The 30 seconds ads for “Clean Coal” aired on the Winter Olympics program inspired me to do some Google research.
An article posted on Truthout, reports that Waxman-Markey climate bill is proposing “a whopping $60 billion in subsidies for clean-coal technologies.” The article says coal stock, as measured on Wall Street, added up only amounts to about $50 billion.
At the heart of clean coal proposals is the notion that CO2 produced by coal can be captured and safely stored. Truthout writes, “Despite the fact that this technology, dubbed Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), doesn’t actually exist in any real capacity in the United States, it has not stopped the coal lobby.”
The article reports, “In theory, in order for CCS to work, large underground geological formations would have to house this carbon dioxide. But according to a recent peer-reviewed article in the Society of Petroleum Engineers’ publication, the CCS jig is up and the technology just doesn’t seem feasible.”
The problem is that it now appears that CO2 sequestration will require huge storage spaces — much larger than originally thought — so large as to be impossible. Turthout quotes, Michael Economides, “There is no need to research this subject any longer. Let’s try something else.”
Truthout concludes, “Let’s take that a step further and add that we ought to bag the idea that coal can be clean altogether. The public investment in clean-coal technology is a fraud and will only serve as a life-support system for an industry that must be phased out completely over the course of the next two decades. Putting billions of dollars behind a dead-end theory will not bring about the energy changes our country and climate so drastically need.”
An article in McClatchy Newspapers, points out that CO2 is only a small part of the environmental concerns about coal. It says, “The (CCS) process wouldn’t reduce coal’s other pollution problems: smog, mercury, and the toxic metals such as lead and selenium in coal ash. Continuing to rely on coal also would do nothing to end the environmental damage of mining the coal itself.”
The article includes these facts:
- About 600 U.S. coal-burning power plants provide about 48 percent of the nation’s electricity.
- The average U.S. coal plant is about 33 percent efficient, meaning that about a third of the coal it burns generates electricity and the rest is lost as heat.
- A third of the America’s carbon pollution now comes from about 600 coal-fired power plants. And of the more than 70 proposed new coal power plants, barely a handful have plans to capture and store their CO2 emissions. If these dirty plants are allowed to be built, this will mean an additional 200 million tons of global warming pollution will be emitted in America each year.
- Coal-fired power plants are expensive to build, but last for decades. Some current plants date to the 1940s, and three-quarters of them were built before 1980.
Here are a couple of You-tube reports I found interesting.
From a CBS News Report, June, 2008
