Cleaner coal: The Mountaineer Power Plant is the first in the world to capture some of the carbon dioxide it emits from burning 3.5 million tons of coal yearly and sequester it two and a half kilometers underground.
Courtesy rmcgervey
Carbon dioxide removed from power plant exhaust and pumped underground
In addition to other environmental technology add-ons that strip out the fly ash, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, the Mountaineer Power Plant in West Virginia now also uses a carbon-capture unit built by Alstom. Dubbed the "chilled ammonia" process, baker's ammonia is used to strip carbon dioxide from the cooled flue gas and then, by reheating the resulting ammonium bicarbonate, captures that carbon dioxide, compresses it into a liquid, and
pumps it 2,375 meters straight down into the Rose Run sandstone, a 35-meter-thick layer with a nine-meter-thick band of porous rock suitable for storage. (or...) into Copper Ridge dolomite, which has much thinner strata for possible storage, more than 2,450 meters down. Thick bands of shale and limestone that lie on top ensure that the carbon dioxide does not escape back to the surface. Scientific American
Only 1.5% but first in the world
Only about 1.5 percent of the carbon dioxide billowing from its stack is being captured now. Scaling up the process to capture 20% of the CO2 will cost at least $700 million. The removal of carbon dioxide will add abouts 4 cents more to the current cost of Mountaineer electricity (roughly 5 cents per kWh). This chilled-ammonia technology should be available commercially by 2015.
Learn more:
Slide show of Mountaineer Power carbon sequestering technology.
First Look at Carbon Capture and Storage in a West Virginia Coal-Fired Power Plant Scientific American
Tags : $40,000 car to revolutionize American commute
in Energy Transformations, Scientific Enterprise, Motion, and Human Organism
This jump is brought to you by: Joy.
Courtesy tbonzzz_6Get your bells out, everybody, and ring them! The Chevy Volt is here! (In a year.)
GM released new details today about its new gas and electric hybrid car, the Chevy Volt. Using a plug-in battery (as opposed to current, unmodified hybrid cars, which recharge only via the gas engine), GM claims that the Volt should be able to achieve approximately 320 miles to the gallon during city driving. Estimates haven’t been completed for combined city and highway driving, by officials are confident that fuel economy will remain in the triple digits.
The car should have a range of about 40 miles, using its battery alone, at which point the gas engine would kick in. Nearly 80% of Americans, however, commute less than 40 miles each day, so most of the expended energy could come from the electrical grid (the car will plug into a standard outlet), instead of from gasoline.
GM’s chief executive calls the Volt a “game changer.”
Finally, a game-changing American car. Not like those sissy Prius drivers, making smug environmental statements by purchasing impractically expensive vehicles. Sure, the Volt will be entering the game about 9 years late, but it does so with the confidence that every environmentally conscious working-class American with $40,000 to drop on a sweet new car will… wait, what?
What about the rest of GM’s 2010 lineup? They’re cutting more than half of their 30+ mpg cars? But a few Volts on the road should bring that fleet average up, right?
And GM is pushing for environmental responsibility in other areas, at least, right? Oh, they’re pulling out of a partnership that collects toxic mercury from their old scrapped cars?
Well, it was a nice thought. And it’s comforting to hear someone say something like “game changer” now and again.
Did you know that the web page that you are staring at right now can produce as much CO2 as an SUV? Well, not science buzz itself but, the internet as a whole is a major contributer to the greenhouse gas, equaling the amount produced by the entire aviation industry. When you think about it, its not as amazing of a fact as it first appears to be. Just imagine the amount of electricity that is used to power all of the computers used in businesses and homes. Add to that the real culprit, all of the servers in data centers that store pictures, videos, and websites.
The data centers run 24/7
Data Center
Courtesy Gregory Maxwell saving and processing information for internet users around the world. The amount of energy needed to run the servers is large but that is not the only consumer of electricity. The cooling systems for the rows and rows of buzzing machines eat electrons like popcorn. All of this electricity needs to come from somewhere and that is where the CO2 comes into play. Its the coal burning plants that add the gases to the environment.
Making more energy efficient cooling systems, better software, and using recycled water are some of the steps companies have made to create a greener internet. Although it is hard to measure how much CO2 each internet action adds and a direct comparison to cars is not available, this is something to think about when watching the latest youtube video. Its not only your computer you're powering.
Pacaya-Samiria NR, Amazon
Courtesy Mark GobleScientists know that the Amazon rainforest can help to slow down climate change. The trees not only take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen, but they also are made of carbon. All living things are made of carbon, and when these things die that carbon is released.
