A Coal Plant That Buries Its Greenhouse Gases

MIT Technology Review ^ | 12/11/2014 | Peter Fairley

[Eric in the Ozarks]

The Canadians referred to it as “work-over” fluid.
The distillate was a free flowing 3 API gravity. Clear in the morning, turning dark by 2 pm.

[captain_dave]

What an incredibly stupid thing to do. They are wasting valuable heat and CO2 that could be used to supply greenhouses. Image each coal power plant surrounded by rows of greenhouses, each heated by the plants waste heat. The greenhouses and the living plants inside would act as the air filters, taking in the CO2.

One company’s waste is another’s resource. Just like in nature.

[thackney]

Total and complete waste of $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.

BS. The link I quoted was from the US oil industry getting return on their own dollars invested for injecting CO2 to get more oil out of the ground. Long before they talked about Global Warming. All the way back to Global Cooling talk actually.

[thackney]

In Alaska, we called that miscible injectant. Mostly Natural Gas Liquids, like ethane, propane, etc.

[thackney]

What an incredibly stupid thing to do.

Producing more oil is stupid?

[Eric in the Ozarks]

The 3 gravity liquid came from a fractionator installed to pull the light ends out of the residual oil. The resid was quite flashy and there had been one explosion of a storage tank. About 500 bbls/day was pulled out of a 5,000 bbl/day stream.
We sold some of this to the former Unocal for their Indonesian drilling program. The Indonesians demanded a 100 percent bribe before allowing the tanker to off load the product from the tanker.

[tillacum]

Using CO2 for fracking?

[thackney]

Using CO2 for fracking?

No, field injection like water flood.

[11th Commandment]

Ping for later.. Great info

[Thermalseeker]

Nice idea, but it would be even cheaper for them to just acknowledge that C02 isn’t a greenhouse gas at all, as 500,000 years of data extracted from the Vostok ice cores proves. This data clearly shows C02 concentrations rise following temperature rise, not the other way around.

[MrB]

Stupid waste of effort and resources.

[thackney]

Producing more oil is waste of effort?

[3boysdad]

What a colossal waste of money.

[MrB]

Is energy out > energy in?

That’s the question.

I’d also say, as others have, that even acknowledging that CO2 is in any way a “pollutant” is playing into the anti-energy left’s hands.

[thackney]

Producing more oil is a waste of money?

[thackney]

The oil industry was buying CO2 and using it for enhanced oil recovery decades before the public heard about global warming. Actually back to the days of global cooling.

It certainly works for the oil side.

[thackney]

Is energy out > energy in?

The better question is $$$ in < $$$ out.

Spending cheap coal BTU's to generate far more expensive oil BTU's doesn't require the energy to be greater. A refinery consumes more BTU's going in than it produces going out. TANSTASFL. But the business of a refinery is to make dollars. Most months, they do that.

[MrB]

The $ equation becomes questionable when oil is so cheap these days.

[thackney]

And back in 1972 when they started doing CO2 EOR? And every year since then?

[JimRed]

Shouldn’t it be a lot more cost effective to build that technology into new power plants than to retrofit the old ones?