Wait, I know why. It’s Chile beating Argentina for the first time in 30-something years.

Anyway, no segue for me.

Unfortunately we are heavily reliant on coal at the moment. And yes we should reduce our reliance on all carbon fuels. But realistically in this economy, we need to rely on coal still, and we should consider using this resource more efficiently. Carbon credits are a great idea, but Ultimately we still need technologies like UCG. Technologies like UCG should replace conventional coal producing facilities. Its tested, it works, we should use everything in our power to try to reduce carbon emmissions. Everything! And get ourselves seperated by the control of OPEC.

Who knows going forward, technologies could be created to turn CO2 into rocks(Solids) which would make this technology a contributer to the building industry as well. UCG at present has the potential to produce Fuels/Raw energy/Plastics/Fertilisers.

Cheers.

John: Waddaya mean it enables carbon sequestration? That’s like saying eating rancid food enables vomitting. Please demonstrate where the carbon emissions are reduced with this technology, in the absence of the as yet unavailable sequestration implementation, on the China scale we are talking here.

From an Ambre ( who want to do coal to fule in felton, a coal champion, but almost honest) corporate document:

While the technology for capturing pure CO2 from syngas is well advanced, the technology associated with geosequestration of CO2 requires further development. There is much confidence about the ultimate prospects for low-cost commercial geosequestration, but during this “gap”, coal gasification plants will have no option but to purchase carbon pollution permits.

For “much confidence”, read “desparate yearnings”

I certainly wouldn’t want to live on top of one of these CO2 timebombs if it should ever go off, even if it was really a go-er to do in the first place, not just a bit of hand waving in a prospectus.

There’s a lake somewhere in africa where a natural CO2 resevoir burped and it killed I dunno how many folks for I dunno how many miles around. It’s like saying the house is clean by sweeping prawn shells under the carpet.
I’m no expert but, and correct me if I’m wrong, but coal is pretty much carbon about as dense as it can get. As each carbon atom becomes CO2, adds 2 oxygens, it must get bigger. Even if you could make the CO2 as dense as the coal from whence it came, it has to be a bigger in aggregate. That’s if you could make high temeprature solid co2. It just can’t fit back down the hole from which it was dug, the idea is not sustainable.
The opportunity cost of devoting huge resources into the fantasy which defies first principles might build a few careers and speculator fortunes and create a lot of column inches, but it would be better spent on solutions that weren’t predicated on geologic yesterdays’ fixed sunshine, but today’s and tomorrow’s.

Coal mining should be phased out. New mines should be not allowed.

I dunno about considering the state of the world economy as a justification, but the state of the queensland economy i see: broke, gutless and clueless, all it’s eggs in one black basket. It used to have the great barrier reef as a drawcard, but unless there’s a market for Big Mistakes as a perverse attraction, dead coral covered in the slime resulting from excess nutrient runoff of agriculture is unlikely to be a basis for a future tourism industry.

Now if we were growing algae purposively, with multiple growth and reproduction control features genetically engineered in, that massively fixed Co2, used saline waters, scavanged those fugitive nutrients, and fed into a process like the LS9 one, with green diesel as the output, that sort of industry I could get behind. We got the sunshine.

Course, some eggs are gonna have to get broken for this custard, and some local ecology would be sadly trashed, but as i say it would be local, not like the global enviro-pox uber-coal will inevitably create.

My vote is the Gulf of Saint Vincent, or is it spencer Gulf, whichever has Kangaroo Isalnd in it’s mouth. Adelaide’s on it’s last legs anyway waterwise, just leave a skeleton crew.Sometimes at semaphore the natural seaweed load was pretty whiffy anyway, it’s not like the phenomonon was new there. Lake Eyre is below sea level, maybe we could just back fill it with sea water and inoculate. Plenty of sun out there, and all those dead birds as a nitrogen source, she’d go gangbusters, .

Or Moreton Bay.

But most likely China will put their hand up to be the Arabs of Green Oil industry. Remember the algal bloom at Qingdao for weeks before the olympics that almost shut the sailing down? Like that. Too easy.