Word: coal
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This church (pictured above), near Megalopoli in Greece, used to be part of a village. By the time British photographer Stuart Franklin visited and took the picture in 2007, work crews had leveled the other buildings and scraped out the earth to extract lignite (brown coal), used to fuel a nearby power station. The crews were too superstitious to destroy a holy place, a guide told Franklin. Far above the new ground level, the edifice is now inaccessible...
...deal with the additional demand created by electric cars would simply be to build more power plants. That would be expensive, however, and, if the additional plants burned coal or natural gas, bad for climate change. A better solution: tap into the enormous extra capacity of the grid during off-peak times, like between midnight and dawn. According to a study by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, off-peak capacity could support the conversion of 73% of the current auto fleet - enough to cut demand for oil in half - without the addition of a single extra plant, provided the cars...
...Indonesia's failure to launch can be seen as all the more frustrating because the country appears to be missing out on an epic global commodities boom. The archipelago of 17,500 islands is rich in natural gas, copper, coal, gold and other sought-after resources. Yet while some sectors, like palm oil, have seen exports surge, others have stagnated despite soaring commodity prices. A dearth of investment combined with aging fields has reduced the country's once formidable oil industry to near insignificance. Production has plummeted by one third in the past eight years. There may be undiscovered...
...placenames are imported from Old England or cribbed from indigenous tongues. Here, rural idiosyncrasy spattered the map with enough wild suggestions to drive the amateur adventurer on a thousand elliptical side trips. Near Climax is Distant. A bit south are Muff and Echo. Elsewhere, places like Oil City, Coal Township, and Lumberville hint at vanished economic powerhouses. A few of these names belong to town centers equipped with American Legion halls and post offices. Most just indicate lonely crossroads...
...course, nothing's ever that simple in the energy business. Sasol's end product is cleaner than the average diesel fuel or gasoline, emitting less sulfur and less nitrogen when it burns, says Barrows. Coal-to-liquid plants can also be used to clean up the mountains of coal left over at old mines. But in terms of carbon emissions, Fischer-Tropsch is dirty. A sliding scale of emissions from fossil fuels, goes: coal, petroleum, methane. Coal emits the most carbon dioxide per unit of energy obtained. The resultant fuel also emits more carbon dioxide when burned...