Greensboring.com | Greensboro, NC

Clean Coal
Today is the day I die.
Stone heart, cancer deep inside.
I choke upon the lie,
gasp,
my children burned my insides.
-Olivia Harkness

Clean Coal: The Cancer Inside
In 1987, an industrial acronym, C.C.T. was coined within congress as warning bells began sounding among environmental scientists concerning the Earth’s carbon-dioxide levels rising. (1) The term, never meant for public consumption was Clean Coal Technology, and unlike the popular tag-line used as institutional advertising today, it was meant solely as a label for a group of technologies based around scrubbing filters used on coal plants. The oxymoron, quite simply an advertising slogan, later became a part of the American lexicon as coal companies later used the term to counteract the Green politics of the last decade. With the threat of solar and wind power, coal companies have attempted and have partially become successful at convincing congress, and citizens that their fuel source, coal, is the antithesis of what it really is. In 2007, the coal conglomerate spent thirty-five million dollars to clean public perception of coal’s dirty image. In essence coal executives have managed to equate hypothetical, non-existent clean technology with today’s current usage of coal. In essence, what may never actually exist is being sold to the public as “Clean Coal” when only dirty coal currently exists.

In the 1980s, a whole new lexicon was being created, like “acid rain”, and “global warming”. The primary cause of the emergence of these new scary words began as they were being associated with coal production and usage. To make matters worse by 1984 the U.S. Government allocated 42 million dollars to relocate an entire town, Centralia, Pennsylvania, in which a coal fire had occurred and continues to burn today. (2) Author David Dekok wrote in his book Fire Underground: “This is a world where no human could live.”

Yet the U.S. has nearly two-hundred-and-fifty years (240 billion tons) of coal reserves left while the world has less than fifty years of oil left. (3) However the earth’s Co2 levels are the highest in two million years, cancer is now an epidemic, and the inconvenient truth, as Al Gore may suggest, is that the world has a “fever”. The Earth, our home and planet is dying because of coal production and usage. It’s been suggested that summer artic ice will cease to exist as of 2013. (4) Combined with the byproducts of cadmium, lead, mercury and arsenic that accompany coal soot, it appears we don’t have time to wait for this elusive Clean Coal Technology.

In fact Greenpeace commissioned a report, titled “False Hope, Why Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) Won’t Save the Climate” (May 5, 2008) which projected the soonest possible deployment date of CCS technology would occur no sooner than 2030. According to the report, within three years, by 2015, the pollutants of coal could trigger unusual and unprecedented atmospheric and climatic changes. In other words, it may be too late already. Droughts, food shortages, water shortages, this is what the guise of Clean Coal has been designed to keep you from seeing.

There is however a caveat to villainizing coal, at least at the current moment; coal is a necessary evil, powering approximately 50% of the electrical grid in the United States. More importantly Clean Coal Technology, the sequestering and storing Co2 is an actually technology which coal companies have used in the past to flush out pockets of coal and it does sound reasonably viable if we could deploy it successfully the way it’s been hypothesized. The only downside is that by expending energy to re-sequester Co2 emissions into the earth, every bit of efficiency that’s been gained by more efficient burning over the last two decades is lost. In essence, by going “green” with Clean Coal, you ultimately burn more coal to reduce the pollutants. So why would we ever consider such a fallacy in logic when it comes to our energy future? The short answer is that coal companies are businesses, and investors whom love profits might enjoy an increased demand of their resource while netting marginally little benefits from Clean Coal. It provides coal companies and their stock holders an empty “good corporate citizen” image while increasing profit margins and preventing the industry from collapsing due to rival, less controversial, eco-friendly energy sources. It’s important to question the motives of an industry that runs publicity-adverts on television framing coal as “clean”, yet not one single home in the United States is powered by clean coal today and there are no clean coal plants selling electricity.

Ultimately the question comes down to capitalism. Clean Coal was coined in a world of change, born in a time of solar, and wind power. The question then became whether you continue to pursue a fuel source which is cheap, dirty, abundant and makes tons of money for not only the companies that produce coal, but industry in the United States as a whole who benefit from it to produce cheap goods, or do you choose to save civilization from itself?

