First a slight mea culpa. A gentleman from an Advance Gasification Publication emailed me and took me to task for being a “know nothing” blogger. Is that great or what! He pointed out that my description of Gasification was flawed. On each Blog I put up all kinds of site addresses like Wikipedia and others so that people can “click and read” about any subject I Blog about if they wanted to. I do not view myself as a babysitter. Google being what it is (or any other search engine for that matter) I don’t even really have to put up the links. A reader can just type in the subject and get a list sources for their own selves. I do it to make it easy for people to READ about what I am writing about and to show the sources I am using.
If you go to the site below you can see the gentleman in all his indignant fury:
http://gasification-igcc.blogspot.com/
For the record the hydrogen to run the plant come from electrolysis like catalytic effect from steam heated in part by the coal. Also for the record this is a dumb way to generate electricity, almost as dumb using coal to make steam. Solar is more direct and more efficient than this crap ever could be. Also for the record, I try to write for the normal Joes and Jackies in the world. The only thing they care about is that the “lights come on when they flip the switch” and the health of their children. It’s the health and welfare of their children and their grand children where this whole project falls apart.
Back to DWI. Illinois is a real bad place to put a Commercial Toxic Waste Deep Well Injection Site and that is what Tenaska is trying to do. The Energy Portion of the Project is In One Sense is a smokescreen. If they get their financial way and get around regulation of the site By the ICC By declaring it an Independent Power producer AND pass Legislation Mandating the Purchase of the Power by Illinois Utilities then they could make a fortune. More on that later. Trust me much more. But lets say, for the moment that RATE BASING a 2 Billion $$$ Power Plant ain’t happening and that a 2 Billion $$$ Power Plant will be “Too Expensive To Meter” What’s the game here?
There are only 5 Commercial Toxic Waste DWI’s in the nation:
http://www.ehso.com/cssepa/tsdfdeepwells.php
As you can see they all sit atop spent or partially spent rock trapped oil fields. Though there is no evidence that these sites are fool proof they at least have the intellectual possibility of succeeding. Most of the other Non-Commercial Toxic Waste DWI sites that are usually operated to get rid of human waste and wastewater have proved troublesome at best.
http://www.stopthetoxicwells.com/
http://eelink.net/EJ/well.html
Their failure rate for something that was supposed, “to solve the waste problems” in the US have not worked out so well.
When you look at Illinois, which has 3 major rivers the Mississippi, the Wabash and the Illinois, and a soft coal-filled Center:
then putting a Commercial Toxic DWI right in its center seems unjustified. But think about this for a moment once it is open who else might dump their Toxic stuff there as well? It is widely rumored in the Environmental and Energy communties that the only reason that Governor Jim Doyle of Wisconsin signed as a “supporting Governor” is that he believes he could ship some of his States sequestered carbon here. This is what a proper sequestration system in North Dakota looks like:
www.netl.doe.gov/…/
Build a PIPELINE to the nearest stone encased oilfield. Hint: It’s not in Illinois.