StoppingClimateChange.com                                                       Fast-tracking  Decarbonization 

 Carbon-captured Fossil Heat or Nuclear Heat + Hydrogen + Biomass System - (Slides) - Dr Charles W. Forsberg .pdf  - Quick slide show explanation.

Recycling air's CO2 carbon into cheap, clean fuels - abstract sketch above - is shown in sketch below using standard industrial equipment to assemble GTL fuel molecules [ GTL ] from gasified biomass to make CO2-neutral fuels.
This is a way to provide mankind with whichever energy is needed, whenever it is needed, in whatever volumes it is needed, at competitive prices. A combination of clean energy producing technologies for stopping Climate Change's growth.  CO2's carbon is an essential component of most modern energy fuels.
The big win is that we change only the fuels, not everything in the world that uses fuels.  Much quicker and cheaper.  For the average person, we won't have to buy electric cars, we can keep air travel, no need for expensive electric heat pumps for our houses. Much quicker, cheaper.

Discussion Pages. >        Introduction        A Quick Tour        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_liquor
Equipment Details. >   1 Unneeded Old Coal Power Plant Site  2 Building A Clean Energy Park  3 Power Plant Choices  4 Hydrogen, Steam Generators  5 Biomass Preparation Equipment  6 Plasma Torch Gasifier  7 GTL Refinery  8 Fuels Description

Decarbonizing Climate Change has two parts: Part 1, Stopping Climate Change's relentless 100 million-ton-per-day CO2 growth by phasing out all fossil fuels.  Part 2, Once we stop adding CO2 to the air, we can begin to suck enough CO2 back out of the air to eventually end Climate Change.
The world's 50,000+ coal power plants and 500+ oil refineries are causing most of this Climate Change.  Shutting them all down and converting about 15,000 of the unneeded coal plants to CLEAN ENERGY PARKS is a FAST-TRACK way to stop Climate Change in about 10 years.  
The oil industry has the ability to do this. (The oil industry is in the fuel business, not the fossil business.) Gas-to-Liquid (GTL) Technology Explained:  Watch video:  https://youtu.be/WYi6NZGAqvY  then, for context, watch:  GTL  
This website is suggesting that mankind continue to use energy dense liquid fuels for vehicles, gas fuels for heating applications. Non-combustion uses of oils continue to be sourced from fossil oil.
ALTERNRG ( https://www.globalsyngas.org/uploads/.../S7-1-Alter_NRG-Walter%20Howard.pdf ) claims combined global waste energy is the equivalent of 239 million bbls/day of liquid fuels if the waste's energy is not used to make the fuels. The world is currently pumping about 92 million bbls/day of oil.

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Carbon Storage and Carbon Capture

       (Left, Click to enlarge.)  CO2 disposal capacities for Michigan counties. (Left) Integral amine carbon captured natural gas (or oil) power plant for powering Clean Energy Parks. 

What is " Carbon_neutrality "?: "Fossil fuel" means we are using the carbon atoms from ancient fossil fuel that was removed from the ground, which, when burned, it's carbon is then dumped into the air forever where most of it accumulates, causing Climate Change. So old it's like it is from another planet.
When a carbon atom is fired in air, it bonds with a couple of air's oxygen atoms, creating carbon dioxide and releasing chemical heat. Adding carbon dioxide to the air causes the air to reflect heat back down to Planet Earth - like a blanket. Eventually, excess heat buildup causes Climate Change.

This website is suggesting instead we use the carbon atoms from plants which removed their carbon from the air to make their cellulose (wood) while growing. When fuel made from cellulosic carbon atoms is burned, these carbon atoms are returned to the air, i.e., creating a carbon-neutral fire.
So the air neither looses nor gains carbon atoms and Climate Change doesn't get worse. When Climate Change's relentless 100 million-ton-per-day CO2 growth is stopped, it then becomes possible to reverse Climate Change by using direct air carbon capture methods to remove CO2 FROM the air.

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 Fast-tracking The Replacement Of Fossil Oil and Gas With Carbon-neutral Oils and Carbon-neutral Gas
Using carbon-captured fossil fuel energy to manufacture carbon-neutral waste-to-fuel energy.  How do we get started?

