Carbon Sequestration is No Solution

To My Readers,

It is not often if at all that I would post the words of a fellow writer and friend to those who read my columns. But, in this case I must. John Schwam is a dedicated journalist as well as activist who has investigated the coal industry in Appalachia. He has seen first hand the devastation the coal industry has brought upon those living in within it. Many online-citizen-journalists will not venture to the places they write of, but John does on his own dime. He runs a site called LiberalPatriot.org and I can vouch for his many years of dedication not only to the Appilation community, but to this country as well.

Sincerely,
Mary MacElveen

Carbon Sequestration is No Solution
By J.G. Schwam – June 23, 2009

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Recovery Act), was enacted in February of this year. It included hundreds of billions of dollars intended to stimulate the US economy. Through funds allocated by this act the Department of Energy (DOE) has announced three anticipated funding opportunity announcements (FOAs) since June 3, 2009 regarding geologic CO2 sequestration, the industrial CO2 capture and sequestration and beneficial use of CO2 and for Round 3 of the DOE’s Clean Coal Power Initiative (CCPI) that increases the funding available for it by approximately $800 million.

While technology to reduce or abate the atmospheric release of CO2 from industrial processes or power generation is a valid goal, carbon sequestration is by many analyses little more than creating underground landfills for carbon. The evil carbon molecule broken from it's oxygen partner is buried, out of site out of mind like plastic shopping bags and used paper diapers, but not without impact nor cost. The only difference being a more complex technological bulldozer (metaphorically) is required.

Perhaps the DOE views this as a short term solution to deal with a long term problem. It has not said so. Do we really need to spend $800 million to develop a technology to dispose of the byproducts of an inefficient coal based power generation industry that relies on a 19th a century fuel to feed its profits?

Inherently coal is dirty. It is dirty to extract, it is dirty to process and it is at its dirtiest burned to boil water to make electricity. The idea of clean coal technology beyond its Madison Avenue birth is flawed. You can't make dirt less dirty. You can only move it somewhere else, like into clean water when you use Tide to remove dirt from your blue jeans. That only makes the jeans clean not the dirt or the water supply where it went.

This part of the Recovery Act is no more than corporate pork, promised by the Obama administration as part of his campaign to the powerful coal extraction industry and the power generation industry it fuels. Carbon sequestration is no more than an attempt to couch the filthy byproduct of a 19th century industry into a more seemingly more palatable. Carbon sequestration is no more than a fancy technological buzzword for a landfill, underground or otherwise, but a landfill none the less.

The great minds of the United States Government and the people they serve and upon whom their futures depend should focus our vast resources on solutions that eliminate inefficient obsolete industries of the past like the coal industry. And instead develop industries that create new jobs in clean industries born of 21st century ideas. Not simply waste hundreds of millions to perpetuate and attempt to make more palatable politically powerful filthy industries of the past like the coal extraction and coal based power generation industries.

These funds instead could and should be used to apply existing scrubber and CO2 ablation technology to the hundreds of dirty coal fired power plants that next to motor vehicles are the largest source of CO2 emissions in North American. Improving this technology and expanding our manufacturing base of it would create jobs would create advanced industrial products that could be exported to the BRISC nations that themselves face the same challenges.

We expected President Obama to be different, forward thinking, a harbinger of change and the future when we voted for him. Now we must demand it. A few thousand new jobs and a few billion in new export dollars instead of gobs of millions of dollars for fanciful research wouldn't be bad either.

Should you wish to contact John Schwam, his email address is, vermontbear@yahoo.com