Limitless clean energy from wastewater? Nah, let's stick with clean coal

A Penn State lab has found a mind-blowing way to make hydrogen fuel from wastewater and seawater with no emissions. So why are we spending our billions on the pipe dream of burying the carbon dioxide we make burning coal?

Thu, Sep 22 2011 at 2:50 PM EST

A curvaceous silver Morgan LIFEcar, the prototype of a new luxury coupe, sits beneath trees in a coastal scene

FUEL-STARVED: A Morgan LIFEcar, one of many hydrogen-powered cars awaiting better fuel supplies. (Photo: Dream-car.tv/Flickr)

I’ve written here before about the extraordinary obstacles to change created by the endowment effect — our tendency to place enormous value on those things (and energy systems) we already have all out of proportion to their actual worth, to fear irrationally for the loss of what we have, and to undervalue what could be gained by using something else.

One particularly bothersome aspect of the endowment effect is its unequal distribution: we tend to be especially deeply invested in certain pieces of the status quo, no matter how woefully inefficient or laden with negative side effects. We’ll adopt a new phone or a whole new technological basis for our TVs in a blink — we went from good ole cathode tubes that’d held us in their warm glow for half a century to LED to plasma in less time than it takes a sitcom to reach syndication — but we’ll fight like trapped wolverines to keep everything but cars off our roads.

We’re especially squirrely when it comes to energy. Consider the way we treat the news of exotic future-tense breakthroughs in the energy field. In fact, consider a specific one from just this week: the absolutely mind-blowing news of a new technology developed at Penn State that uses the embodied energy in seawater and garbage to produce hydrogen, which has of course long been touted as a potential replacement for gasoline in our cars’ engines.

The science is of course pretty complicated — few of us have the scientific background to readily parse a sentence like “The key to these microbial electrolysis cells is reverse-electrodialysis or RED that extracts energy from the ionic differences between salt water and fresh water.” But then, few of us really understand how an iPhone’s touchscreen turns our light swipe across it into the deadly parabolic arc of an Angry Bird, but that hasn’t stopped us from dedicating way more time to doing so on any given day than most of us spend contemplating the cosmos.

So really, what we should be paying attention to is Penn State engineering professor Bruce E. Logan’s summation of the value proposition, based on peer-reviewed, technical-journaled research. Which summation is sufficiently Jetsonian that I’m going to boldface it and set it off in block quotes, like so:

This system could produce hydrogen anyplace that there is wastewater near sea water. It uses no grid electricity and is completely carbon neutral. It is an inexhaustible source of energy.

This is the kind of thing that should evoke your best dumbstruck Keanu-esque whoa. This is lightning in a bottle, something for nothing, gold from dross, all that. Now of course it’s also way future-tense, undoubtedly riddled with technical hitches and logistical wormholes and all the other stuff that often stretches the process from lab to marketplace across many years.

On the other hand, it exists. There’s a lab in Pennsylvania where a versatile fuel source is being made from a renewable and currently worthless resource, creating no waste in its production or use, and easily adapted to supply power to a range of devices from long-prophesied fuel-cell cars to Bloom Energy’s boxes that have been setting Silicon Valley’s hearts racing in recent years. This is an actual, functional prototype of a thing that works.

So imagine in my next breath I said that governments around the world — the American and Canadian ones in particular — had decided this was promising enough to dump billions of dollars into bringing it to market and in fact were basically predicating our future energy supply on this new hydrogen production system. I bet even if you’re a cleantech renewables nut like me, that’d give you pause, elicit a whole other genre of whoa, the one from old Westerns that means slow down there, hoss. It would likely strike you as starry-eyed, reckless, a dangerous gamble on an unproven technology to supply us with one of our most vital needs in turbulent times. Right?

Now compare this to our reaction to the phrase clean coal. There is, at this moment, not a single coal-fired power plant anywhere on earth that captures and buries all of its carbon dioxide emissions. There’s one in West Virginia storing away 1.5 percent of its smoke, at a cost of $13 million. (Plans are afoot to expand this to 18 percent, at the low, low price of another $673 million.) Doing so actually reduces the efficiency of the overall plant — you actually have to make more power to compensate for the energy spent hiding the horrifically awful side effect of the energy you need. The Norwegian government has declared sequestration on this scale at natural gas plants to be its equivalent of the Apollo program, and yet the flagship test has abandoned the idea of actually burying all of the emissions at a single plant as too expensive and complex at present, choosing instead simply to try to demonstrate that it would be theoretically possible, which it is having a hard time doing.