We need about 15,000 Clean Energy Parks immediately to head off the worst of Climate Change.  We have a head start on obtaining Clean Energy Parks with the growing availability of unneeded coal power plant sites since, worldwide, there will be over 50,000 unneeded coal power plants in the future. The most practical size for conversion to Clean Energy Parks are small to medium sized suburban and rural plants equipped with one or two 50 to 200 megaWatt generating units . Many of the world's coal power plants happen to be located directly above CO2 disposal strata. For example, in Michigan, above, left, perhaps a dozen unneeded Michigan coal power plant sites are located directly above some of the best and safest CO2 disposal geologic strata in the world. All that is needed to sequester the captured CO2 from these plants is to drill a CO2 disposal well straight down on plant property. Nothing could be quicker and cheaper. Many regions of the world have similar geologic strata near population centers

1.Carbon-neutral waste-to-energy feedstock. According to AlterNRG ( http://www.alternrg.com/ ) combined global waste energy is the equivalent of 239 million bbls/day of liquid fuels if the waste's energy is not used to make the fuels. (The world is currently pumping about 92 million bbls/day of oil.) There is a great temptation to burn biomass feedstock to manufacture liquid fuels as is advocated in the BECCS electric energy scenario. This approach overlooks the vastly greater value of carbon-neutral liquid and gaseous combustion fuels for the world's population in general. For the near-term, we still have massive amounts of carbon-captured fossil natural gas and oil energy to make electricity and heat to use to manufacture carbon-neutral liquid fuels. For the long-term, we will soon have a variety of small, better, safer, nuclear fission reactors that, using the proven uranium resources obtainable from seawater, we will be able to manufacture Climate-safe carbon-neutral fuels forever.

2. Molten Salt and Pebble Bed nuclear reactors won't be ready for general use for at least another decade so we will have to begin repowering old coal power plants with carbon-captured natural gas turbines as the initial step.  Gas turbines have been in mass production since about 1940 as jet airplane engines. Every day, about one million ordinary people trust airplanes with their lives.  Either of two gas turbine configurations - conventional carbon-captured natural gas - or, in some parts of the world, oil powered hybrid CO2 - are able to do the job - albeit with a small amount of CO2 emissions. Either of them will prove to have dirt-cheap initial cost compared to early Small Modular Nuclear Reactor (SMRs) facilities.

Standard Turbine/Generator modules equipped with duct heated Heat Recovery Steam Generators (HRSG) are available in a wide variety of sizes for immediate delivery.  They are typically mounted on a standard outdoor concrete pad that can be installed in several months by local building contractors working from standard pad designs from at least 10 different world-class manufacturers who have already made tens of thousands of gas turbines for the world's electricity and aircraft industries.

The carbon-capture systems for both gas and oil burning turbines can be added later if carbon capture is not available at the time of the turbine's installation. A facility such as this will have multiple fire-heated chemical processes so the carbon capture equipment will have to be up-sized to accommodate them as well as the basic turbine powered electricity and heat generating system. Carbon capture equipment could be supplied by one of the more than 20 different global chemical process engineering & construction companies. Some of these E&C companies have been designing and building industrial-scale carbon capture facilities for various fuel and chemical processes since the mid-1930s.
https://www.shell.com/sustainability/environment/climate-change/carbon-capture-and-storage-projects.html 
https://sequestration.mit.edu/tools/projects/index.html    https://sequestration.mit.edu/tools/projects/index_capture.html 
https://www.amecfw.com/services/carbon-capture-and-storage/carbon-capture-and-storage 
http://www.tcmda.com/en/Press-center/News/2018/Major-American-company-will-test-new-technology-for-carbon-capture-at-Mongstad/ 
https://ion-engineering.com/

3. Plasma gasifiers are engineered and built by Alter NRG Corp. Westinghouse Plasma Division and other companies and 15,000 could be mass-produced by highly automated shipyards in Korea and China on the same equipment used to build small ocean-going fishing vessels. The consumable plasma torches are currently being manufactured by Alter (and others) and are currently being used in multiple global facilities as Metropolitan Solid Waste Syngas Generators supplying Syngas to Clean Electricity gas turbine generator power plants.
Check out the United Kingdom's two 1,000 Ton-Per-Day (TPD) Metropolitan Solid Waste (city garbage) MSW Syngas gasifiers in the 2015 Tees Valley Units 1 and 2 project.
  https://www.nrg.com/case-studies/petra-nova.html  (also Plasma Gasifiers)

4. The small Gas-to-Liquid (GTL) fuel refineries have been engineered and are currently being offered to the energy industry by Shell (and others) for fuel manufacture using natural gas feedstock. Over the last several years many different catalytic GTL processes also using Syngas feedstock have also been engineered and patented. Watch Shell's  https://youtu.be/WYi6NZGAqvY  video to the end to see what they have come up with.

