This column a few years ago discussed nuclear power and how our country was underutilizing it in generating electricity.
A man who works for a company called ConvertCoal, Inc., or CCI, recently contacted me because of that article. The company, founded in 2005, claims to have a process that will enable it to generate petroleum, clean water and cleaner-burning coal fuel from the low-rank coal that is readily available here in the U.S.
There are certainly many subjects about which I have no particular expertise, and the mining and processing of coal are among them. But what this man was saying intrigued me, so I decided to pass along his thoughts to you.
There are basically two types of coal in the world, high-rank coal and low-rank coal. High-rank coal is found deeper in the ground, which means it has been compressed by the weight of the mass of material above it and heated much more fully than low-rank coal. Thus there is less water in high-rank coal and that coal is also more concentrated, which in turn means that it takes less of it to run a power plant generator.
Since strip mining is not feasible because it is so deep, high-rank coal is also more expensive to bring to the surface, because the only practical way to mine high-rank coal is to use deep shafts and tunnels like those that trapped the miners in Chile. Unfortunately, that also makes the deadly "black lung disease" more prevalent due to the miners breathing more of the coal dust inside the mines.
About two-thirds of the Earth's known coal deposits are low-rank coal, and because it is cheaper and more plentiful, that is mostly what is used in the generation of electricity. In fact, about 35% of all the electricity generated in the United States is fueled by low-rank coal. But with the new process, according to CCI's brochures, that same low-rank coal can now be converted into a low-emission coal-char fuel, clean water and synthetic crude oil that can be refined into petroleum. CCI further says it can actually recover between a half to a full barrel of oil from every ton of coal that is run through its process.
That means that, since a standard coal conversion plant would convert about 10,000 tons of coal per day, that coal alone would produce about 500 gallons of clean water each minute, as well as 7,000 barrels of oil each day, along with sufficient upgraded clean-coal char fuel to run a 500 megawatt power plant — and all with fewer emissions! If this is true, and if it could be done economically, this process could spur an economic revolution.
In 2008, the recoverable oil reserves in the U.S. were estimated to be about 21 billion barrels, with an average production of 5.7 million barrels per day. (Since the cost of oil just recently passed $100 per barrel, we are talking about lots of money!) But according to CCI, the potential domestic production of oil from low-rank coal simply using existing power generating plants would be about 1.9 million barrels per day. So just based upon current capacity and using this new technology, we could reduce our oil imports significantly.
Although all of this certainly sounds attractive, I really have no idea whether this process works or not. But the thoughts I am left with are that if this process really does work as well as advertised, why haven't I heard of it before, and why aren't people already making millions of dollars putting it into operation?
When I asked my host these questions, he said the coal conversion process actually was successfully demonstrated in a project run in Gillette, Wyo., between 1992 and 1997. But the reason it was not put into operation at that time is that the process is not economically viable unless oil is priced at more than $60 per barrel. So now that it is priced well above that level, they are optimistically going forward.
Even more fundamentally, though, I am left scratching my head over the federal government's huge and continual subsidizing of corn-based ethanol as a gasoline additive at the rate of a 45-cent per gallon tax credit. The yield in energy from corn does not even approach the yield that could be obtained from the petroleum extracted from coal, if this process would work.
So why is the government doing this — particularly since the government's interference in the market has resulted in substantial increases in the worldwide prices of corn and corn products, such as tortillas, cereals and food for animals like pigs and chickens?
So all of this simply once again brings home the libertarian lesson that governments should put a quick and permanent end to their subsidy programs and leave the market alone! Fundamentally speaking, if there is value in this new coal conversion process, the market will support it, which means that the new technology will be implemented and society will be benefited.
And if there is no value in this process, it would and should fail, but along the way the markets for other products will not be upset, and society would be no worse off. In other words, politicians are not good at choosing what technologies will be successful in the marketplace, and they should leave those issues alone.
JAMES P. GRAY is a retired judge of the Orange County Superior Court, the author of "Wearing the Robe: the Art and Responsibility of Judging in Today's Courts" (Square One Publishers, 2010), Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It, A Voter's Handbook, Effective Solutions To America's Problems and can be reached at jimpgray@sbcglobal.net or http://www.judgejimgray.com. Judge Jim Gray is also currently offering his 25 years of experience on the bench to ADR Services in Orange County for Arbitration and Mediation services.
Showing posts with label petroleum. Show all posts
Showing posts with label petroleum. Show all posts
Monday, March 7, 2011
Sunday, September 13, 2009
The great Pacific Ocean garbage patch - by Judge Jim Gray
Recently I was shocked to hear of an area in the Pacific Ocean somewhat north of a line between San Francisco and Hawaii that is simply a heap of trash twice the size of Texas! Just as things tend to drift toward the drain in your bathtub when the water is being emptied, this trash has gravitated to this area for decades because of prevailing wind and current conditions.
