Green Energy Reporter

4 November '09
8:32 AM EST
No Comments

Warren Buffett Goes Long Coal With BNSF… No, Wait…

Is Billionaire Warren Buffett’s $34 billion investment in BNSF railroad actually an investment in coal as the energy of the future?

Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad carries 1/5th of the nation’s coal, principally from the Rocky Mountain West, which contains the Powder River Basin’s low sulfur coal, to the Midwest.

Moving coal accounted for ¼ of BNSF’s revenue through Q3 of 2009.

The Vine’s Bradford Plumer argues that Buffett, knowing the importance of coal for the railroad’s revenue, is thus betting that “coal’s going to remain a major part of the U.S. energy mix for quite some time…”

Reuters’ John Kemp says much the same.

The Economist plays both sides, arguing that Buffett is “doubling down on the carbon-intensive economy.” Wait, no, maybe he’s planning on “weaning BNSF off coal and moving into other freight areas…”

You can see can see how quickly this discussion devolves into incoherence without any guidance from the Oracle of Omaha himself.

And the problem with oracles, as Julius Caesar discovered, is that they’re awfully vague.

Let’s look at the evidence. Read More »

Tagged: Carbon capture and storage, clean coal, Kerry-Boxer, Power River Basin, Warren Buffet

16 July '09
11:01 AM EDT
No Comments

Cleantech

Funding

Obama Administration: Clean Coal is Clean Tech it can Believe in….

On Tuesday the Department of Energy breathed new life into the controversial and expensive FutureGen carbon capture and sequestration project as it announced that it had issued a National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) Record of Decision.

Plowing through the bureaucratic language NEPA is nothing more than a DOE backing of clean coal, despite growing chatter that the technology doesn’t even work.

Alexis Madrigal at Wired explains some of the problems faced by clean coal technology:

One major problem is that no one has actually tried to bury CO2 in huge quantities, or as industry folks would say, at scale. Without real-world testing, it’s hard to know whether it will be possible to scrub the CO2 from our coal plants at a reasonable cost.

Pending a final decision, expected early next year, the government anticipates investing up to $1.073 billion in FutureGen — $1 billion coming from the $740 billion stimulus. The project’s total cost are expected to near $2.4 billion. The test plant will be built in Illinois.

Couldn’t that money be used on cheaper and proven technologies that could be deployed in a much shorter time?

At a panel discussion last spring in Sydney Mark Diesendorf, deputy director at the University of New South Wales’ Institute of Environmental Studies, made just that point when he pointed that carbon storage and sequestration could work but that it would take a long, long time before a test — not an operational — facility goes live.

Watch: