If Santee Cooper and DHEC get their way, expect to breathe in more than 90 pounds of poisonous mercury a year from now on.

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!

A year after MIT’s 2007 study, “The Future of Coal“, Assistant Professor Ruben Juanes and graduate student Michael L. Szulczewski have progressed with the idea of sequestering CO2 from coal-burning power plants and other greenhouse gas contributors by looking at doing it in the real world – on a basin scale.

“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.