Could this be true? On occasion, there are stories that are too wild to believe. Maybe this one fits that category, or maybe it doesn’t. Twice the size of Texas is a big area. It sounds unlikely to me, if only because occasional hurricanes have a tendency to move things around a little bit. But people report that they have seen it, and about 90% of the trash is said to be composed of plastic, and the layer of trash varies between 3 inches and 300 feet thick!
Well, after doing some research on plastic, I discovered that it goes into about 225 million tons of products in the world each year. Most of the plastic is manufactured from petroleum, but some also comes from natural gas. So in addition to pollution problems, this has more than just a minor effect on our country’s importation of oil.
And our usage of plastic is increasing. For example, each person in our country consumed an average of 1.6 gallons of bottled water in 1976. That increased to 10.5 gallons in 1993, 22.6 gallons in 2003 and 28.3 gallons in 2006.
As a result, 3.3 billion plastic water bottles were sold in 1997, and 15 billion were sold in 2002. That is a lot of plastic, and the amount is growing, since plastic containers are almost completely replacing those made of glass. In fact, there is even talk of putting expensive wines into plastic bottles.
Since most of the bottled water is consumed away from home, only a small amount of the plastic bottles are recycled, and that rate is decreasing. For example, about 53% of the plastic water bottles were recycled in 1994, but only about 19% were recycled in 2003.
The rest often find their way onto the streets, where many of them eventually flow into drains and out into the ocean.
Today, only 11 states have plastic bottle recycling laws and, of those, only three include plastic water bottles in their programs. They are California, Hawaii and Maine. That is shortsighted, because where there are recycling laws, about four of five bottles are recycled. And in states such as Michigan, which has a return rate of 10 cents per bottle, a full 95% of the bottles are recycled.
When I was growing up, a friend of mine and I routinely went to housing construction sites and picked up the soda bottles, which had a 2-cent return rate. Of course, we did it to make money. By the way, the beer bottles back then did not require a deposit, so we left them alone. Just another example that “Incentives Matter!”
As further proof, we don’t see many aluminum cans littering our cities and highways today, because either the consumer holds onto them for their return value, or various “Dumpster divers” hunt them down and return them for the money.
The same phenomenon explains why used hypodermic needles and syringes are mostly not found on streets and in parks in cities that have needle exchange facilities. As a result, those programs protect people from inadvertently stepping upon a dirty needle and thereby sometimes contracting AIDS or hepatitis!
So why don’t more states have plastic bottle recycling laws? For the same reason: Incentives matter. The water industry knows it will sell more product if the merchants don’t have to charge the return rates, and the beverage industry has more political clout than the environmental groups.
But recycling is a good idea for more reasons than merely cutting down on pollution. For example, the energy saved from making just one aluminum can from a recycled one instead of starting from scratch is enough to power a television set or computer for three hours, or power a 100-watt bulb for 20 hours! And the energy saved from recycling a six-pack of aluminum cans is able to move a standard-sized automobile about five miles.
Similarly, the energy saved from recycling a one-gallon milk jug will power a 100-watt bulb for 11 hours. And recycling a one-foot stack of newspapers will save enough energy to heat a standard-sized home for 17 hours.
So when we see that, of the estimated 28 billion water bottles that are consumed each year in our country, only about 20% of them are recycled, we can see how wasteful we are. And the other 80% either end up in landfills, or as litter that either pollutes our countryside, or ends up in the ocean.
To make matters worse, plastic is not biodegradable, like most of the more natural products. Instead, it is photodegradable, which means that the sun’s rays will make it brittle, similar to what the rays do to the vinyl roof of an automobile. That will cause the plastic to break into smaller pieces, and eventually emerge as a fine dust. But otherwise, it takes decades to break it down further.
So instead of being good stewards of the Earth, we are literally fouling our own nest! And in addition to the pollution issues, many of the birds and fish confuse plastic trash for jellyfish and other food. So when they eat the plastic, the wild beings can’t either digest it or expel it, which means that many of them simply starve to death with their stomachs full of plastic.
All of this is disturbing, but what can we do? Obviously, this is a monumental problem, and each of us is only one person. Nevertheless, we can all help by using recycling programs to the fullest, and also by insisting that legislators from all over the country pass recycling laws. And when asked “paper or plastic,” we can choose paper.
Or better yet, we can form the habit of taking canvas bags with us to do our shopping. And we can also remember to decline using a bag at all when it is not necessary.
In the final analysis, whether this trash dump story is true or not, the problems of plastic trash disposal are enormous. But like with so many other things, the resolution is up to us, and every effort helps!
JAMES P. GRAY is a retired judge of the Orange County Superior Court, the author of “Wearing the Robe – the Art and Responsibilities of Judging in Today’s Courts” (Square One Press, 2008), and can be contacted at jimpgray@sbcglobal.net or via his website at www.judgejimgray.com .