There’s ample evidence, in other words, to suggest that clean coal couldn’t possibly be broadly feasible for another generation or more. It may never really be. It is, in fact, much more in the realm of speculation than Penn State’s hydrogen-based perpetual motion machine is. And yet both the Canadian and American governments have sunk billions into it, as has the government of my home province of Alberta. We’ve sleepwalked through the last 20 years, our emissions jumping by 45 percent globally, and a cornerstone of our current strategy to do something about it rests on one day being able to inject our carbon dioxide emissions back into the earth.

Why? Why does clean coal seem so plausible and reasonable to energy bureaucrats and politicians and business leaders when lab-tested, truly gamechanging renewable technologies are treated as cute, peripheral novelties? Simple: vested interests and the endowment effect. The vested interests are theirs — in North America, in particular, our political and business elites are deeply invested in our lucrative, catastrophically destructive status quo — and the endowment effect is ours. They sell us the pipe dream of clean coal because we buy it. It doesn’t challenge the value we’ve invested in the system we’ve got, the one that keeps our plasma TVs aglow and our new mobile phones charged for another round of Angry Birds. It says we’ll stick with what we’ve got and bolt a miracle fix onto it when we need to.

Clean energy from wastewater and the sea upends the status quo; clean coal perpetuates it. Deluded by the endowment effect, we’ll pick the devil we know every time.

Share your thoughts at 140 characters at a time, follow me on Twitter: @theturner.

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coal reports 04/17/2012 04:16 AM

Coal Industry would suggest the commodity isn't going anywhere. Coal reports show if we have to live with it, we may as well reduce the impact of coal and CCS seems to be the best solution found to date. Cherry www.coalportal.com While for some an ideal world would see no reliance on coal statistics to produce electricity,

Radpet 10/17/2011 12:14 PM

It is not enough for the process to produce hydrogen. The H2 must be captured, compressed, and stored, and then converted to a usable energy. Hydrogen molecules are so small that they cannot be easily stored without leaking between the molecular structure of the container. Most of the hydrogen will be dissolved in the water, increasing the pH.

Pragmag 10/22/2011 09:35 AM

Well said. Contrary to hopeful belief, hydrogen is a terribly inefficient fuel source as there's far more to the equation than simply burning it. To store it requires enormous costs that will always offset any benefits over hydrocarbons.

We also shouldn't be too terribly concerned about carbon dioxide. For the most part, oil and coal date back to no earlier than the Cretaceous. This was a time when life flourished thanks to higher carbon dioxide levels. Mammals were abundant and.... More

Radpet 10/17/2011 12:16 PM

That should say decreasing the pH, making it slightly more acidic.

coalportal 10/12/2011 05:34 AM

The use of sophisticated software systems for coal mining that is mostly burnt for power generation and steel production and adds to the greenhouse effect is valid for western countries who may allocate resources and funds to alternative and more greener sources of power. Some of the alternatives may be "safer" than the traditional mines. Unfortunately, coal statistics show developing economies are more likely to increase their use of thermal coal & metallurgical coal in coming years.... More

Dwight 10/10/2011 14:48 PM

There is a very simple way for all of you who believe that this is the cure to all the energy and enviornmental problems to put this into action. Take all your savings and retirement acounts as well as anything you can borrow on your house and invest it into a company I am sure the writer will be willing to form and put his money into and develop this idea, That is what people normally do to get a business going. If you arent willing to bet what you have on it then dont expect someone else.... More

TampaDan 10/10/2011 14:09 PM

I wish the term "clean coal" was eradicated from existence. Thre is no such thing as clean coal. Extraction involves blowing the top off of a mountain, strip mining vast expanses, or mines that produce black lung disease. Localized-destruction coal might be more accurate.

