Energy Summit at UVa-Wise

WISE, Va. – The spill of a billion gallons of coal ash slurry in Tennessee four months ago is more than a mess – it’s also $1 billion lying on the ground, said a speaker at the Energy Technology Summit here Monday.

“If you could take the coal fly ash … and refine it, there’s a billion dollars worth of materials there,” said Larry Austin, a merchant banker who is seeking funding for a “pilot plant” for the technology to separate fly ash into its valuable components.

“We’ve got coal fly ash as a problem; we can turn it into a solution,” he said. “We can use magnesium … to strip out the carbon dioxide and create something more than a waste product that clogs our waterways.”

Austin’s presentation was just one part of the second annual summit at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise. Lean, green and renewable were the concepts of the day.

Energy technology leaders gathered in the heart of coal country Monday to talk about the limitless possibilities for clean energy alternatives.

James Titmas, chairman and CEO of Genesyst International, is another who said there’s money to be made from waste. His company is in the business of processing municipal waste to turn trash into ethanol instead of burying it in a landfill.

“The target is zero waste – you use 100 percent of all the waste that is generated in the community,” said Titmas. “If we make our fuels right in the community rather than buying oil from overseas, it just puts the community that much better off.”

Bristol businessman Ted Cox is seeking to build a plant using Genesyst’s gravity pressure vessel technology in Southwest Virginia, though a location has not been announced.

Wise County officials announced at the conference that they will partner with the Advanced Vehicle Research Center to study converting the county’s vehicles to use alternative fuels – and also their support for the possibility of the center conducting fusion energy research here.

“We are in a pickle,” said Richard Dell, program manager for AVRC, of the nation’s energy situation. “We have a variety of energy sources in our portfolio, and some of them are linked to such issues as terrorism, such as global climate change; we need a way out. Some people like to say that there will be a critical impasse around 2050; I think it’s going to be much sooner than that, and it’s not just energy. ... Fusion can provide the means to address both the greenhouse emissions as well as the issues of more and more energy needs.”

Dell said his research on inertial electrostatic fusion is on a relatively small piece of equipment that would release energy by fusing atoms, but he says public perception about the long history of unsuccessful fusion research is a barrier to the development of this technology, which he says would cost about $30 million.

But, he says, “If in the next six years this technology is developed, boron [the fuel] could become the new coal of the next century.”

A pilot plant for Austin’s coal fly ash project, meanwhile, would cost $10 million to $15 million, he said. In addition to turning the ash into profitable material, it would also produce carbon nanotubes, a form of carbon with a variety of potential technology applications.

Alpha Natural Resources President Kevin Crutchfield spoke abut another issue of the day: mountaintop removal coal mining.

Environmentalists generally refer to all high-elevation surface mining as mountaintop removal; Crutchfield, whose company gets more than 40 percent of its coal from surface mining, pointed out the technical definition is much narrower – and said coal remains important if the U.S. hopes to achieve energy independence.

“At the end of the day, coal’s got to play a part of our energy future,” Crutchfield said. “I think the second biggest question now is as a nation when we implement some of these things that people talk about [to reduce environmental impacts] … the question we have to answer is how much of a cost of living increase are we willing to endure to achieve some of the things that we’re shooting for … and that’s a big question.”

He said if mountaintop mining is stopped in the next few years, it would mean the loss of tens of thousands of jobs – plus loss of the economic development benefits of having flat land created by surface mining.

U.S. Rep. Rick Boucher, D-9th, spoke about efforts in Congress to regulate carbon dioxide emissions without hurting the economy or the coal industry. He said a bill will be ready for consideration in the House this summer.

Since the Supreme Court ruled that carbon dioxide is a pollutant, meaning it must be regulated under current law, action by Congress to regulate it is preferable to control by the Environmental Protection Agency, he said.

Coal will still be a relatively cheap fuel even with the cost of technology to capture and sequester carbon dioxide emissions, the congressman said. And the growth of the electric car industry will mean more demand for electricity, about half of which comes from coal.

He said carbon cap legislation will provide “the largest scale increase in demand for coal of any event since the industrial revolution.”

Not only clean coal, but other sources of electricity will benefit, he said – everything from nuclear to renewables.

“Energy technology is the next economic boom we’re going to have in this country,” Boucher said. “As these technologies are researched, developed, manufactured and then exported all across the globe, this will create millions of jobs, it clearly will be the next technological revolution, it will revive our economy and it will provide for long-term growth in the United States.”

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