“Goodbye and good riddance to the most expensive, and the most useless clean coal facility ever built.” (Angus Harvey, below)
The quick fix of coal gasification and CO2 storage is all but dead. Projects will continue, and the subsidies will flow if Biden gets his way. But it is greenwashing and greenwasting.
The shiny star to be, Plant Ratcliffe, better known as the Kemper Project, a $6.7 billion integrated gasification power plant, was an experimental boondoggle from the start (mid-2010). The dream really ended years ago, with The Guardian reporting in March 2018:
… Continue Reading“This was the flagship project that was going to lead the way for a whole new generation of coal power plants,” said Richard Heinberg, senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute. “If the initial project doesn’t work then who’s going to invest in any more like it?”
“The explanation of [wind speed anomalies] points to the phenomenon called global stilling and it is related to #climatechange induced warming in the poles.” (Roberta Boscolo, UN World Meteorological Organization, below)
“… we were told not to worry … it would resolve itself, they said, either because wind is usually blowing somewhere, or through the development of electricity storage in giant battery farms. This was plain wrong.” (Matt Ridley, September 20, 2021)
The present UK/EU energy crises, expected to head into the winter, have much to do with forced energy transformation from coal/natural gas to wind/solar. After looking the other way, the mainstream media now recognizes the problem but is offering excuses.
Excuses, excuses. It’s COVID and an economic snap-back that was faster than expected, as well as poorly coordinated international energy planning, states Thomas Friedman in the New York Times.…
Continue ReadingDifferent technologies, different time periods, different rationales, same result. Lesson learned again: markets pick winners, leaving the losers for government.
It was synthetic fuels then; it is coal carbon capture & storage (CCC&S) today.
News flash: The billion-dollar Petra Nova Coal Carbon Capture System (CCCS) outside of Houston, enabled by a $190 million U.S. Department of Energy grant, has announced closure. Last May, NRG Energy put Petra Nova “in reserve shutdown.” It now faces the scrap heap.
From its start-up in 2017, Petra Nova suffered cost overruns, prolonged outages, and other problems associated with new, unproven technology. It also failed to meet its CO2 capture goals of one-third of the coal unit’s CO2 emissions.
The 240-MW project at Coal Unit 8 of the W.A. Parish Generating Station was designed to remove one-third of the coal’s CO2.…
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