LoisT 10/10/2011 09:18 AM

I searched for some kind of credential for Chris Turner that would qualify him as an expert in anything related to sustainable energy. I got nothin'. So when he says something like, "the science is of course pretty complicated — few of us have the scientific background to readily parse a sentence like..." what he is saying is HE doesn't have the scientific background to understand what he's talking about. Plus, it seems that he thinks the choice for energy is either coal or exotic.... More

Les 10/10/2011 11:23 AM

Thanks for the reasearch. I have always said... "consider the source"

Chris_Turner 10/10/2011 11:53 AM

Consider the source indeed. In classical logic, this is known as an ad hominem argument and is not generally thought to be a strong tactic.

My credentials, for the record, are mostly as a journalist with 15 years' experience and nearly all of those on the climate/energy/tech beat. You think rocket scientists write their own press?

pristine2 10/10/2011 00:15 AM

Great idea, exploiting the energy differential between seawater and fresh water. Inexhaustible? In theory, I suppose. But how much energy are we talking about, realistically? Enough to power a consumer-industrial society? No possible way. Tally up the joules and bitter truth will become clear. There simply is no easy replacement for that incredible C-H bond in fossil fuels, which represent tens of millions of years of concentrated solar energy we can consume in a glutinous instant. We will use.... More

Les 10/10/2011 11:13 AM

Replacing only 1 barrel of foreign (Arab) oli makes it worth it.

tallone 10/09/2011 23:10 PM

Our present came from people's dreams in the past. Many of
those dreams were called pipe dreams, in other words foolish.
Some were, but others led to great discoveries, and inventions,
which we take for granted today.
We need our thinkers and dreamers for the future .

Enter your name 10/09/2011 23:06 PM

LP gas conversion for my 1977 Chevy Pickup. Suckers. lol

CWA 11 10/09/2011 23:00 PM

LIKE YOUR GAME PLAN AND LOVE THE MORGAN SHOW'S SOME SEMBLANCE OF A GENTELMAN'S CARRAGE. PLEASE TAKE DR. BRUCE OVER TO SEE BILL GATES HE HAS MONEY AND KNOWS HOW TO MARKET YOUR IDEA AND SAVE THE PLANIT. GOOD LUCK~

Martin 10/09/2011 23:00 PM

Why isn't this technology getting governmental support ? Because every single American politician at the national level is absolutely corrupt and owned by the corporations. Do you really thing Exxon, Shell and the rest want this technology to exist ? Of course not they would largely be finished. The would no longer be able to gouge vast fortunes from the public and pay ZERO taxes in this country.

That's right, the oil companies typically pay zero taxes becuase of the foreign tax credits.... More

Yep 10/09/2011 22:50 PM

Nuclear is our only alternative for low cost domestic engery. Soloar, wind etc.. will not provide a sustainable base for energy which is the foundation of our lifestyle.

Anonymous 10/09/2011 23:41 PM

Nope. Nuclear creates more problems than it solves. "Our lifetstyle" is not "sustainable" at the current rate of energy consumption.

Clean Energy Please 10/09/2011 22:17 PM

$36 BILLION dollars in loan guarantees for more nuclear this year. We'd all be much better off if that money was spent on renewables + truly CLEAN energy. www.enenews.com

smitvict 10/09/2011 22:06 PM

Maybe spending a few sentences talking about energy density of seawater / wastewater conversion and then energy density of coal. That point will explain why more energy (pardon the pun) is put into clean coal.

Dalton 10/09/2011 21:46 PM

But there you go too. You spent all your time talking about Clean Coal instead of telling us about this new technology. surely there is a way to explain it beter than this.

disco_fever 10/09/2011 21:44 PM

The author spent all that time talking about the benefits of such a thing and comparisons to iphones but nothing to the hurdles of the tech in question. Why did you just gloss over it? I could sit here and rattle off at least 20 different technologies that sound like the answer to everything because I have read about them in stories just like this. Do we really want billions of our taxdollars going to every single pipe dream that a Penn State proffessor thinks is easy? Give us a little.... More

JeffinIL 10/09/2011 18:47 PM

Simple Answer: Penn State isn't spending millions lobbying governments for the money.

