Black Hydrogen

If only coal really were just "black hydrogen". Coal is a complex substance; most forms contain many undesirable impurities, such as mercury and radioactive elements, which greatly complicate the use of coal for clean energy. There is also the issue of coal mining, which has caused huge environmental damage in the past.

That said, coal is a very, very important source of energy, which will undoubtedly be used for generations to come. There is no magic bullet for our energy needs: all possible sources must be examined and used in the best possible way.

Tom

 

I did not quite follow what the article was trying to promote.

If the argument is that we should burn coals with higher hydrogen content, the reader should recognize that increasing the hydrogen content of the coal (i.e., moving to lower rank coals) requires burning more fuel to generate the same energy output.

I will have to sit down and figure out if CO2 emissions are really reduced by this approach before I draw the same conclusion.

Cheers,

Okay - here is what the EIA says:

"The (arithmetic) average emission factors obtained from the individual samples (assuming complete combustion) (Table FE4)(10) confirm the long-recognized finding that anthracite emits the largest amount of carbon dioxide per million Btu, followed by lignite, subbituminous coal, and bituminous coal. The high carbon dioxide emission factor for anthracite reflects the coal's relatively small hydrogen content, which lowers its heating value.(11) In pounds of carbon dioxide per million Btu, U.S. average factors are 227.4 for anthracite, 216.3 for lignite, 211.9 for subbituminous coal, and 205.3 for bituminous coal."

from this link:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/coal/quarterl...rticle/co2.html

Interesting.

 

So really what we need to be doing is decommissioning old, inefficient coal-fired power plants and replacing them with more efficient ones and alternative energy sources. Combine that with algae ponds located at the plants to capture the CO2 emissions and produce biofuels with them. Then we'd be using the CO2 twice.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(tripp @ Aug 30 2006, 08:30 PM) [snapback]311983[/snapback]</div>

I watched an ep[isode on that not too long ago. It was a pretty neat setup except they did it by passing the exhaust air from the factory through tubes filled with water and algae.

 

Yeah, I think Green Car Congress had an article about a few pilot plants where they were doing this and reducing the CO2 emissions by 40%.

 

I'm more than a little confused after reading the article. It wasn't till the end that I began to suspect it MAY have been written by the coal lobby. I am not scientific so can't comment on the use of coal as an energy source, but have become suspicious when industry writes positive articles about their own. Nonetheless, the hypothisis that we have lots of an energy source which with tweaking, may provide us with a clean source of energy is intriging. Either I haave spelled everything correctly, or our spell check is not workking.

 

It's tricky. Coal is just so easy. That's really the problem. It CAN be "clean" but it takes some/lot of work and most of the processes are unproven at this stage. Like qbee42 said though, it's a very, very important source of energy. The US gets about 52% of its electricity from coal. It supplies a lot of base load. Something that solar and wind can't do (at least with out storage of some kind). That said, I think that coal is worse than nuclear power. It's more polluting and actually more radioactive (assuming normal operation of both types of plants). Pebble bed reactors might be the way to go in the future. My (primitive) understanding of them is that they are much better than current reactor types for a variety of reasons. Can anybody comment on them? Am I FOS/daydreaming?