If By Clean You Mean Filthy

The moral is: hold proponents of clean coal to account. Don't let them trumpet the technology before it has been shown to work, and that it can do so at a lower cost and with more benefits than a comparable investment in renewables would.

For now, we have no good reason to believe that coal can be made clean. If commercial-scale demonstration plants suggest otherwise over the course of the next few years, all the better.

a sibilant intake of breath

www.ilovemountains.org

Regardless or whether they successfully manage to magically store the CO2 in underground caverns (maybe protected by dragons and spells and curses), COAL IS DIRTY from it's extraction to it's grave. If you still have an inkling of appreciation for that plentiful mercury&lead-laden rock, check out:

www.coal-is-dirty.com

www.campusprogress.org

Absolutely true. Even with perfect CCS, a better description for 'clean' coal is 'decarbonized' coal. The environmental impacts of coal go far beyond climate change. Similarly, the benefits of replacing it with cleaner options go beyond climatic considerations.

a sibilant intake of breath

A new power plant built today removes about 98 percent of sulfur dioxide emissions, more than 95 percent of nitrogen oxides and 90 percent of mercury emissions.

The key challenge is carbon dioxide, and we are moving to the point for technology to help capture 100 percent of those emissions.

It is a waste of time to seek new ways to use old energy sources. We all know peak oil is coming, and the effects of climate change are more evident with every season. What will we have lost before we stop destroying the unique mountains, ecosystems, and communities of Appalachia? What will we have lost before we stop burning fossil fuels?

Stopgap, band-aid measures like "Clean Coal" are born of delusion, greed, and a lack of imagination. There are millions, probably billions, of dollars poured into these kinds of projects--these just plain bad ideas--every year.

My goodness, think what that money, that time and expertise, could achieve elsewhere! Think how quickly we would invest in energy conservation and develop sustainable energy sources if we just took the unconscionable options of coal and nuclear power off the table. If, instead, we got creative and sought out real, humane, sustainable solutions.    

Catalytic converters made an amazing and measurable reduction in the amount of pollution cars created, something like 1/4 to 1/5 the amount of emissions that they were targeting.  Now, people drive 4 or 5 times as much as they did in the 70's so we are back at the same levels of pollution.  So, the coefficient solution helped reduce emissions and made a difference, but, our behavior changed, and we used more and more.

"Clean Coal" may reduce a targeted emission, but if consumption increases, the helpful effects of the coefficient solution will diminish, just like they did with the catalytic converter.  It's great that the industry is even looking at something like this and I think it should be pursued.  However, we need to be in the process of moving to cleaner energy sources at the same time so that we can reduce our need for coal while making it a cleaner fuel to use.

Start small, build on success, learn from failures.

I think "systematic genocide of Appalachia" clearly defines clean coal for me and many, many of us here in the southeast most directly affected by it.

In that setup coal and water are combined and the products are CO2 and H2. The turbines that turn the generators are fueled by the hydrogen so produced. This means that the FutureGen plants will be the world's first large scale hydrogen energy plants and for that reason I can't help but support them. All that remains is to find a better way to produce the hydrogen fuel.

What I don't like about them is the whole CO2 "sequestration" concept. Since a hydrogen from water via coal plant should produce less than half the CO2 of a traditional coal fired plant the whole sequestration thing is unnecessary. Here is a link to a story I wrote explaining the process:

http://current.com/items/89061252_what_is_clean_coal_and_ ...

Here is a link to a graphic from FutureGen so you can see what I mean above:

http://www.futuregenalliance.org/images/integrated.jpg

Mike Johnston

It's not Either/Or

You'd said "Should we spend money and time researching and developing technology to make coal less awful? Or is this a stupid misdirection of human capital, better spent on solar, wind, hydro, ocean power, and conservation? Within these basic choices lie multitudes of questions about global responsibility, costs per kilowatt, the potential of technology, the role of corporate money in government policy, and the will of the people."  

We need to move beyond this either/or thinking.  We need to accelerate development of renewables, AND make coal cleaner.  

Given that coal currently fuels about 50% of US electricity production and 25% of our total energy, and the fact that significant scale-up of renewable energy sources will take years under best-case scenarios, we can't afford NOT to make coal cleaner.  That said, we do have to identify the right balance of investment in both accelerating market-viable renewables and cleaning up coal.  

CHANGEpartner

The U.S. is supplying the rest of the world the coal they are burning to advance their own economies - so we both use and sell the tool of our own destruction.

Meanwhile, our coal industry pollutes the air and water and blows mountain ranges to bits throughout the eastern states.

The U.S. can do better. We must lead the race to advance clean solar, wind, and geothermal technologies and meet the challenge to get off the coal-based economy. The renewable energy industry has better and safer jobs waiting for the old coal based workforce.

As for clean coal, I don't care if you clean every speck of every noxious substance out of the coal we burn for electricity. There's still a vast amount of methane and other greenhouse gases that start to escape into the atmosphere the moment the diggers strip off the overburden. The mudstone and shale that is just pushed around and left to lie because it's no good as fuel is still loaded with carbon and methane that's escaping or oxidizing from the moment it's exposed. So not only is coal mining screwing up the topography, it's adding scads of GHGs to the atmosphere, and there's no way around that. We have to put an end to coal, period. Clean coal is a hoax, and a deadly one at that.

From my upcoming book Prescription for the Planet: A coalition of national environmental groups called Clear the Air commissioned a study from Abt Associates, one of the largest government and business research and consulting firms in the world. This firm has provided the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Bush administration with analysis of many of the agency's air quality programs. Knowing the track record of Bush's EPA and its antipathy to alternative energy, one might reasonably suspect that this firm's conclusions would hardly be slanted on the side of environmentalists. Thus their conclusion may surprise you: Some 24,000 people die prematurely in the United States each year just from the effects of soot from coal-fired power plants, by an average of 14 years. The study also pegged the annual total health costs associated with soot from power plants at over 167 billion dollars! Just from soot, mind you, not to say anything about carbon dioxide emissions or any other nasties tossed out in the slag heaps.