My fellow Americans, people all over the world, we need to solve the climate crisis, it's not a political issue, it's a moral issue. We have everything we need to get started, with the possible exception of the will to act, that's a renewable resource, let's renew it.
-Al Gore, Academy Awards Speech (2/21/2007)

 
Works Cited
1. Clean Coal Technologies, Air Legislation, and National Energy Strategies. C. Lowell, Miller PHd. Washington D.C. : s.n., 1987. US Congress. pp. http://www.anl.gov/PCS/acsfuel/preprint ... 4-0003.pdf.
2. Centralia Pennsylvania. s.l. : Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania.
3. Rudolph, John. Green : Less than 50 Years of Oil Left. s.l. : New York Times, http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/ ... sbc-warns/.
4. Amos, Johnathon. Arctic summers ice-free 'by 2013'. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7139797.stm : BBC, 2007.

Well this is something I know about. People have been working on 'clean coal' for a long time - unfortunately the goal posts have moved.

Originally clean coal meant burning it while capturing the sulphur and fly ash - and burning it much more efficiently using fluidized beds and combined cycled energy capture - with maybe some cogeneration on the side.

Burning it more efficiently is a good thing - less CO2 is released per Joule of energy generated, but coal is still mostly carbon and the energy comes from oxidizing (burning) carbon to carbon dioxide C + O2 -> CO2 + ENERGY. So even with 100% efficiency the main product is CO2

So the focus now is on capturing and sequestering the CO2. One advantage is that, unlike petroleum, coal is mostly burned in a relatively small number of concentrated locations (power stations) rather than distributed amongst millions of mobile vehicles.

The problem is really how to sequester it in such a way that it stays sequestered for a few hundred years. But it isn't insoluble - the problem that is - CO2 is very soluble and under pressure and low temperatures stays in solution - think beer cans.

There's a huge incentive for coal companies, power companies and governments around the world to make this work. The US response has been to fund Global Warming Deniers but other governments are taking it seriously,

Here there are some first attempts to use it for greenhouses, oil/gas well stimulation and underground water sequestering. Early days, but people are taking it seriously

Why should we even consider it though (other than being a stockholder in a coal company) when we are basically just trying to adapt a fuel source which will eventually run out? (At least according to Google:250 years.) With booming populations that are expected, it would seem clean coal's only benefit would be short-term profits, a bandage upon the world's energy problems.

Even if we make coal emission friendly, there's been a lot of mishaps with workers, and the extraction process seems to be one the more dangerous fuels sources out there. (Not to mention, isn't there an abandoned town somewhere that's been on fire for like 40 years now?)

According to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the burning of coal, a fossil fuel, is a significant contributor to global warming. (See the UN IPCC Fourth Assessment Report). As 25.5% of the world's electrical generation in 2004 was from coal-fired generation (see World energy resources and consumption), reaching the carbon dioxide reduction targets of the Kyoto Protocol will require modifications to how coal is utilized.[12] -Wiki

Found the above interesting. Of course, since clean coal, technically doesn't exist, the label only serves to benefit the coal industry with it's current image. Would they not have been better off calling it "Magic Coal"? Seems like the idea of "clean coal"
is selling "dirty coal"????

Coal-fired power plants are the largest aggregate source of mercury: 50 tons per year come from coal power plants out of 150 tons emitted nationally in the USA and 5000 tons globally.[17] In the USA, neither the combustion products of oil,[18] nor their associated solid or liquid waste streams,[19] are considered to be major contributors to mercury pollution. -wiki

I guess I'm having a hard time seeing any advantage of this technology for anyone other than an investor. I mean if we suddenly stumbled upon the answer, it was cheap to employ, and happened now.... sure a 200 year band-aid would be nice, but the risks still seem to outweigh any gain, and likelihood of success seems unlikely from what I'm reading.