Concerned Albertan 10/09/2011 16:56 PM

The futurist Joel Barker, noted for his work on the social psychology of paradigms, would no doubt recognize your endowment effect as paradigm paralysis. New paradigms come from the margins and are stoutly resisted by strong institutionalized entities. The clean energy alternative meets Barker's rule that when a paradigm shifts, everything goes back to zero. We can always hope.

joel 10/09/2011 16:48 PM

You've misrepresented the state of carbon sequestration. It's considerably more advanced than you've suggested. All that's missing is a cost on emitting carbon into the atmosphere and the coal plants will start implementing it.

You've also misrepresented this "clean energy from wastewater." What you're suggesting instead is a system that if you bother reading the paper requires an electricity source. It's a more efficient way of performing electrolysis, but it's still.... More

Anonymous 10/09/2011 23:46 PM

I read the abstract (http://www.pnas.org/content/108/39/16176.short), and you're wrong at the other extreme. The process they've developed using salinity differential across membranes generates it's own charge, and only needs a small boost to produce hydrogen. I'd like to see more complete calculations of the EROEI of the process, and if it can be scaled up to commercial.... More

gremlin96 10/09/2011 15:56 PM

looks like the next step would be to build a power plant. start with a small one and keep building biger one unill he can run a small town or large city. untill then its just a modle that works.

Anonymous 10/09/2011 14:39 PM

Alberta invests a lot of money in carbon sequestration because pumping carbon in the ground repressurises oilfields that still have a few more barrels tucked away. It has absolutely nothing to do with environmentalism. That's just lip service.

jackieanne 10/09/2011 10:05 AM

Despite all the naysayers, we converted our home to geothermal energy for heat and never regretted it for a moment. Let's face it, The oil and coal barons own congress and the Senate, our last president and vice-president both were deeply tied to that industry. Do you really think they are going to allow a new technology to replace their stranglehold on our economy?

endofchapter 10/09/2011 08:40 AM

If these alternatives were affordable our whole family would be all over them. We have looked into 'sustainable' energy options in the remodeling of our home. It isn't even like it costs a little more. It is unattainable for the average family. If anyone/company needs test homes, we will gladly volunteer but until the cost to convert comes down, be careful who you are accusing of holding on to the old.

greylock 10/08/2011 22:53 PM

It's easy to come up with a new whizzbang, cure-all technology.

It's hard to prove it on a small scale and then prove the scale up works.

Unless you are a total idiot - you do NOT walk away from what demonstrably works until you have PROVEN that there is - in actual PROVABLE fact - a viable alternative.

Lenster 10/08/2011 13:34 PM

Extracting hydrogen in a cheap fashion is great. My chemistry teacher 40 years back predicted anyone to do this will become infamous.
In the meantime there are clean alternatives that seem to be hidden from public view.
I heard about Polk Power Station in the Tampa, Fl area some time ago on NPR. It burns gasified coal and exceeds emmision standards. The pollutants are extracted in the gasifieng process, and much of which is sold off to industry for producing materials such as.... More

Les 10/10/2011 11:20 AM

Emission standards for coal are still not good. Just because they meet a "standard" doesn'tt mean they are not polluting.

Tom 10/08/2011 11:59 AM

This all well and good. But I assume this is another technology that is "down the road." We need to keep the lights on TODAY, sir. And clean coal and traditional methods of burning coal with TODAY's AQCS systems such as scrubbers, SCR and SNCR systems, low-Nox burners, carbon injection, and fabric filters allow coal to be burned with well over 90% of the dangerous emissions removed from the flue gas stream. Not to mention the fact that the US is the Saudi Arabia of coal. We cannot afford to.... More

Enedelia 10/08/2011 11:52 AM

Because the familiar - no matter how bad - is familiar. Same reason people stay in bad relationships. The known - even if bad - is not as scary as the unknown.

George 10/07/2011 16:11 PM

Because the new fangled stuff never works at scale for a cost that is competitive and without causing other problems. The scientists announce a breakthrough that might be better in the future, but that imagined future never arrives.

M 10/09/2011 09:13 AM

many times because there is inadequate funding to pursue new technology. Seems we would rather stay on course and pollute our environment then invest in alternative energy sources.

