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Of course we are presently building new coal-fired plants at a comparable rate (proportional to energy output per unit) of one every few days, world-wide. If we diverted that effort to a comparable effort on new 5 MW windmills, we might be able to get along without expensive and still experimental capture and sequestration, or we could concentrate on retrofitting the existing coal-fired plants rather than putting all the effort into keeping up with just the new ones.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Chuck Britton" <britton@ncssm.edu>
Is anyone interested in CO2 sequestration?I hope so. That is what looks to me to be the most promising of any short
(being tried in some Scandinavian country IIRC)
term schemes for reducing greenhouse gasses. Solar, wind and biomass are
not going to be able to take over the load from the fossil fuels (currently
90% of energy supply world-wide). They can help but as my yearly student
project shows, trying to turn just the oil and natural gas usage over to
renewables involves millions of large wind generators, 10s of thousands of
square miles of solar collectors, 100s of thousands of square miles of
farmland and trillions of dollars of capital expenditures. The fact that
there is probably enough fossil fuel for 2-300 more years (at about double
today's cost) and the fact that the infrastructure is already in place for
its use, suggests that figuring out how to use the stuff with minimal
emissions is probably a more prudent way to go at this point in time. Doing
so will give us enough time to either pare down the world population to
something that can be sustained with acceptable damage to the environment or
else to really figure out some new energy source--maybe even fusion (was it
this list where somebody described fusion as 'The Energy of the
Future--always was, always will be!"