which are already using the decision to speed their own efforts to regulate the gases that contribute to global climate change.

Meanwhile, as Congress gets to work on the issue, the oil, coal, and automobile industries prepare for some heavy-duty lobbying:

“It’s incumbent on everyone to roll their sleeves up, if they haven’t already, to deal seriously with this problem,” said Luke Popovich of the National Mining Association, the trade group for the coal mine operators who will be at the center of the lobbying. “If pain concentrates the mind, there will be more concentration on the issue now.”

[...]

“There are differences within the industry,” Mr. Popovich said, “but we are allied in favor of a solution that preserves coal’s growth in the United States.”

At the same time, individual states continue with their own measures:

At least 300 bills have been filed in 40 states that address heat-trapping gases and climate change in some form, said Adela Flores-Brennan, a policy analyst with the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Let's hope this court decision provides enough force to keep the ball rolling down there - and maybe give us a push too!