Clean Coal Gets New Backing

The Department of Energy’s flagship “clean coal” power plant has a new lease on life, thanks to a billion dollars from last year’s stimulus package. The plan to build the plant, which will be the first large plant to capture and bury its carbon dioxide emissions in the ground, was scrapped by the Bush Administration in early 2008.

Rekindling the FutureGen project is a signal that the Obama Administration and Energy Secretary Steve Chu won’t just be supporting wind and solar power, but some new fossil fuel technologies, too.

“This important step forward for FutureGen reflects this Administration’s commitment to rapidly developing carbon capture and sequestration technology as part of a comprehensive plan to create jobs, develop clean energy and reduce climate change pollution,” said Steve Chu, Secretary of Energy, in a DOE statement. “The FutureGen project holds great promise as a flagship facility to demonstrate carbon capture and storage at commercial scale. Developing this technology is critically important for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the US, and around the world.”

Carbon capture and sequestration is a hotly debated technology among energy and climate experts. Some environmental groups argue that burying CO2 isn’t feasible in the near-term and merely acts as a rhetorical front for the fossil fuel industries. On the other hand, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N.-backed body of climate researchers, see it as a major part of the long-term energy future. If it works and it’s cheap — two huge ifs — it would provide low-carbon power 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The Department of Energy, under Chu, had already announced a separate chunk of $2.4 billion for carbon burial, bringing its total support for the tech to $3.4 billion. Politically, it’s a popular “green” technology in the coal states, particularly in the South, where renewable energy resources are more limited than in other areas of the country. And if it works really well, it’s possible that biomass could be burned, which would actually pull carbon out of the atmosphere.

The carbon burial process is geologically complex. You need just the right combination of layers of rock: one porous rock layer, such as sandstone, that can contain the CO2, and then a layer (or layers) of impermeable caprock, such as shale, on top of that to prevent the gas from escaping back to the surface. Just capturing the CO2 out of a mix of other molecules is difficult, too. It takes highly engineered materials that selectively capture CO2 and release it on command. The high-tech nature of both of components of a carbon capture and sequestration plant have soured some utility executives on the technology.

One major problem is that no one has actually tried to bury CO2 in huge quantities, or as industry folks would say, at scale. Without real-world testing, it’s hard to know whether it will be possible to scrub the CO2 from our coal plants at a reasonable cost.

The 275-megawatt FutureGen project has long been intended to be that real world laboratory. First announced by President Bush as a $1 billion project in 2003, it was supposed to prove that coal power plants could effectively capture and store their greenhouse gas emissions underground. The project advanced slowly, though, and its total cost is now estimated at $1.8 billion.

While Chu’s words were a strong indication that the project has his backing, the future of FutureGen is not entirely assured. The DOE and the collection of corporations known as the FutureGen Alliance will take another look at the feasibility of the project in early 2010 before truly moving forward.

Source: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/06/futuregen/

Tags: Clean coal, geologically complex, FutureGen Alliance, DOE, US Department of Energy, CO2, Wired, Obama Administration, Energy Secretary Steve Chu, Bush Administration, Global Best Practices,

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Friday Is Final Curtain For Analog TV Signals

Officials say most are ready, but still expect some viewers to be confused

NEW YORK - The last major TV stations that are still broadcasting in analog will turn those signals off Friday and go all digital. And this time, they really mean it.

The original Feb. 17 deadline for the shutdown was delayed by the Obama administration after funding ran out for $40 coupons the government offered to help people buy converter boxes for old TVs.

Now officials say the country is much better prepared than in February, though they still expect some viewers to be confused.

About 3.1 million U.S. homes were unprepared to receive digital signals as of late last month, according to the Nielsen Co. That's half the number that were unprepared in February, and the number will probably decline further by Friday, as procrastinators get around to replacing old TVs or hooking them up to converter boxes or cable or satellite service.

Some people may believe the analog shutdown will be put off once again. But President Barack Obama debunked that with a statement last week: "I want to be clear: There will not be another delay."

Because digital signals are more efficient than the analog TV broadcasts that have been on the air for six decades, the transition will make room in the airwaves for wireless Internet and emergency communications services.

Analog signals cut at many stations

Nearly half of the nation's 1,760 full-power TV stations have already cut their analog signals, though they are mostly in thinly populated areas. Come Friday, older, non-digital TV sets will lose all major channels unless they have an antenna and a converter box that allows them to accept digital signals, or if they are hooked up to cable or satellite.

A few low-power analog stations and rural relay stations known as "translators" will still be available in some areas. And about 100 stations will keep an analog "night light" on, informing viewers of the need to switch to digital reception.

The Federal Communications Commission has given stations freedom to decide what time of day they will be shutting down analog. Many have opted to do it in the evening, meaning the full impact will not be felt until Saturday.

Groundwork for the analog shutdown has been laid with a massive public information campaign, but getting the whole country to understand what's going on has been a challenge.

Moe Shakkour, manager of an independent electronics store in a largely Hispanic area of New York City, said people have come in with converter box coupons, without knowing what they are for, or that analog TV signals are going away.

Antenna issues

Other stores are also reporting antenna shortages, and antenna issues in general could be another problem for the transition. Digital signals travel differently than analog ones, and some viewers may need to get new antennas for optimal reception.

Antennas that produced a poor but watchable picture with an analog broadcast may get nothing at all on digital, or a picture that freezes now and then.

Early public information efforts were focused on getting people to understand the need for a converter box. Thanks to lessons learned from areas where stations shut down analog early, the latest ads also stress the need for a suitable antenna that receives both the UHF and VHF bands.

The ads also point out that viewers need to force converter boxes and digital TV sets to "re-scan" the airwaves to find channels that will move to new frequencies Friday. Even if a set is correctly hooked up to a converter box and a good antenna, many stations that are already being received digitally will disappear when they move to new channels.

To confuse matters further, many stations will not be broadcasting very strong digital signals on Friday, because those signals are coming from secondary antennas. The primary antennas, at the top of the broadcast tower, have been used for analog. Until those are taken down and replaced with digital antennas, which can take weeks, outlying areas may get poor or no digital signals. Where stations have already cut off analog, the shutdown has caused some confusion but hardly the sort of widespread resentment that was originally feared. When hundreds of broadcasters stuck to the original deadline, just 28,000 people called the FCC's help line, though an estimated 12 million households without cable or satellite were affected.

One afternoon this week, a walk-in digital TV help center operated by a Hispanic community association in New York was empty. Roberto Cuesta, who runs a nearby electronics store, said most people were comfortable with their new converter boxes and only about one in 50 customers needed extra help connecting them.

"The good news is that we're in considerably better shape now than we were four months ago," acting FCC Chairman Michael Copps said last week. "We were nowhere near ready for a nationwide transition in February. Had we flipped the switch back then, we would have faced a debacle that would have made New Coke look like a stroke of marketing genius."

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31193075/

Tags: MSNBC, Analog TV signals, Digital TV signals, FCC, FCC Chairman Michael Copps, Obama administration,

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