There is a huge amount of coal in the world, especially when compared to oil and gas. We've just taken the easy stuff. The benefit is that there is nothing to replace it with yet. Nuclear is the only other source that comes close. We have the infrastructure already

The US has around 240 billion tonnes of recoverable coal and uses less than 1 billion per year. 240 years supply. That's a fairly compelling argument. If we haven't learned how to get another energy source by then we deserve to freeze in the dark

Out of curiosity, and if you can....

What's the atmosphere (or was) within the industry?

Was it, one in which they were going to try to make these changes out of fear of being shut down? (Loss of profit and investment- (government emissions regulations).

or

Was it, we're going to do our best to make the world a better place?

or

Was it, we need to fit into the new "green culture"?

or was it something else?

Well the issue has been in their minds since the mid 90's. Like many, the initial reaction was disbelief and skepticism, then grudging acceptance and recognotion that the industry has to do somethnig or there will be no industry

Many companies do want to do things for altruistic 'good corporate citizen' reasons, but if one company cannot afford to if their competition gets a free ride. Take mine reclamation for example. It costs an enormous amount of money, companies may want to do a full environmental reclamation - but if that makes their product 20% more expensive than their competitors they will go out of business if they go it alone. If the regulations are absent, weak or not universal then no company will do it.

The companies I've worked with seem to be well aware that regulations are needed because if they leave a mess, public opinion will prevent them from being granted permits for the next mine.

There was an article in the local paper this last week how entire mountains are dissappearing in the Appalachian mountains due to coal.




According to this video, a 1 million dollar charge bigger than Hiroshima was set off to harness the coal from property neighboring this guy's land.

I find this video even more intriguing as Wells Fargo, which was unheard of in NC prior to the bank catastrophe, is now everywhere here, and almost every street has a re-branded Wells Fargo bank on the corner.

This seems to be the nail in the coffin to me:

“CCS cannot deliver in time to avoid dangerous climate change. The earliest possibility for deployment of CCS at utility scale is not expected before 2030. TO avoid the worst impacts of climate change, global greenhouse gas emissions have to start falling after 2015, just seven years away.

http://www.dasolar.com/alternative-energy/clean-coal

Oh wait...

According to this video, all the coal on earth was created by Noah's flood.

That is referring to a practice called 'mountain topping' in the Appalachians. The coal seams are largely horizontal and extraction involves removing the mountain top down to the coal seam (600 feet) and filling the nearby valleys. This fills the headwaters of many streams with acid and iron producing rock

I agree, it's very destructive of the local habitat and permanently alters the geography. There are little or no attempts at reclamation

The 'more explosives than Hiroshima' is a bit misleading. Every week the combined total of all mine blasts in the Appalachians is about equal to the first Hiroshima bomb. No individual blast comes close. The difference between an hour long firework show - or setting them all off at once

Most coal mining in the world is less destructive and is a more temporary use of the landscape. You can see from this Satellite view that this Saskatchewan coal mine (in operation for over 30 years) the reclamation is following close behind the active mining area (the green areas to the left/west). Much of the land is only out of farming production for 5 years or so



Sufficient bonds have to be posted so that if the company goes bust the government can pay for outstanding reclamation.

Liv wrote:This seems to be the nail in the coffin to me:

“CCS cannot deliver in time to avoid dangerous climate change. The earliest possibility for deployment of CCS at utility scale is not expected before 2030. TO avoid the worst impacts of climate change, global greenhouse gas emissions have to start falling after 2015, just seven years away.

http://www.dasolar.com/alternative-energy/clean-coal

There's the rub. With science denying being a political/religious point of doctrine on the right, no action will be taken by the right wing. China is outproducing the US in CO2. And the world population is 7 billion, 3x it was when I was born. Contraception is a moral necessity and yet the Christian Right and the Catholic Church are actively campaigning to eliminate birth control and refusing to fund any programs that promote it.

We're screwed. Global warming is happening and we won't do anything about it until it's far too late - we needed to have started a decade ago. Get used to warmer weather and don't buy real estate in Holland, Texas or Louisiana