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Developed Industries Already Using Gas-to-Liquid (GTL) Technologies

1. Shell Pearl: The world's largest Gas-to-Liquids (GTL) refinery.  https://www.shell.com.qa/en_qa/projects-and-sites/pearl-gtl.html 
Showing what the oil industry could do to abate Climate Change using syngas-to-liquids GTL technologies. Check out Shell's introductory video "What is Pearl GTL?"
This website is about clean Gas-to-Liquids (GTL) fuels. What is GTL? You can go back and also check out Shell's other video "Shell's GTL Technology".

Shell Pearl clearly and simply illustrates the realization that the world's oil industry has the capacity - personnel, know-how, equipment, and economic ability - to rescue the world from much of the growth of Climate Change if the world would make it worth their while.
Global mass production of simple, standardized, trouble-free Clean Energy Parks should bring substantial reductions in cost-per-park along with improved performance and reliability. Think what mass produced cars, airplanes, and ships have made possible.
(Plasma torches break matter down into it's basic atoms for re-assembly into new molecules.  Although rare on earth, plasma (think lightning and Star Trek weapons) is the fourth state of matter. Plasma is the most common form of matter in space.)
Notice the plasma gasifier has a 1,000 tons-of-garbage-per-day appetite so it needs to be located near 1 large or at the intersection between several medium size cities or in a forest near a number of sawmills and paper mills.
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2.  Fulcrum to build second waste-to-fuels plant in Gary, Indiana:  https://www.greencarcongress.com/2018/12/20181214-fulcrum.html 
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    http://plascotechnologies.com/  is using city garbage (MSW) to make electricity now! 
Check out their videos.
3.  Don't let garbage go to waste!   -   Let's not fritter away valuable CO2-neutral syngas by burning it to make electricity.  -  Make carbon-neutral gasoline instead!

Since we are talking about rebuilding 15,000 unneeded coal power plants spread all over the world, great economies - time, cost, initial fabrication, installation, reliability, maintenance, performance - can be realized by standardizing the facility machinery by using the same international equipment harmonization practices that were evolved during World War II between the U.S., Great Britain, and Russia.

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The World Of Fast Tracking Decarbonization
The world has over 50,000 coal power plants. Convert 15,000 unneeded coal power plants into Clean Energy Parks to stop Climate Change.
Even if it cost 1 Billion Dollars for each Clean Energy Park, we are talking about 15 Trillion dollars over 10 years.
15,000 400 megaWatt Clean Energy Parks would produce 6 teraWatts (1 tW = 1 million megaWatts) of electricity. This is about the world's 2014 connected electrical grid capacity ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption ).  [I'm thinking each CEP would have 2 200 mW electrical generators.]

      

 

The entire world is covered with similar coal power plant sites about to be shut down either due to emissions or worn out. We couldn't be more fortunate. 
                                  

(Left) U.S. Coal Power Plant Shutdown Schedule: Red-2000 to 2014, Yellow-2014 to 2050.     (Right) Global Carbon Capture (CCS) Storage Locations.

Here is a small rural coal power plant site scheduled for shutdown that is working very hard to upgrade itself to provide local industry with a cleaner energy industrial park:  https://michiganhub.com/ 
Note: U.S. Supercritical and Ultra Supercritical Thermal (Coal) plants and their sites should be reserved for future carbon capture development and considered out of bounds for Clean Energy Parks.

There are about 50,000 more or less identical coal power plant sites worldwide that could make clean energy manufacturing locations.
No magic to tripling a coal power plant site's power output. Just install a three or more times as powerful carbon-captured gas turbine or modular molten salt reactor (SMR) adjacent to the abandoned old coal equipment.
 

                 
                  Lights = Cities = Coal Power Plants (click)                                Major Oil Refineries (click)                                   Industrial Gasification Facilities (click)

Oil Refinery

                         

                             2016_billion_ton_report_12.2.16_0.pdf (400+ Pages)                                                            Methanol - The Basic Chemical and Energy Feedstock of the Future.pdf                  

The opportunities to rebuild our liquid fuels industries on climate-neutral biomass are staggering.
(If you want economy, buy methanol.    If you want mileage, buy gasoline.    If you want neither, buy ethanol.)

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"Nothing in life is more liberating than to fight for a cause larger than yourself, something that encompasses you but is not defined by your existence alone" - John McCain.

