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Old 09-26-2009, 10:05 AM
laura010
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Default New Rules Put a Freeze Coal Plants

Dirty, cheap coal provides 49% of the electricity in the U.S. and 30% of the country's carbon emissions — which means that if the more than 100 new coal plants currently in the development pipeline get built, the planet is doomed to get warmer. That's what made a decision on Nov. 13 by an obscure appeals board at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) so important. Responding to a lawsuit filed by the Sierra Club over a new coal plant being built in Utah, the board ruled that the EPA had no grounds to refuse to regulate the CO2 emitted by new coal plants. Immediately, that made it virtually impossible for the EPA to certify any new coal plant, freezing development. In the long term, it gives the incoming Obama Administration an opening to force the coal industry to clean up — or shut down。

 

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Old 09-27-2009, 12:24 AM
Sparty Sparty is offline
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Default Thanks Laura... I wonder if the coal fired stations can "clean" up?

Here in Australia we are seeing a huge (relative to Australia) amount of money being directed towards carbon capture and storage for our new and existing coal powered electricity generators plants. The problem is that there has not been a successful trial and many of our scientists believe it to be the impossible dream in economic if not scientific terms. (Australia is also involved in projects designed to get a cleaner burn)

This places Australia in a very difficult position as we are one of the world's most coal dependant economies for electricity production.

Our Government's support of geothermal developement has been dwarfed by the contributions to carbon capture and yet we have some of the world's shallowest hot rocks with suitable insulators in areas almost under our national grid. http://www.HotRockEnergy.com is designed to give a bird's eye view of Australia's Geothermal potential, its players and the current issues.

Australia also has abundant gas and uranium. http://www.australian-gas.com, and http://www.australianuranium.com.au are a good starting point to gain an understanding.

We also have massive deposits of very deep lower quality coal that is very suitable for underground coal gasification (UCG) and we have the world's first successful plant where UCG has been combined with gas to liquids (GTL). Plus we currently have two or possibly three electricity generators that are using UCG produced syngas for their energy source. See http://www.ucg-gtl.com.

But not withstanding the above I believe that our future rests with Geothermal energy for base load electricity production unless we go down the nuclear reactor road which I feel would be a second class choice for a country as richly endowed as Australia with hot rocks.

Footnote: We have also recently seen our Govt. playing favourites within the various alternative energy fields with quite an inbalance between funding for wind and solar over geothermal.

 

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