The Left believes in a world frozen in time. At any given point in time, it believes that limits of human innovation have been reached, wealth has peaked, and now is the time to hold everything at standstill and redistribute the wealth.
The entire Global Warming/Climate Change fraud is based on this premise, including its sister scare-the sustainability con. That our resources are finite, and so we must use them judiciously (that is, under the guidance and control of a Left bureaucracy chosen by The Party). In reality, man continues to find more efficient ways to use existing resources, and create resources out of materials not considered resources earlier. As they say, stone age did not end because the world had run out of stones, but because man found things better than stones.
And so the news comes of a development that, if successfully concluded as planned, will change the face of energy industry, and will finally bury the most ambitious fraud of the Left: The Global Warming/Climate Change. In the US, a power generation plant is being constructed that would use supercritical CO2 as the working fluid instead of steam. Thus the CO2 generated in burning the fossil fuel will be captured and used instead of steam, and would leave liquid CO2 for use in other industrial processes. No more power plants having smokestacks!
At the americanthinker.com blog page, Bruce Thompson has details:
“The key innovation is using supercritical carbon dioxide as the working fluid rather than steam. You can read the details at NetPower technology and RTO Insider. The fossil fuel (natural gas or coal) is burned in oxygen, rather than air, yielding carbon dioxide and water plus power, with saleable byproducts pipeline-quality carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid. The power plant doesn’t even have a smokestack. No more pictures of emissions to rile up the masses!
There are also discussions about using another nemesis of the AGW crowd, coal, as the fuel via a coal gasification process to replace the natural gas fuel used by 8 Rivers. Previous advances in using supercritical steam have already provided evidence that we can use coal for efficient green power.
Now we are seeing the beginnings of the next technical advance. The Bismarck Tribune in North Dakota noted interest in co-locating such a plant adjacent to the Bakken shale oil play for enhanced oil recovery.
North Dakota is uniquely situated because the coal fields of North Dakota are adjacent to the Bakken shale oil play. While advanced drilling techniques and fracking have opened up this oil-bearing shale for production, only about 3 to 6 percent of the oil is currently being produced. By introducing CO2 for enhanced oil recovery, we believe the production could increase significantly, thus providing much greater economic development opportunities.
To summarize, we seem to be on the verge of being able to use America’s vast fossil fuel resources to achieve real energy independence from affordable, clean, reliable fossil fuel power plants. There is no need to worry if the wind is blowing or the sun is shining to get electricity. And given that America is becoming the world’s top producer of oil and already is the “Saudi Arabia of coal,” we could become the World’s Only Energy Superpower Powered by Fossil Fuels!”(from the blog. Links as in original.)
To read the full blog article, click here.