Germany already produces ~ 25 % of their electricity with solar energy - and this will double in 10 years. China and Japan are becoming leasers in solar while this country spends tens of billions in oil subsidies each year.

Anonymous 10/10/2011 00:08 AM

Germany does NOT produce a 1/4 of its electricity from solar. That figure is pure invention. While it would be nice if that were true, it simply isn't.

mouse 10/07/2011 15:59 PM

the problem isn't developing 'new' tech to solve our energy problems, there are systems in place now that could do the job quite nicely the problem is the established systems can make more with the systems they have or, in a few cases, are working to provide than they can with alternatives. this is primarily because point of use generation, which in most applications is the best way to go, entirely cuts out the big industries built around distributed energy.

the bloom box concept along.... More

gremlin96 10/09/2011 16:02 PM

the bloom box can run off of natural gas. witch can be ready made from sewage. the problem is getting citys to trun there sewage in to methane. then, use that for power plants or if its a small city to run the sewage plants and use it as compressed gas to run busses and city non-emergancy cars and trucks.

Doug 10/07/2011 13:55 PM

You're comparing a laboratory experiment with a production pilot? Talk about intellectual bankruptcy. Both ideas are probably bad, but you can't compare them at this time.

BTW most of the increased emissions you cite are nowhere near North America. You're thinking of China, which already surpasses the US. US emissions have been flat for a decade.

Charles B. Naumann 10/07/2011 13:12 PM

Electricity is electricity. We not stuck on coal or anything else. If there is a new proven process that can produce cheap electricity if should have no probem finding financial backers.

Deathstalker 10/07/2011 13:05 PM

The main problem is not creating the energy we can do that in many methods. The problem is creating the cars that need that type of energy. We have the supply but no demand. Create the demand then the supplies will be found. Hydrogen powered cars are very expensive to make right now. That does not mean we should not make them but it takes lots of money. Our government has the power to fix this but the coportations that love oil prevent it. This is the problem with our country and our economy.... More

Bill 10/07/2011 10:42 AM

The large energy related corporations are jumping on the bandwagon of the so-called "green" power projects because they can make more money from subsidies and grants from within the D.C. beltway than they can from actually working.

Concern 09/28/2011 17:59 PM

We don't need limitless energy, we need less people.
Too many people view more efficient "less polluting" systems as a way to use more energy and pollute the same.

Also this method, if used on a large scale turns fresh water into your energy resource, that is a scary thought, *yes waste water is fresh water* - mix fresh water with salt water what do you get? diluted salt water, an estuary if you will, remember how well desalinization works? horrible, this means more waste water.... More

Fred Flintstone 10/07/2011 13:02 PM

Would you care to be the first volunteer to become "less"?

Tony M 09/26/2011 11:45 AM

We don't just have the endowment effect; there's also "perpetual disappointment." I can remember reading in school books, written during the 70s, that tidal power, electric cars, and cheap solar panels were going to revolutionize American life. Yet, even now, they haven't. Inventors have been promising cheap, clean, abundant power since long before I was born, and not one has ever delivered. It's not easy to believe new claims, no matter who from.

Artifex 10/07/2011 11:10 AM

Yes, that is the old "where is my flying car" argument. But it misses the point the author is trying to make - those are disruptive technologies (to resurrect an old phrase) and are not funded or supported in any way close to the way we fund and support more entrenched, possibly inferior, known technologies. We may take short term runs at it when the situation forces us to (oil embargo, gas crises, etc) but without the familiarity of entrenched technologies they don't have the stability.... More

Anonymous 10/09/2011 19:42 PM

Too many crooks running the oil companies keep any kind of new energy from being developed. Get rid of these crooks and watch new energy flourish!

Robert 10/07/2011 12:42 PM

Is it CHEAPER per Mw? Storage for electricity and hydrogen are neither easy nor cheap. Every time you move electricity you lose some, and unless the hydrogen is liquified storage won't scale easy. Coal, oil, gas etc have higher enegery density and stable long lasting storage. The storage system for electricity (batteries) has not changed much in the 150 years they have been around. Different materials are used, but effectively the same principal and process for storage because there hasn't.... More