"Technological fixes are often far simpler, and therefore cheaper, than the doomsayers could have imagined." -  ( From Foreword )

The objective of this website is to communicate that the Climate Change crisis is similar to the horseshit crisis described in the Foreword's story and to point out that a solution to the Climate Change crisis can spring from a subset of the existing coal power plants. ________________________________________________________________

Thoughts

1. Energy is a common commodity.   Clean energy fuels must be genuinely cheaper than fossil energy fuels before they will be embraced by the world.
2. Climate Change's growth must be STOPPED before Climate Change can be REVERSED . (We are currently dumping over 100 million tons of ADDITIONAL CO2 into the air EVERY DAY.)
3. Possibly fewer than 1/4 of the world's coal power plants would need to be rebuilt to stop Climate Change's growth from ALL fuel sources. The remaining 3/4 of the coal plants could then be repurposed or shut down.
4. The world's oil industry has the ability to stop the growth of Fossil Fuel Climate Change by building and operating "Clean Energy Parks" to both make electricity and to replace all fossil oil and gas fuels with Carbon-neutral Liquid and Gas fuels.
5. "All the really important mistakes are made on the first day."

 

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This website is based upon the understanding that fossil fuels will always be preferred as long as clean energy fuels are more expensive. Nuclear appears to be the best path to making cheap clean fuels.
Already, there are over 50 different baby nuclear reactors incubating in technology's development nest. You're bound to find several you like. I point out four on this website that are all very different, yet all very desirable for different applications such as producing electricity, extreme heat, hydrogen, desalinated water, and, of course, carbon-neutral combustion fuels.
The world also has over 200 thousand stationary diesel engines in the 2,000 and under horsepower class cranking out electricity and pumping water in rural locations. A swarm of tiny nuclear micro-reactors (outside the scope of this website) are being developed to replace dirty diesel fuel oil-burners.
Would it be worth living with nuclear's problems if that's what it took to end Climate Change's problems? Nuclear is the most powerful clean energy tool available. 
Of the $556.7 million green-leaning foundations spent from 2011-15, “not a single grant supported work on promoting or reducing the cost of nuclear energy.”  https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-change-has-run-its-course-1528152876
If environmentalism's base - such as Sierra Club - really cared about stopping Climate Change, they would have been 100% behind nuclear by 1990. In light of the bad things Climate Change is bringing to the world, their opposition to nuclear is simply criminal.
Nuclear's real danger is what happens when Climate Change causes crop failure, then famine, then mass migrations. Then nuclear weapons will be used to gain and keep control of the world's still-fertile regions regardless of other consequences.

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International Panel on Climate Change: Sixth (2018) Assessment Report:  https://www.ipcc.ch/ 

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Every day we are dumping an additional 100 million tons of fossil fuel's CO2 into the air for no good reason.

(From Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center Q&A):  Q. In terms of mass, how much carbon does 1 part per million by volume of atmospheric CO₂ represent?
A. Using 5.137 x 10¹⁸ kg as the mass of the atmosphere (Trenberth, 1981 JGR 86:5238-46), 1 ppmv of CO₂ = 2.13 Gt of carbon.   [G = Giga, or billion.]
- - - So, 400 ppmv CO₂ = 852 Gt of carbon, or 852 billion tons of carbon, or, times 44/12 for CO₂ to include the weight of the 2 oxygens at 16 each and one carbon at 12 each = 3,124 billion (3.124 trillion) tons of CO_2.
This is why this website is about HALTING the GROWTH of additional CO₂ first, rather than begin by pulling enough existing old CO₂ out of the air to make things right again.

             

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The material presented on this web site was gathered from the internet or a few personal photos over the the last 10 years by a long-retired utility and industrial control systems engineer living mostly on Social Security.  His motivation for building this web site/blog rather than a model railroad is his concern that most of the people making decisions about Climate Change are from academia or politics and quite a few of their Climate Change mitigation solutions - i.e., wind, solar, massive batteries, etc. - display only a superficial awareness of the consequences of thrusting massive amounts of chaotically fluctuating electricity from these sources into the electricity grids powering modern industries located in technologically advanced countries.
Old coal power plant sites, as Clean Energy Parks, would be platforms for industries offering clean energy solutions such as fuel synthesis that need the stable, predictable, no-carbon 24/7/365 electricity and heat available from Carbon-captured and nuclear power plants.

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You have seen what the world's first fast-track Climate Change mitigation web site has to offer.  There must be smarter folks out there with even better ideas.  Let's see them!
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