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The Clean Fuel Symphony
| Article
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20652 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
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10 / 1992 |
2,737 Words |
| Author
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Meyer Steinberg
Mayer Steinberg is a senior chemical engineer at Brookhaven
National Laboratory in Upton, New York. |
From container ships on the ocean to cars on the highway, computers in the office, and homes that are warm in the winter and cool in the summer, modern society runs on energy extracted from fuels harvested from inside the earth.
Humanity releases prodigious amounts of energy by burning coal, oil, and natural gas. Yet in burning these fuels, we also release such prodigious amounts of carbon dioxide gas that the delicate balance of global temperature may be threatened. [See "The Science and Politics of Global Warming," THE WORLD & I, July 1992].
Growing public concern that carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels may be contributing to a global warming puts a spotlight on the multitudinous ways in which fossil fuels are burned. The glare of this spotlight sets the stage for a serious rethinking about fundamental approaches to harvesting the rich energy contained in the fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels are composed primarily of hydrocarbon molecules whose hydrogen and carbon atoms break apart and combine with oxygen if they are exposed to heat and oxygen. The primary products of this reaction are heat, which is the usable energy; water vapor; and carbon dioxide gas.
Yet the three forms of fossil fuel--coal, oil, and natural gas--each have distinctly different physical characteristics. Not only do each of them look and feel different, but also burning each of them produces different amounts of heat, water, carbon dioxide, residues, and pollutants. Although coal is the most abundant of the three fossil fuels, it also has been the least desirable from an environmental viewpoint, because it produces the most carbon dioxide for unit of heat released, and it also produces the most residues and pollutant gases.
Vast sums of money have been spent in devising better methods of extracting energy from coal, and considerable progress has been made in gaining control of the residues and gaseous pollutants from coal combustion. [see "Clean Coal Technologies," THE WORLD & I, January 1989]. However, the concern about the amount of carbon dioxide produced is a whole new dimension that has only recently been addressed peripherally by the clean coal technologies.
The fuel behind the Industrial Revolution
Toward the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, coal was mainly used to
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