Squeaky Clean Coal?

While there are a few expensive technologies that can extract the carbon waste from burning coal for power generation and use it for manufacturing processes, “clean” coal technologies have generally fallen into one of two categories: compress the carbon dioxide, greenhouse gas, that results from burning such coal and shove it into the ground (like in abandoned oil wells) to be dealt with in the future or reduce the amount of greenhouse emissions (but keep on burning coal to generate electricity, and release C02 into the air).

With China literally building a new coal-fired electrical plant virtually every week and with strong lobbies in the U.S. to allow our massive coal reserves to continue as the backstop of American power generation, this issue becomes incredibly important in assessing both employment as well as environmental issues. Older coal stations in China have efficiency (the ratio of extraction of the energy in the coal to the amount of electricity generated) of between 27 and 36 percent according to the May 11^th NY Times. American “higher efficiency” plants can average around 40%, but there are a lot of clunkers still on line in the U.S.

Half of China’s plants don’t even have “sulfur scrubbers” that remove compounds that generate highly destructive acid rain. Ostensibly, China’s policies have attempted to rid the country of one inefficient plant for each modern coal generation station they build, but it is still estimated that 60% of their coal burning generation facilities are of the older inefficient kind.

China is beginning to build new plants – those capable of a higher-than-U.S.-efficiency with a 44% rating – based on a process that has yet to take hold in this country, primarily because of increased costs. Simply, exceptionally hot steam is used to convert coal into a gas before it is burned to generate power. U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu may force this technology to a higher priority here, because coal is such a major factor in American power generation.

While China gets 80% of its electrical energy from coal and is a major air polluter as a result, she is once again the technology leader in improving this process, which process I most certainly hope becomes obsolete in the future (unless 100% of the pollutants can be eliminated). As China grows, clearly she needs more electricity, a fact which means an increase in pollutants no matter which process is used. But at least China is trying to reduce the rate of emissions growth pending a replacement of coal-fired electrical power generation altogether.

What still amazes me is that most Americans actually hear the words “clean coal” and assume that such a beast exists on a genuinely practical level and that America is the leader in this “new technology.” Clean coal still remains primarily a mythical creature, and the United States is not even the leader in creating more efficient coal-fired electrical plants. As we watch oil prices creep slowly upward (this pushes the cost of all fossil fuels upward too), which many believe is an irreversible trend (at least the in the longer term), maybe alternative energy will become more of the “American experience” that merely adding a new meaningless phrase to the American lexicon. We need this change to save our environment and to add millions of truly skilled American jobs.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.