From Uncle Sam’s Sandia National Laboratories:

CAES facilities function like big batteries. Electric motors drive compressors that compress air into an underground geologic formation during off-peak electric use times like evenings and weekends. Then, when electricity is needed most during high-demand times, the pre-compressed air is used in modified combustion turbines to generate electricity. Natural gas or other fossil fuels are still required to run the turbines, but the process is more efficient. This method uses up to 50 percent less natural gas than standard electricity production.

“Our coast could be the Saudia Arabia of wind power, but the report doesn’t even mention it,” said Ben Moore, energy and climate program director at the South Carolina Coastal Conservation League. “And because we’re among the most wasteful states in the country when it comes to energy use we have tremendous upside in efficiency upgrades but the report also omits studies done showing that tremendous potential.”

S.C. has plenty of coastline to stagger turbines off of for wind power, just like Denmark has been doing since 2002. If we built a storage area underground for all the free, clean wind we have access to offshore, it would not only be 50% cleaner, but also save costs.

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Forget Dirty Coal, Go Clean With CAES

The proposed coal-fired power plant for Florence County will be allowed to release that and other air pollutants under the air quality permit DHEC granted Santee Cooper yesterday.

DHEC claims mercury, ozone, particulate matter and greenhouse gases were addressed, but unless the permit gets turned down, our only savior now may be the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. If they determine “that an alternative energy source is the preferred approach to meet Santee Cooper’s need, DHEC’s air permit will be modified accordingly.”

btw: The American Geophysical Union just said today that oil is not the worst global warming problem, coal is!

See also: SCsaysNO!

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Thanks DHEC. Where’s My Gas Mask?

Some amazing, concerned citizens here in South Carolina have been going out of their way for us as stringent activists against the dirty coal industry – even taking off a year from college and one winding up incarcerated. Obviously we don’t want anybody winding up in jail, but sometimes, desperate times call for desperate measures.

With help from informed individuals like them, and the fine people behind our South Carolina Sierra Club & other environmental groups, we will turn the table on these Earth-killing corporations.

One way you can help clean up dirty coal plants now is by signing the S.C. Sierra Club Petition today.

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CLEAN UP DIRTY COAL PLANTS NOW

“Our model is a simple, effective way to calculate how much CO2 a basin can store safely. It is the first to look at large scales and take into account the effects of flow dynamics on the stored CO2,” he said.

By burying the CO2 in naturally deep basins, the idea is that a ‘capillary trapping’ effect will occur, where liquefied CO2 is trapped in underground water – think bubbles of water in oil. The CO2 would dissolve and react with the reservoir rocks to eventually come out as harmless carbonate minerals.

Juanes study used the Fox Hills Sandstone as their model candidate and found that the formation would hold around 5 gigatons of CO2. While that’s more than half of all the CO2 emitted by the U.S. each year, the question is, how many large scale basins do we have for sequestering all this CO2 that’s entering our atmosphere from these coal plants?

An EPA appeals panel rejected a federal permit for a Utah coal plant just last week. The local Denver office didn’t enforce controls on CO2 emissions like it was supposed to under law.

For more reading, you can look back at 20+ years of research on this topic. Here’s an informative article from the Bureau of Economic Geology, Univ. of Texas at Austin: Carbon-Dioxide Sequestration that covers the Fox Hills — Lower Hell Creek, Powder River Basin and more.

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Will Burying CO2 On A Basin Scale Curb Global Warming?