Could this be true? On occasion, there are stories that are too wild to believe. Maybe this one fits that category, or maybe it doesn’t. Twice the size of Texas is a big area. It sounds unlikely to me, if only because occasional hurricanes have a tendency to move things around a little bit. But people report that they have seen it, and about 90% of the trash is said to be composed of plastic, and the layer of trash varies between 3 inches and 300 feet thick!
Well, after doing some research on plastic, I discovered that it goes into about 225 million tons of products in the world each year. Most of the plastic is manufactured from petroleum, but some also comes from natural gas. So in addition to pollution problems, this has more than just a minor effect on our country’s importation of oil.
And our usage of plastic is increasing. For example, each person in our country consumed an average of 1.6 gallons of bottled water in 1976. That increased to 10.5 gallons in 1993, 22.6 gallons in 2003 and 28.3 gallons in 2006.
As a result, 3.3 billion plastic water bottles were sold in 1997, and 15 billion were sold in 2002. That is a lot of plastic, and the amount is growing, since plastic containers are almost completely replacing those made of glass. In fact, there is even talk of putting expensive wines into plastic bottles.
Since most of the bottled water is consumed away from home, only a small amount of the plastic bottles are recycled, and that rate is decreasing. For example, about 53% of the plastic water bottles were recycled in 1994, but only about 19% were recycled in 2003.
The rest often find their way onto the streets, where many of them eventually flow into drains and out into the ocean.
Today, only 11 states have plastic bottle recycling laws and, of those, only three include plastic water bottles in their programs. They are California, Hawaii and Maine. That is shortsighted, because where there are recycling laws, about four of five bottles are recycled. And in states such as Michigan, which has a return rate of 10 cents per bottle, a full 95% of the bottles are recycled.
When I was growing up, a friend of mine and I routinely went to housing construction sites and picked up the soda bottles, which had a 2-cent return rate. Of course, we did it to make money. By the way, the beer bottles back then did not require a deposit, so we left them alone. Just another example that “Incentives Matter!”
As further proof, we don’t see many aluminum cans littering our cities and highways today, because either the consumer holds onto them for their return value, or various “Dumpster divers” hunt them down and return them for the money.
The same phenomenon explains why used hypodermic needles and syringes are mostly not found on streets and in parks in cities that have needle exchange facilities. As a result, those programs protect people from inadvertently stepping upon a dirty needle and thereby sometimes contracting AIDS or hepatitis!
So why don’t more states have plastic bottle recycling laws? For the same reason: Incentives matter. The water industry knows it will sell more product if the merchants don’t have to charge the return rates, and the beverage industry has more political clout than the environmental groups.
But recycling is a good idea for more reasons than merely cutting down on pollution. For example, the energy saved from making just one aluminum can from a recycled one instead of starting from scratch is enough to power a television set or computer for three hours, or power a 100-watt bulb for 20 hours! And the energy saved from recycling a six-pack of aluminum cans is able to move a standard-sized automobile about five miles.
Similarly, the energy saved from recycling a one-gallon milk jug will power a 100-watt bulb for 11 hours. And recycling a one-foot stack of newspapers will save enough energy to heat a standard-sized home for 17 hours.
So when we see that, of the estimated 28 billion water bottles that are consumed each year in our country, only about 20% of them are recycled, we can see how wasteful we are. And the other 80% either end up in landfills, or as litter that either pollutes our countryside, or ends up in the ocean.
To make matters worse, plastic is not biodegradable, like most of the more natural products. Instead, it is photodegradable, which means that the sun’s rays will make it brittle, similar to what the rays do to the vinyl roof of an automobile. That will cause the plastic to break into smaller pieces, and eventually emerge as a fine dust. But otherwise, it takes decades to break it down further.
So instead of being good stewards of the Earth, we are literally fouling our own nest! And in addition to the pollution issues, many of the birds and fish confuse plastic trash for jellyfish and other food. So when they eat the plastic, the wild beings can’t either digest it or expel it, which means that many of them simply starve to death with their stomachs full of plastic.
All of this is disturbing, but what can we do? Obviously, this is a monumental problem, and each of us is only one person. Nevertheless, we can all help by using recycling programs to the fullest, and also by insisting that legislators from all over the country pass recycling laws. And when asked “paper or plastic,” we can choose paper.
Or better yet, we can form the habit of taking canvas bags with us to do our shopping. And we can also remember to decline using a bag at all when it is not necessary.
In the final analysis, whether this trash dump story is true or not, the problems of plastic trash disposal are enormous. But like with so many other things, the resolution is up to us, and every effort helps!
JAMES P. GRAY is a retired judge of the Orange County Superior Court, the author of “Wearing the Robe – the Art and Responsibilities of Judging in Today’s Courts” (Square One Press, 2008), and can be contacted at jimpgray@sbcglobal.net or via his website at www.judgejimgray.com .
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