Posts Tagged ‘waste’
Posted in A large section of the Fifth Estate, that world company of scientists, climbed the Allegheny Mountains to Pittsburgh last week. They knew soft coal, what it was and what could profitably be done with it and were answering the call to the Second International Conference on Bituminous Coal made by President Thomas Stockham. Baker of Carnegie Institute of Technology.
Coal Situation. Of U. S. coal companies, only the Island Creek Coal Co. admits that it is making satisfactory profits. Practically all the rest claim that they are losing money. Certainly most are. They have millions of tons of coal mined and ready .for : sale at low, unprofitable prices. But sales have fallen off. Electricity, gas and oil are supplanting coal. This economic shift is inevitable.
The way to coal profits—President Baker emphasized when he opened last week’s conference—is to teach consumers how to use coal in new ways and to teach coal men how to “unlock the riches that lie hidden” in coal (i.e., to produce synthetic goods).
C-O-H-N & Synthetics. When Carnegie Tech’s President Baker asked Director Edwin Emery Slosson of Science Service to speak at this bituminous coal conference, he did not expect Dr. Slosson “to make any serious contribution to the practical and technical problems” which engaged the attention of the Congress. So Dr. Slosson, learned journalist, made a brilliant survey of synthetic chemistry, in which soft coal is the great raw material. Read the rest of this entry »
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As the United States’ oil reserves dwindle, some say the nation will have to rely on synthetic petroleum fuel made from its large stores of coal.
A two-step chemical process augments a method of making cleaner-burning alternative fuel from coal and other carbon sources by transforming some of its waste products into diesel fuel, researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, report.
“Two percent of the United States’ energy reserves is in oil, 3 percent is in gas, and 95 percent is in coal,” said Dr. Maurice Brookhart, W.R. Kenan Jr. professor of chemistry in UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences. “Many people in the energy sector think that when oil starts to run out, coal will be a source of transportation fuel for some time before we perfect the science behind solar and hydrogen-based energy. Producing diesel fuels from coal is especially attractive since diesel engines are more efficient than gasoline engines.” Read the rest of this entry »
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The world has taken a step closer to “clean coal,” thanks to new technology that actually uses CO2 to make power generation more efficient.
The research by scientists at Columbia University means that millions of tons of CO2 could be prevented from entering the atmosphere and instead used to turn coal, biomass and municipal waste into cleaner fuel.
This remarkable double hit is based on a well-established process called “gasification” that is already used to clean “dirty” fuels by heating them with steam and turning them into a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, known as syngas. In turn, that is then burned in power stations or used to create transport fuels.
But until now this process has demanded very large amounts of energy and water, and produced substantial CO2 emissions. Read the rest of this entry »
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More than a year after a Tennessee coal ash spill created one of the worst environmental disasters of its kind in U.S. history, the problem is seeping into several other states.
It began Dec. 22, 2008, when a retaining pond burst at a coal-burning power plant, spilling 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash across 300 acres into the Emory River and an upscale shoreline community near Knoxville. It was enough ash to cover a square mile five feet deep.
While the Tennessee Valley Authority’s cleanup has removed much of the ash from the river, the arsenic- and mercury-laced muck or its watery discharge has been moving by rail and truck through three states to at least six different sites. Some of it may end up as far away as Louisiana.
At every stop along the route, new environmental concerns pop up. The coal-ash muck is laden with heavy metals linked to cancer, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is considering declaring coal ash hazardous.
“I’m really concerned about my health,” said retiree James Gibbs, 53, who lives near a west-central Alabama landfill that is taking the ash. “I want to plant a garden. I’m concerned about it getting in the soil.” Gibbs said that since last summer there has been a “bad odor, like a natural gas odor.”
After the spill, the TVA started sending as many as 17,000 rail carloads of ash almost 350 miles south to the landfill in Uniontown, Ala. At least 160 rail shipments have gone out from the cleanup site, said TVA spokeswoman Barbara Martocci. Read the rest of this entry »
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