« Peas | Main | Paying the Price for Cheating Democracy »
December 2, 2006
Arizona Public Service and GreenFuel Technologies Recycle Power Plant Flue Gases into Transportation-Grade Biodiesel and Ethanol
Now this is some great news folks! As you recall the GreenFuel folks are the ones that were using the Algae to create Bio-diesel and Ethanol from smoke stack emissions on power plants. Of course this allowed them to cut CO2 emissions from those plants by 40%, not to mention taking upwards of 80% of the sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide out as well and these are components of acid rain as you may recall. These CO2 numbers are much lower than the original test system because it does not have 100% exposure to sunlight and instead uses a circulation system to move the algae in and out of the sunlight causing the lower CO2 intake levels, but that's the price you pay for a retrofit I guess. Maybe in the future we can push those numbers up much higher by building power plants with the GreenFuel technology in mind.
This is where the APS comes in. They've actually been running their 1,060 MW Redhawk power plant in Arlington, Ariz. with this technology attached to it for the last 18 months. I had originally stated that I wouldn't think that any American organization would have the foresight to actually adopt this technology and I stand corrected on that front. The Green Car Congress article doesn't specify how much Bio-Diesel or Ethanol is being produced by the plant, but on their website they speak vaguely about a "1,060 MW combined cycle facility in 2005 in the southwest United States", which sounds pretty close to what the Redhawk power plant would be producing "annual yields of 5,000-10,000 gallons of biodiesel and a comparable amount of bioethanol per acre." Once again we don't know how many acres they have producing algae, so we can't get an exact yield from the plant, but realize that this is all in addition to the production of electricity that is happening at the power plant already. That's the power of the this technology...It allows you to use the same natural gas to generate electricity as before and now you get some amount of Bio-Fuels out as well for running your cars and trucks in America. Not to mention that fact that you're using the CO2 twice and reducing the presence of acid rain causing elements. It's hard to make a case not to require this technology in every power generation plant in America. Once they get into full scale production and we see how it shakes out. I think is definitely something that needs to be written into law. I mean we know the GOP purposely changed the Ethanol plants to use coal so they could cause more pollution with the technology, now we can take their attempt to undermine America and force the plants to use Algae technology allowing us to produce even more Bio-Fuels than before to defeat their buddies in the oil industry.
Energy independence is truly just a few short steps away for America, it's going to take a few years if we drag our feet, which is what we can expect from the Oil company controlled GOP, but we could be free in a very short period of time if we applied our national will to the problem. I have to send a great deal of thanks to the folks at the Arizona Public Service Company, you are taking the first serious step towards saving our country from foreign oil and all its deadly entanglements. Hopefully the rest of Corporate America can try and live up to the high standard you have set.
Read more over at Green Car Congress.
Posted by Jamison at December 2, 2006 6:13 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.daffodillane.com/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/7454