Coal Fired Power Plants...

This is more of a national problem but I will focus on how it affects Ontario since I live close to the Nanticoke generating station. The amount of CO^2 being produced from coal fired hydro plants is astonishing and Nanticoke is #1 on the list of polluters overall. I remember reading somewhere that if you were to shut down Nanticoke that it would be the equivalent to taking 6 million cars off the roads of Ontario. (I will post the link later if I can find the story referencing that number) Now that is just a massive number and it sounds great in theory to be able to do. However the problem is where then do we replace that power generation? Any viable projects I have read about would take nearly a decade to complete. So basically what that leaves us with is, "Is there a viable solution to reduce the output that could be completed relatively quickly?"

I think the solution could found from a company by the name of GreenFuel Technologies Corp. You absolutely have to check these guys out. The technology seems to good to be true but to sum it up briefly, basically they use scrubbers to harvest the CO^2 coming out of smoke stacks and use it to grow a variety of Algae that in turn can be converted into a bio fuel and then further process into ethanol to be used to power cars. This would be like double dipping from burning coal, not only would you get the electricity generated but you'd end up with a lot of bio fuel when you were all said and done. They say that as much as 40% of the CO^2 can be repurposed into the algae, with the Nanticoke plant alone that would be like taking 2.4 million cars off the road. This is a significant number by any measure (imagine taking every car in Toronto off the road). Also based on their ratio of approx. 100 million gallons of bio fuel per 1,000 megawatts of generation at a coal fired plant, extrapolating that over Nanitcokes 7,500 megawatt production means that Nanticoke would also produce approx. 750 million gallons of bio fuel a year (which could simple be added to gasoline at the Esso plant next door to make e10 or what ever those ethanol/gas mixes are called). So overall the environment would be benefiting twice from this green solution, not to mention how much closer it would get us to complying with the Kyoto protocol.

I'll finish it with an interesting little mathematical evaluation.

In 2003, the province of Ontario consumed approx. 15.5 billion litres of Gasoline. If you convert the 750 million gallon possible output into litres, you get approx. 2.8 billion litres. So right now Nanticoke supplies about 25% of Ontario's hydro. With this modification, at it's current level of operation, it would not only supply the 25% of hydro we, Ontario, needs, but it would produce 40% less CO^2 while also supplying nearly 20% of our gasoline requirement. If that's not wow enough for ya, I don't know what is.