NEWS RELEASE                                                                                      January 2020

The Opportunistic Antidote to the Climate Change Doomsday Scenario

The U.S. Administration will support a trillion tree planting campaign along with many other nations. However, the U.S. still believes that warming may be caused by solar activity and that increased CO2 levels are a result and not cause of the warming. What if the U.S. government officials are wrong and the doomsday predicters are right?  They say we are reaching a tipping point and it will be difficult if not impossible to prevent the catastrophic floods and fires without immediate cessation of fossil fuel burning.

Fossil fuel elimination will certainly threaten economic prosperity throughout Asia.  If Asian nations are not participants any reductions in Europe and the U.S. will be insignificant.

The solution to this dilemma is a Doomsday antidote which is Opportunistic Biomass Combustion and Sequestration. A UK consortium is already generating a significant amount of its electricity from biomass burning and will be distributing CO2 and hydrogen to industrial facilities and sequestering the remaining CO2 underground.  In Canada the SaskPower Boundary Dam 3 coal fired plant has now supplied 3 million tons of CO2 for enhanced oil recovery.

So there is no doubt that biomass combustion and CO2 sequestration is a legitimate option.  The question is how costly will it be?  It will not be cheap but on the other hand if the doomsday believers are correct then it could be the only option. This biomass combustion/sequestration will “suck the CO2 out of the air”.  Wind and solar are just neutral. So the biomass option is the antidote for the doomsday scenario.

The greater the impending doom the greater the amount of biomass which should be grown, combusted and sequestered.  But to be opportunistic why spend the money if it is not needed.  So the opportunistic approach is to build and retain biomass capable fossil fuel boilers. Should the coal fired boilers being retired in the U.S. be scrapped or should they be mothballed and ready for conversion to biomass firing if needed?

Should utilities reconsider scrapping the coal plants and building natural gas fired units?  Or should they design natural gas fired plants for eventual biomass gasification and sequestration?

Should the Philippines make its new fleet of coal fired boilers biomass ready? It is a major target of the trillion tree initiative. There needs to be an optimization of four  initiatives

  • Tree planting for long term sequestration (hundred years)
  • Biomass fuel growth with the most mass in the shortest amount of time
  • Biomass combustion
  • CO2 use and sequestration

Due to the uncertainties the wise course is to spend modest amounts to make combustion plants ready for biomass combustion while continuing to develop new sequestration strategies including substituting CO2 for water in hydraulic fracturing.

A biomass capable electricity generator becomes the highest ranking choice with wind, solar, hydro and other options falling behind.  Biomass may never be burned but if the doomsday scenario becomes part of the strategy then it is the antidote.

Details on the strategies, projects, and on all coal fired generators around the world are included Utility Tracking System. http://home.mcilvainecompany.com/index.php/databases/42ei-utility-tracking-system