Clean Coal: Oxymoron or Magic Bullet?

(NOTE: This item is the first in a three-part series on clean-coal technology. For links to other parts of the series, see the end of this item.)

Al Gore and his cohorts think that “clean coal” is an oxymoron. But the U.S. government and industry have poured billions into R&D to clean up emissions from burning coal in power plants. So some coal and utility companies believe there may be a “magic bullet” to solve the dilemma of keeping America’s most abundant fossil fuel in its energy mix instead of abandoning it for costlier and less reliable renewable energy alternatives.

The stakes are huge. Coal is by far the world’s biggest conventional fossil fuel resource; U.S. reserves of coal alone — a fourth of the world’s total — could last for more than 200 years at current consumption levels. “King Coal” accounts for 40 percent of global electricity production. Coal-fired power plants also account for the lion’s share of U.S. power production.

Better emissions control than you think

There have been noteworthy successes in reducing the environmental impacts of burning coal to produce power, as seen in the chart to the right. Since 1980, the U.S. utility industry has cut in half emissions of sulfur and nitrogen compounds that contribute to acid rain, and new control technologies can reduce mercury emissions by 40 percent.

State-of-the-art plants, such as TECO’s Polk power station in Florida, use integrated gasification combined cycle technology that can cut those emissions even more dramatically, while minimizing waste and water use and producing power far more efficiently than conventional pulverized coal-fired power plants. This approach converts the coal to a synthetic gas and burns this “syngas” to run a turbine generator. Waste heat then fuels a steam generator — a power-efficiency “twofer.”

But Gore & Co. contend that the concept of “clean coal” still remains an oxymoron as long as those plants continue to pour out billions of tons of carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas targeted in scenarios to mitigate climate change.

The greenhouse challenge

And now U.S. environmental policy is moving in lockstep with that view. The U.S. Supreme Court recently forced EPA to reverse course and to begin regulating industrial CO2 emissions as a harmful pollutant. Although the Bush administration largely ignored the court’s ruling, it was a major victory for advocates of the U.S. moving closer to the rest of the world’s position on addressing global climate change.

With the Obama administration and new Congress acting to accelerate that move, it is likely that the U.S. will implement major policy changes that will penalize the energy sources with the heaviest carbon footprint.

That trend underscores the urgency with which new research will proceed to find ways to economically capture and store CO2.

Next: Coal’s Problem with Carbon — and the Technologies to Capture It

BNET Energy on Clean Coal

• Clean Coal: Oxymoron or Magic Bullet?
• Fixing Coal’s Carbon-Capture Problem
• Storing CO2 for the Long Term

Image courtesy of the National Energy Technology Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy