An op-ed reprinted from Wednesday's San Francisco Chronicle...
If you are a politician running for national office -- or a coal or utility executive -- the notion of "clean coal" is alluring, much like pledging to lower taxes without cutting services. Like other campaign promises, however, citizens are well advised to seek the truth before committing.
During their recent debates, neither the presidential nor the vice presidential candidates dared admit the truth: There is no such thing as clean coal. Despite years of research and billions in government subsidies, not a single commercial coal plant in the United States can capture and store its greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover, many scientists and even coal utility executives say the technology is at least a decade away. For policymakers and others concerned about climate change, the real question is not whether coal can be made clean, but whether we should even try.
Clean coal can mean many things to many people. Until recently, the phrase was often used to describe various processes to reduce air and water pollution caused by mining and burning coal, such as installing scrubbers on smokestacks to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions that cause acid rain. But the industry's biggest problem is that coal is the country's largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. So now clean coal usually refers to carbon capture and sequestration, an attempt to capture a plant's carbon emissions and store them underground, permanently, rather than releasing them into the atmosphere to contribute to global climate change.
The biggest challenges of carbon capture for the U.S. coal industry pertain to scale and cost, both of which are huge. Researchers at MIT estimate that if less than two-thirds of the carbon dioxide from U.S. coal plants were captured and compressed for storage, the collective volume to be stored underground "would about equal the total U.S. oil consumption of 20 million barrels per day."
Building an infrastructure to accomplish this would not be cheap. The Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory found that adding carbon capture to existing coal plants would increase the cost of electricity generation by 81 percent. This includes neither the rising cost of coal, nor the heightened cost of new coal plant construction, which has surged by more than 130 percent since 2000.
Assuming these challenges can be met, then what? Coal will still be dirty. The American Lung Association estimates that pollution from coal-fired power plants triggers 550,000 asthma attacks and 38,000 heart attacks annually, helping to cause an estimated 24,000 Americans to die prematurely each year. Coal combustion is also the country's largest source of mercury poisoning and releases more than five dozen different types of hazardous air pollutants.
And don't tell the residents of Appalachia that coal is clean. Mountaintop removal coal mining has flattened 450 mountains and buried more than 700 miles of rivers and streams in one of the country's most beautiful regions.
Rather than perpetuate our country's dependence on dirty energy, we can rejuvenate our economy with a transition to truly clean and renewable energy resources. Each year, the price of coal soars, while the costs of solar and wind decline. A report prepared for the California Public Utilities Commission earlier this year estimated that clean coal plants would cost $.1732 per kilowatt hour, compared to $.1265 for utility-scale solar power and just $.0891 for wind. Moreover, an analysis of more than a dozen independent reports studying the impacts of clean energy on employment found that wind power produces up to three times as many jobs as coal per unit of power produced. Rooftop solar produces seven to 10 times as many jobs.
"Clean coal" is both an oxymoron and an excuse policymakers use to avoid developing a responsible energy policy. Every dollar spent on a clean coal infrastructure is a dollar better invested in energy efficiency and renewable energy.
Michael Brune is the executive director of Rainforest Action Network and the author of Coming Clean -- Breaking America's Addiction to Oil and Coal," (Sierra Club Books, 2008).
Follow Michael Brune on Twitter: www.twitter.com/bruneski
Nukes leave us with the problem of storing spent fuel. Check the half-life of nuclear fuel. Finding a safer place to store spent nuke fuel requires finding a site that is sparsely populated. There is the NIMBY factor & the problem of safely transporting spent nuke fuel from the plant to the storage site. Any safer way to transport spent nuke fuel is going to be expensive & risky. We humans often make mistakes. Remember 3 Mile Island & Chernobyl(sp?)? There are going to be accidents.
We may get cleaner coal generated power & cleaner nuke plants & storage sites but that's it All we get is cleanER & at a very high price.
And let's please not forget the jobs of over 100,000 people directly employed in the coal industry, the 300,000 dependents of those people, and the 600,000 - 800,000 people who live in communities that depend on coal production to provide even the most basic services. Yes, we're rural folks who don't know Mission Street from 8th Avenue, but we matter.
Finally, please don't tell me about how many more jobs California estimates will be created from wind and solar. I don't want to move to California, nor should I have to. But even if those jobs are available where I live in Appalachia, how much will they pay? Will they be union jobs like I've got now, at $22+ per hour with health care and a real pension? I seriously doubt it.
Coal provides a part of the solution for our nation's energy future and jobs in some of the most rural, most economically challenged areas of America. Blinding ourselves to the possibility of carbon capture and storage is negligent in the extreme.
It is all of our responsiblity to be as honest as we know how and to use our talents and intellect for the betterment of us all. Being honest starts with the reality that there is no such thing as CLEAN COAL. There is no devised solution for storing NUCLEAR WASTE safely. There are many illusions that spew in to our lives.
Minervoice... You're voice is important.. PLEASE KEEP EDUCATING!!!
Odds are, you still do. At least you do if you use electricity to heat your home. 70% of US electricity is produced by coal. While solar, wind, etc can be used to generate electricity, only coal or nuclear can be used to produce a consistent, baseload level of generation. Nuclear, while much less polluting, is also vastly more expensive than coal. In the short term (next 100 years or so), coal is an ideal solution for generating electricity compared to the expense of the alternatives.
So when politicians talk about "clean coal" they are talking about gassification and converting power plants to burn this source of fuel instead of coal dust. The bigger issue is the development and implementation of carbon capture, an untried technology. Even if carbon capture and clean coal work, these are only stopgap measures. We need new energy sources.
Just wondering... got a link?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasification#History
One thing that is rarely mentioned: A coal plant emits way more radioactivity than a nuclear power plant due to the naturally occurring radioactive elements in coal. That radioactivity is in the same dust particles that cause asthma, i.e. that are inhaled.
And the cases of asthma (especially in children) are clearly located downwind of large coal plants. Don't forget what is happening in China at the moment. They are creating an ecological disaster with all the coal plants they're building.
Well, if that's what they said, it must be true. Personally I would kind of doubt these small scale experiments having any resemblance to reality on the larger scales, but then, who am I... just an engineer.
:-)
Sort of like Vulcan used to do.
Now can we have the same conversation about nuclear power and why it has been a huge disaster in America. The number of Nuclear power plants that have never run at 100% capacity because of design flaws is staggering considering the amount of tax payer money that has gone into it.
Socialized power, God lets hope not.
Nuclear power is not only MUCH worse, it also is incredibly expensive and dependent on a very finite resource (uranium). But most of all it is just too dangerous.
Both make no sense and should not even be under consideration.