Duke Energy is the 3rd largest utility in the country. Its CEO, Jim Rogers, admitted that coal fired plants contribute heavily to global warming on CBS’ 60 Minutes last night. Rogers talked about coal as cheap and plentiful but DIRTY. Clean coal commercials are misleading to say the least.
The report went on to show one Duke coal plant that traps all the CO2 emissions, liquefies the stuff, and pumps it underground. The problem is this plant cost $1.5 billion to build. And I’ve read this over and over again, and Rogers says the same, there is no scientific data about the results of pumping enormous amounts of liquid CO2 underground. Enormous is not an exaggeration. The 60 Minute report showed how much coal one particular Duke Energy coal plant uses per day. The rail cars were one mile long! That’s a lot of CO2 to capture without knowing what exactly will happen when we pump it underground. We’ve already become like human mosquitoes, poking upwards of a million holes in the earth for mining coal, oil, or gas in this country alone. This is quite a bloodsucking scenario we’ve perpetrated on earth already. Now we’re prepared to poke holes to put stuff back in. I guess big bloated landfills aren’t enough for the earth to digest. We need to pump stuff into it too.
All of this uncertainty about pumping CO2 into the ground hasn’t deterred the U.K. Its Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband announced last Friday: “Any new coal-fired power stations built in Britain will have to be fitted with cutting-edge technology to capture their carbon emissions.” http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/clean-coal-is-future-for-energy-supplies-1673412.html. While this will probably prove to be too costly for the U.K., at least the government isn’t allowing any more coalburners to be built the old fossil fuel way. Duke plans to build two more coalburners in the near future.
Duke Energy is of the notion that phasing out all coal burning facilities in the next 20 years is a “no-can-do.” That’s a pretty definite answer from a company that admits it’s part of the problem. Besides, how many times have we heard “it can’t be done” about airplanes, autos, refrigerators, television, air conditioning, microwave ovens, pc’s, etc? I distinctly remember working on some of the first desk top computers at U of M hospital in 1974. The main frame took up a room. Now our cell phones are morphing into mini computers. And of course new technology costs. Look at digital watches when they first came out compared to today where you can buy one at the dollar store.
I believe most of the cost of changing technology and moving in a new direction comes from fighting the guys that don’t want to let go of their moneymaker, whether it kills us or not.