Climate Change 11of12: Clean Coal Power Plants

[merrthad]

Carbon dioxide is bad now?

[theinquisitor]

@merrthad, in certain quantities yes. Water is also bad if you have too much of it. Without any CO2, the planet would be too cold. Too much and it's too hot. It's a matter of balance.

[superpinga]

"Clean coal" doesn't exist. All coal is by definition, DIRTY!

[theinquisitor]

Yeah, it's a bit of a misnomer, but the idea is keep the "dirt" out of the air, by sequestering it somewhere. The problem is if the sequestration fails.

I think some genetically engineered bacteria that metabolise extremely high concentrations of CO2 at an unnatural speed would be handy for this. Pump all that CO2 into a vat of those things, and they'd turn it all into food or fertiliser or plastic or something. That would be awesome.

[Jacnas]

It was a nice lecture until the patently false claim about the amount of usable coal.

[theinquisitor]

Do you have a source that indicates what the amount of useable coal is? As they say in wikipedia [citation needed].

[Jacnas]

eia(.)doe(.)gov/oiaf/ieo/coal(­.)html

But it's of little importance here. I should've clarified that i'm not disputing the amount of coal there is (it wasn't even mentioned in this vid) but the projection of 100s of years worth of coal in the US. I would like to see his source for that. But since I can't, I can only speculate that it comes with a caveat "at current rates of consumption".

[theinquisitor]

Yeah there are a lot of mitigating factors. Depends very much on what other energy sources we'll be using alongside coal. I think at best, clean coal will be stopgap measure. We'll surely need something more sustainable in the long term.

[Riggro]

man... I liked him until he said he drives a Prius...