June 16, 2008

It's the break heard around the world. And it's happening in Canada, where the two most populated provinces have eschewed a plan by the federal government and are instead developing their own ideas to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The premiers of Ontario and Quebec say that they are compelled to create mandatory standards whereby industry would have to cut its global warming pollution and use 1990 as a baseline by which to measure results. That runs counter to one submitted by the current Canadian national government that would rely on a "floating cap" but one in which it says greenhouse gases would be cut by 20 percent by 2020.

June 13, 2008

Regulatory pressure is bringing about the improvements. But the bottom line is that major utilities with coal-fired operations are investing in modern pollution control equipment.

While it may not be the ideal solution, it is a step forward. The country is now grappling with how to add generation capacity and specifically the role of coal-fired plants. Pressure is building for those generators to be cleaned up and as a result, industry analysts expect that most such facilities will add scrubbing equipment by the end of the decade or they will shut down. While the costs will be passed on to ratepayers, the plants would produce cleaner energy and the investments in technology would spawn new jobs.

June 11, 2008

Clean coal is an imperative. Some breakthrough technologies to achieve that goal now exist while others are years away. One such concept is to use waste carbon emissions from power plants to grow algae, which is subsequently converted to energy and because those releases would re-cycled, carbon dioxide emissions would be cut in half.

Views range from enthusiastic to reserved. It's a sensible alternative but one that will not end the debate over which fuel sources will best meet the global community's future energy needs. In fact, if the theory can be scaled up and used at power plants, the subsequent reduced emissions might even encourage the use of coal.

June 9, 2008

Rapidly rising energy costs are leading the U.S. government to conclude that more public lands must be opened to drilling. But environmentalists are warning that such an assertion is misleading and ecologically harmful.

The U.S. Department of the Interior says that at least 40 percent of the oil and gas that lay beneath federally-controlled lands is off limits to production -- a policy that is no longer feasible, given $4 a gallon gasoline and escalating home heating prices. By extension, the solution is to provide more access to deep waters offshore and in the Western United States where ample supplies now exists.

June 2, 2008

We Energies, the Electric Power Research Institute and equipment and service provider Alstom have started a pilot project to test an ammonia-based absorption system to remove carbon dioxide from the emissions of an existing coal-fueled power plant.

The pilot uses chilled ammonia to cool flue gas. Cooling increases the volume and rate at which carbon dioxide can be isolated in a highly concentrated form. The participants in this pilot believe the technology has the potential to capture up to 90 percent of the carbon dioxide from a plant's flue gas emissions, although the ability to store such releases is not yet possible.