eieioAn absolutely fantastic article ... it is a helluva long...

eieio

An absolutely fantastic article ... it is a helluva long read but it is rivetting imo and gets to the crux global energy security.

In a perverse way, the universe is working with Cougar investors in brutally shutting the door (for now) on Kingaroy and opening a gateway to China and (in space travel parlance) a "worm hole" to the world.

Len's strength is his unwaivering determination to succeed with UCG ... a determination that would be well received and matched by the Chinese.

Below are a few sequential but disjointed quotes (all in italiics) from the article ... http://zoomdr.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-future-of-clean-energy-is-dirty.html ... that sum things well for me.

If America doesn't get it, then it can't be a surprise that the Qld Govt, other State Govts and the Australian Federal Govt don't either ... as sad as that is.

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"You can think of China as a huge laboratory for deploying technology", the official added. The energy demand is going like this (his hand mimicked an airplane taking off) and they need to build new capacity all the time. They can go from concept to deployment in half the time we can, sometimes a third. We have some advanced ideas. They have the capability to deploy it very quickly. That is where the partnership works.

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... the "cleanest" of the emerging pre-combustion coal technologies� "underground coal gasification" ... It leaves in the ground much of the carbon, sulfur, nitrogen, and other elements that create greenhouse gases and other pollutants when coal is burned. "And this can be very cheap," Sung told me. "You don't have to mine the coal. You don't have to send men underground or haul coal around or dispose of ash. All the dirty stuff stays buried "Because of these and other savings, he said, coal used this way could match or beat the price of today" standard dirty power plant.

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David Mohler, Duke's chief technology officer, was one of the first visitors and most frequent return travelers. "We learned that China is preparing, by 2025, for 350 million people to live in cities that don't exist now" he told me. "They have to build the equivalent of the U.S. electrical system "that is, almost as much added capacity as the entire U.S. grid" by 2025. "It took us 120 years." Rogers, Mohler, and the company as a whole moved quickly from being impressed or frightened by Chinese growth to determining how they could work with it.

"We realized there was no way we could duplicate their speed, the scale, or the constancy of energy policy within the United States," Mohler said. "So we wondered if we could find Chinese partners to work with in applying these clean technologies, so we could bring the benefits of their speed and scale back to the United States."

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But China's very effectiveness and dynamism, beneficial as they may be in this case, highlight an American failure, failure that seems not transient or incidental but deep and hard to correct.

The manifestation of the failure is that China is where the world's "doing" now goes on, in this industry and many others. If you want to learn how the power plants of the future will work, you must go to Tianjin or Shanghai, or Chengdu� to find out. Power companies from America, Europe, and Japan are fortunate to have a place to learn. Young engineers and managers and entrepreneurs in China are fortunate that the companies teaching the rest of the world will be Chinese.

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The deeper problem is the revealed difference in national capacity, in seriousness and ability to deliver. The Chinese government can decide to transform the country's energy system in 10 years, and no one doubts that it will. An incoming U.S. administration can promise to create a clean-energy revolution, but only naifs believe that it will.

"The most impressive aspect of the Chinese performance is their determination to do what is needed," Julio Friedmann told me. "To be the first, to be the biggest, to have the best export technology for cleaning up coal." America obviously is not displaying comparable determination and the saddest aspect of the U.S. performance, he said, is that it seems not deliberate but passive and accidental, the product of modern America's inability to focus public effort on public problems.

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Dex