Comments on: Historic Vote Today – Let Your Voice Be Heard

By: Ginter Vurlicer

Ginter Vurlicer — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 04:13:34 +0000

Have you ever seen the unit trains carrying coal from Colorado to Texas? They are about two miles long each and make the trip daily. That’s an indecent amount of carbon dioxide added to our earth’s atmosphere from underground deposits. Eastern Texas has an abundance of pine forests covering an area of about 300 miles by 200 miles. The trees are a renewable energy source taking carbon from the air and vast areas of forest land are now managed by paper companies who have perfected the harvesting of a steady supply of timber.
Please back programs to convert all our coal-fired power plants to wood-fired power plants. Being a chemical engineer, I can appreciate that wood is not a clean as coal for generating steam, but the steel industry used to make a lot of coke (a pure form of carbon) from relatively “dirty” coal, capturing the off-gases and marketing the captured materials as ammonia, sulfuric acid, aniline, and a host of other useful organic starting materials. There is no reason why the electric power industry could not make the investments in proved technology to convert wood to charcoal on a scale necessary to replace all the coal they now use, substituting reused atmospheric carbon for new sub-ground carbon that adds to our growing climate warming crisis. The chemicals they generate from the wood-to-charcoal conversion process can pay for the investments and can help reduce our imports of new oil for the petrochemical industries — also reducing the new sub-ground carbon that is emitted from petrochemical operations.
There are studies and projects to capture carbon dioxide from power plants, but that does not address the primary irresponsibility of our present power industry of taking carbon from underground deposits (as coal, oil, or natural gas) and putting them into the thin layer of earth’s surface where we all live. If a sequestering technique ever fails we suddenly have huge releases of carbon dioxide with predictable and dire long range consequences.
Why not just sustain our standard of living on renewable resources like fast growing lob-lolly pine forests?

By: Ginter Vurlicer

Ginter Vurlicer — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 04:13:00 +0000