EXECUTIVE SESSION
NOMINATION OF JOHN G. ROBERTS, JR., TO BE CHIEF JUSTICE OF THE UNITED STATES--Resumed
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
COAL ENERGY
Mr. NELSON of Florida. Mr. President, I have stated that each day we are in session I am going to try to rise in the Senate to speak about the dependent condition we find ourselves in on foreign oil. Some 58 to 60 percent of our daily consumption of oil comes from foreign shores. This is not a good position for the United States. No matter how much we sounded the alarm bells over the past several years, it is hard to shake the powers that be out of our collective lethargy, to break this stranglehold that oil has running through our economy. And it has led us to our dependence on oil for well over a majority of our daily consumption.
That is not a good position to be in for the defense of our country's interests where we have to protect the free flow of oil to all of the very oil-thirsty world. A lot of those sealanes coming out of the Persian Gulf region look to the United States for the military protection to keep those lanes open so oil can flow.
Clearly, we ought to, after the reminder of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, be on the journey quickly to weaning ourselves from the dependence on this oil. That means the collective will of this Nation to come together in a major project, like a Manhattan Project or an Apollo Project. In other words, the moonshot of this decade ought to be weaning ourselves from dependence on foreign oil, as going to the Moon as a result of the Apollo Project was to the decade of the 1960s.
Each day I am going to try to chronicle a new technology so that we can do that. Today I will talk about coal gasification, specifically coal-based integrated gasification. It is otherwise called combined cycle technology.
Our Nation has an abundance of coal. The United States has the largest proven coal reserves of any Nation in the world. At the current production levels, U.S. coal reserves should last over the next 250 years. That is the good news; the bad news is coal's high carbon content relative to other fossil fuels so that in the burning of it, it releases significant quantities of carbon.
Right now, coal combustion, the burning of coal, accounts for more than one-third of the world's carbon emissions. Those emissions in the air is what we do not want.
I will never forget being in Beijing, China, in the year 1981 in the dead of winter, January of that year. The city of Beijing was shrouded in black smog that was a result of the coal dust settling over that city because the primary source of heat was the burning of coal, with no attention to the emissions that allowed all of those particulates to go into the air. The last time I visited Beijing, about 2 years ago, after the dead of winter, I must say they have cleaned up their environment quite a bit, but they still have a ways to go.
We know the negatives with regard to burning coal. Now let's look on the positives; that is, coal gasification or coal-based integrated gasification combined cycle technology has much lower pollutant emissions, and it holds great promise. Only two such plants exist in the United States today. One of them is in my State of Florida. It is run by Tampa Electric Company. I commend TECO for being one of the leaders in this country. My State of Florida is going to have another IGCC plant--that is coal gasification--by 2011, through the Orlando commission and the Southern Company. I thank those two companies for being leaders.
This is the technology: First, the coal is gasified using a chemical process rather than just the burning of coal to generate a synthetic gas--or what we call a syngas, synthetic fuels--that is mostly composed of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Then that synthetic gas is used to fuel a combustion engine, a turbine, and the exhaust heat is employed to produce steam for power generation and for gasification. The process has the potential to be both cleaner and more efficient than just the burning of coal in a steam boiler which is done to make electricity, and it generates considerable waste heat in the traditional burning of coal that then leads to the release of a myriad of undesirable emissions.
In contrast, coal gasification isolates and collects nearly all of the impurities, including mercury and a large portion of the carbon, before the combustion. So those things are not going to be emitted into the atmosphere. The coal is gasified with either oxygen or air, and the resulting synthetic gas or syngas is cooled, cleaned, and fired in a gas turbine, and the hot exhaust from the gas turbine passes through a heat recovery steam generator where it produces steam that drives a steam turbine.
Theoretically, the steam gasification process can be applied to any low-quality carbonaceous feedstock. The progress in developing this technology also raises interesting possibilities with respect to the future of biomass--either alone or in combination with coal--for electricity production. This has a lot of promise.
This whole process, called IGCC, could also be utilized for something called polygeneration. That is co-producing other high-valued products in addition to electricity using gasification.
Gasification could be used to produce ultraclean synthetic fuels from coal, and biomass. Carbon dioxide capture and storage would have to be developed to address the climate change issues coal-based synthetic fuels pose.
But the long and short of it is, these synthetic fuels are inherently superior to crude-oil-driven hydrocarbon fuels. This would help us in the transition to more energy-efficient technologies, such as compression-ignition-engine hybrid electric vehicles.
We could exploit our country's huge coal reserves in an environmentally responsible way. The economic and reliability challenges certainly still exist before these kinds of plants become more readily abundant. And the CO 2 carbon capture and storage must be perfected.
Those are all challenges we must meet. But it is a promising technology that would provide the United States with an alternative to electricity produced from natural gas and a way to set us on a course to wean ourselves from dependence on foreign oil.
Mr. President, I will continue to speak out on all of the alternatives in which we can try to sever our dependence on foreign oil.
I yield the floor.
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