Clean Coal is Dirtier than Ever

The ugly Beijing haze that stings the nose and lungs and waters the eyes has elements from many standing or mobile polluters, but the biggest source of those health-killing irritants comes from the massive numbers of coal plants generating power for China’s insatiable energy needs. Coal is still abundant, cheap and capable of powering electrical power needs for a very, very long time. It’s a big deal here in the United States, as coal miners in West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio will tell you. Take coal out of the American energy sector, and our economy just grinds to a halt. Across the globe, about a quarter of all electrical power generation comes from coal.

Where these modern technologies have been employed, we have managed to reduce many of the emissions from coal-burning power generating plants. Electrostatic precipitators, chemical washing, recirculating some of the effluent emissions, pre- and post-combustion capture, and better burning techniques, etc. have all worked to make significant reductions in noxious emissions. But coal still remains among the worst sources of greenhouse gasses on the planet. New plants, expensive to build, can reduce emissions by 90%, but even with retrofitting, older plants have only seen a 40% reduction. While that sounds good, remember that China is adding a new coal-fired power plant every week or two (80% of their electricity comes from coal vs. about 40% for the U.S.), and India plants on accelerating its construction of such plants.

Back during the George W. Bush administration, a Department of Energy program called FutureGen 2.0 was created to build the ultimate “clean coal” power plant in Illinois. The theory was to use modern technology to reduce emissions and, for those emissions that could not be eliminated, to pump these remaining effluents into underground storage where they would create no greenhouse gasses (literally kicking the can down the road for future generations to deal with!). The technique is called carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) and it was touted as the salvation of coal as the power source of the future.

If the method sounds a bit lame, perhaps it is because rather than solving an issue, this technology simply creates an expensive delay in dealing with the core problem. And financing such dumb program was problematical. “Funding, however, was a different matter. President Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus law provided initial funding for the Illinois-based project, though it was to be financed via a public-private partnership and a September 2015 deadline to spend the federal portion was fast approaching.

 “The private sector, meanwhile, has shown little interest in expensive CCS technologies, making it a hard sell for government projects… ‘The biggest problem CCS faces right now is that there are no markets for the projects,’ said Howard Herzog, a research engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology…‘These demonstrations are created by government incentives and government programs to get the first of the kind going.’

“Herzog said there would be no market for coal plants with expensive carbon-capture systems until federal limits on power plants’ greenhouse gas emissions require them. 
… ‘Longer term, you need markets, and the markets are only created via climate policy,’ he said. ‘And the climate policy is just too weak right now to create the markets.’” TheHill.com, February 8^th. Simply put, the environmental regulations that would motivate power companies to employ the system have been opposed by the GOP-led House (and now the entire Congress), that actually would like to see emission requirements reduced or eliminated (a strong sentiment among Tea Party “man-induced climate change” deniers).

So it was pretty stupid for the feds to fund a coal-plant-system that is so expensive that no one in the coal-power industry would even consider using it, especially when environmental controls are pretty lax. So the program was just scrapped. “The Energy Department’s decision [in early February] to pull the plug on a major ‘clean coal’ demonstration project stands as the latest setback for a technology that only recently held promise as a key piece of the United States’ fight against climate change… Meanwhile, industry groups are seizing on the decision to scrap the years-old initiative as more evidence of the Obama administrations ‘war on coal.’” TheHill.com. Me? I prefer waging a “war on stuff that’s really bad for you”! Is alternative energy ever going to be the “go-to” solution?!

I’m Peter Dekom, and I guess those dedicated environmentalists out there really can’t take a choke, and the Congress really doesn’t care!