Political Ecology

The US Department of Energy (DOE) has selected 8 research projects for funding that will focus on gasification of coal/biomass to produce synthetic gas (syngas) as a pathway to producing power, hydrogen, fuel or chemicals. The total value of the projects is approximately $8.2 million, with $6.4 million of DOE funding and $1.8 million of [...]

This paper, which is the first part of a series of papers, introduces a hybrid coal, biomass, and natural gas to liquids (CBGTL) process that can produce transportation fuels in ratios consistent with current U.S. transportation fuel demands. Using the principles of the H2Car process, an almost-100% feedstock carbon conversion is attained using hydrogen produced [...]

The original FutureGen site was supposed to be in Matoon, Illinois, and serve as the nation’s first commercial-scale coal plant equipped with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology. Under the revised FutureGen 2.0 plan, the site will now serve as a regional deep saline injection CO2 storage facility.  Instead, an idle 200 megawatt coal-fired power [...]

Based on economic and policy considerations that appear to be unconstrained by geophysics, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) generated forty carbon production and emissions scenarios. In this paper, we develop a base-case scenario for global coal production based on the physical multi-cycle Hubbert analysis of historical production data. Areas with large resources but [...]

Based on economic and policy considerations that appear to be unconstrained by geophysics, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) generated forty carbon production and emissions scenarios. In this paper, we develop a base-case scenario for global coal production based on the physical multi-cycle Hubbert analysis of historical production data. Areas with large resources but [...]

In 2008 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit overturned the Clean Air Mercury Rule because the reductions sought would not have been achieved until 2018, says EIP attorney Ilan Levin. But new regulatory action is under way; the EPA intends to propose air toxics standards for coal-fired power plants by March 2011 [...]

Underground coal gasification (UCG) opens up the prospect of accessing trillions of tonnes of otherwise unmineable coal. When combined with carbon capture and storage (CCS), UCG offers some attractive new low-carbon solutions on a vast scale. This paper has several aims: to review key developments in technologies for UCG, CCS and CO2 storage in coal [...]