There was an unusually severe drought in 2005, which gave scientists a preview of the Amazon's future climate. Scientists think the rainforest will see hotter and more intense dry seasons with climate change. When Oliver Phillips a professor at the University of Leeds, looked at the effects of the drought, he found that it caused carbon losses in the rainforest. This is bad for us, because we rely on the Amazon to take in carbon dioxide, not release it!
In most years the Amazon absorbs almost 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide. In 2005, the trees did not absorb that much carbon dioxide, but the forest lost more than 3 billion tons. The losses were caused by all the trees that died in the drought. The impact of the drought, 5 billion extra tons of carbon dioxide is more than the annual emissions of Europe and Japan put together.
Oceanic revolt?
in Earth and Space Science, Chemical Reactions, The Water Cycle, Weather and Climate, and Energy Transformations
Changing chemistry and rising levels: Is trouble on the horizon for world's oceans?
Courtesy Mark RyanTwo recent stories in the news highlight environmental issues with Earth’s oceans. The first deals with how the oceans’ pH levels are changing at a much faster rate than normally due to increased levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. The second concerns the rise of sea levels due to climate change.
With the first story, Prince Albert II of Monaco and over 150 marine scientists are urging world policymakers to confront the problem of ocean acidification. They stated their concerns in the Monaco Declaration, a document that arose from the 2nd International Symposium on the Ocean in a High-CO2 World held in Monaco last October.
According to the Monaco Declaration, the rapid change in seawater chemistry is already measurable and could by mid-century cause oceans to become inhospitable to coral reefs, inhibit calcification in mussels, plankton, and other calcifying organisms, and subsequently harm the fish population to the extent of causing massive deficits in the food source for millions of people.
The world’s oceans have long acted as buffers against CO2 - absorbing up to a third of it - but are now straining to keep up with rising levels of the greenhouse gas. When CO2 dissolves in seawater it causes pH levels to drop, resulting in a more acidic chemistry. Oceans are 30 percent more acidic than before the Industrial Revolution, and in recent years, researchers at Scripps Oceanography have recorded a drop in the pH from 8.16 to 8.05
The declaration warns that only a serious and immediate reduction in CO2 levels will reverse ocean acidification.
You can find more info at the following links:
Story at Sciencedaily.com
The Ocean Acidification Network
EPOCA's blog on Ocean Acidification
In the second story, the rise of sea levels due to climate change may actually be a greater threat than previously thought. The potential for rising water from melting ice sheets is not news. Earlier studies have predicted rising ocean levels from the melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet and other ice could, by the end of the century, inundate coastal cities and low-lying areas with up to 3 feet of water.
But previously unrecognized factors are ratcheting up the severity of that number. Authors of a new study say related events triggered by the initial ice melt could cause the sea-levels to rise as much as 21 feet. But it’s really more of a “could happen” rather than a “will happen” situation.
Geophysicist Jerry X. Mitrovica (University of Toronto) and geoscientist Peter Clark (Oregon State) predict not only would the melted ice add more water to the oceans, but also the reduced gravitational pull from the melted (and missing) ice sheet could cause the Antarctic water levels to decrease while northern water levels increased. Also, once the weight of the heavy ice sheet was gone the Antarctic land mass would rebound, pushing more water outward. Finally, the redistribution of water could cause a shift in the Earth’s rotation and potentially push more water northward toward highly populated coastal regions.
University of Toronto physics grad student Natalya Gomez also contributed to the study that appears in the journal Science.
LINKS
USA Today story
Voice of America news story
Rising sea levels at NASA site
Carbon Dioxide glass: source: Wikipedia This diamond anvil is used to create pressures of several hundred thousand atmospheres. Carbon, silicon and germanium are the first three members of group IV of the periodic table of elements. Why then is CO2 a gas whereas SiO2 and GeO2 form a solid, glass like substance?
Mario Santoro and colleagues from the European Laboratory for Non-linear Spectroscopy and INFM recenttly discovered such a form of solid carbon dioxide.
"The new material, which was made by applying extreme pressures to normal solid carbon dioxide, resembles window glass on the atomic scale. Dubbed amorphous carbonia, the substance could be important for understanding the interiors of gas-giant planets in which carbon dioxide is squeezed at high pressures." (Nature 441 857)
"Another important implication is that mixtures of a-carbonia and a-silica could, in principle be used to make new amorphous glasses that would be very hard and stiff and likely stable at room temperature," adds Santoro. "Small amounts of these new glasses could be of interest for technology applications like hard and resistant coatings for micro-electronics, for example." PhysicsWeb
Turning carbon dioxide into glass form might even be a solution to stop its greenhouse effect.
Sources:
Abstract of paper from Nature
Editor's Summary; Nature
source: Wikipedia This diamond anvil is used to create pressures of several hundred thousand atmospheres.
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