Carbon LOX Stock and Barrel

Clean coal which was a $10 billion subsidy issue in the last election is developing. It involves capturing carbon dioxide by first burning it with liquid oxygen. Buy LOX stock. I like Air Liquide. There are two technologies: one rich: they inject steam, use heat to split off the oxygen to burn the coal and use the hydrogen to generate more electricity. The other lean: just use more LOX.

Both are idiotic from an economic standpoint. To add a hydrogen system and make the coal crazy hot enough to split water will use a lot of LOX at $1/gallon or so. Clean coal is an attempt to minimize the carbon output per electricity instead of the carbon output per money. Better than producing 1,000,000 barrels of CO2 via clean coal, would be to generate 3,000,000 barrels of carbon dioxide enriched air. Underground storage of air is a lot cheaper than buying hundreds-of-dollars-a-ton of LOX to burn $20/ton coal. We ought to be able to achieve sequestration for under $5/ton of CO2. And the plant modification is low-tech. Just direct the exhaust into a pipeline to inject it into the ground.