The Truth Behind the Numbers

"Greenhouse-Gas Trends” [The Data, January] states that Europe decreased greenhouse-gas emissions from 1990 to 2005 while the United States increased emissions. This ignores the very reason that 1990 was chosen as the baseline year for the U.S.-rejected Kyoto Protocol.

In 1990, at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe knew that bringing the former Eastern bloc countries up to Western European standards would result in a huge decrease in all sorts of pollutants from the very dirty smokestack industries prevalent during the Soviet era. If you discount that cleanup, it is a sure bet that Europe as a whole would have had a net increase in greenhouse-gas emissions over the same time period.

Ken Javor

IEEE Member

Huntsville, Ala.

Evaluating Carbon Cleanup

William Sweet’s article, “Restoring Coal’s Sheen” [January], missed a question critical to cleaning up the burning of fossil fuels—namely, what is the overall energy balance for the process described in the article? Every scheme needs to look at the total impact on cycle (fuel-to-­electricity) conversion efficiency. If you start with a coal-fired plant and add an air-separator plant on the front end, flue-gas recycling fans and two sets of cooler/condenser systems in the middle, and a CO₂ gas-to-liquid compressor system on the back end, and then truck the liquid CO₂ somewhere off-site and pump it into the ground, what is the resultant “womb to tomb” ­efficiency of the process in kilowatts per hour?

John Spencer

IEEE Senior Member

Oreana, Ill.

William Sweet responds: The total system energy balance—together with economic and carbon balances—is among the key issues to be ­evaluated at the Schwarze Pumpe ­demonstration plant. The energy costs ­associated with the oxygen-­nitrogen separation system are especially high, and Vattenfall considers it crucial to get those costs down in future oxyfuel plants. With the U.S. Department of Energy’s cancellation of the FutureGen ­project—a big coal-­gasification plant that would have generated electricity and yielded hydrogen, with the carbon dioxide captured and stored—Schwarze Pumpe is more than ever the only game in town. Vattenfall and Alstom Power are to be commended because this will be the first larger-than-laboratory-scale plant to evaluate all aspects of capturing and sequestering CO₂ using the oxyfuel process.

Is Journal Publication Obsolete?

Robert W. Lucky’s “Technical Publications and the Internet” [Reflections, January] raises an ­important issue. Today the information in ­scientific and professional journals can be ­submitted and transmitted electronically; the Internet makes printing and shipping journal copies obsolete. The true ­function of a refereed journal, then, is to filter information through a committee of recognized experts. However, journal publication is likely to reduce the number of people who will see your work.

Much scientific work is now interdisciplinary, so you really need many subscriptions. You cannot very well ­subscribe to a dozen expensive journals. If you have a sufficiently large library nearby, you must go there once a week or so. At some point you may simply give up—and miss an important new paper. Further, copyright restrictions ­prevent your reading the full text of most papers on the Internet. Societies like the IEEE offer publications on the Web, but they charge fees affordable only by large libraries or businesses.

This problem can be solved neatly. All we need are the editorial ­committees—those of currently existing ­journals will do nicely—and Web pages. Members of the vital expert editorial ­committees normally don’t charge for their ­services. The small cost of a Web page and a webmaster would be no problem for libraries and professional societies. Libraries would save hugely on ­subscriptions and storage space. Everybody would benefit.

Granino A. Korn IEEE Fellow, Chelan, Wash.