Mixing cocktails of innovative technology & free market exchange may offer the best solution to control global warming, while harvesting Illinois' estimated 200 year bounty of fossil fuel energy.

     Comfortably cushioned in the midst of urban creature comforts, it's often hard to imagine the tough decisions facing regulated utilites as nuclear & fossil fuel generating stations join alternative energy cousins to keep the lights on in homes, businesses & schools across the nation. The government scrutinizes utility costs passed on to customers on one hand, while environmental groups appear as the principled ingénue.  

     It's easy to see how such a regulatory & environmental gauntlet might suppresses technological innovation.   

     So as actor Colin Farrell, acting in the role of character Sonny Crockett in the 2006 movie Miami Vice may conclude, "This is the hand which we are dealt." 

     President Barack Obama's Administration has proposed restrict ozone-depleting carbon dioxide through a so-called cap-and-trade tax policy, whild US Senator Dick Durbin have rekindled financial support for the so-called FutureGen "clean coal" project in downstate Mattoon, Illinois.

     On one hand, the cap & trade approach gives big air polluters financial incentive to reduce emissions while allowing them to pay a defacto tax for exceeding emission caps. Some may call it a greenhouse gas tax, however indirect its approach.

     As for the innovative FutureGen project, environmentalists may question the juxtapostion of the words "clean & coal" even as an alliterative pairing. 

     Those opposed to the FutureGen cabon dioxide deep well injection may be surprised to learn that this is a long-standing practice for many chemical process manufacturers before chemical engineers discovered practical use for these effluent streams. Formerly, Allied Chemical drilled hundreds of feet in to the earth just east of this blogger's hometown of Danville to discharge chemical process bi-products. The same chemically resistive fiberglass re-inforced plastic used to drive oil field drilling pumps & hook a child's prized aquatic catch channelled this effluent in to geologic repose.

     Fellow environmentalists may ask why not simply harness that chemical discharge & avoid environmental risks to land, water & air? 

     That's exactly the practical use discovered by researchers since the 1960's when actor Dustin Hoffman, portraying Benjamin Braddock in the movie The Gradute, heard succinct career advice, "plastics." Chicago Southwest suburban Argonne National Laboratories continues research on ways to reduce emissions from burning Illinois high sulfur content coal. 

     While the discharge of effluent streams may once have been referred to as a corporate externality, today, chemical process bi-products often become useful ingredients. An example was the generation-old project which harnessed sulfuric acid discharge from a US Steel manufacturing steel pickling process in New Dravosburg, Pennsylvania. This blogger's former client--the now defunct Chicago-based Hoyer, Schlessinger, Turner--designed a system for K. A. Steel Company, a chemical company which produced a water treatment chemical commonly used to clarify drinking water. In the intervening years, new technologies may have replaced those formerly favored, so much so, that's there's little mention of this process on the former client's Internet web site. It's all part of the nature technogical progression which helped former polluters to find socially acceptable use for what once was a toxic discharge.

     My economically beleagered East Central home may need this stimulative investment even if naysayers may criticize its economic & environmental viability. We may find that it costs more to generate electricity & that my fellow environmentalists may find this technology disturbing. 

     But as with the apprehensive ingénue, the promise of marital bliss may be well worth the near term risks of this perceived dangerous liaison.  

 

Mark Arnold Fredrickson

President

Northwest Area Citizens Organization

 

P.S. This blogger reported on community efforts to block the expansion of surface mining in East Central Illinois during the 1970's & consulted with chemical process engineering & environmental remediation firms serving the food, pharmaceutical & municipal water treatment industry during the 1980's. This blogger's grandfather mined coal using dynamite & carbide lanterns during the Great Depression, proving some to neighbors who couldn't afford to heat their homes.