Ask Mike: What the heck is clean coal?
Hey Guys,
I watched all the debates. I’ve read way too many articles on the upcoming election. I’m about as informed as I’m ever going to be. However, there is at least one issue that I’m still in the dark about: clean coal. Specifically, how in the heck is coal, a fuel that’s as dirty as they come, considered clean?
Both candidates have mentioned this seemingly oxymoronic term during their energy speeches, so I did a little research. According to the Sierra Club, there is “no such thing” as clean coal. However, the site notes that “new technologies and policies can help reduce coal plants’ deadly emissions, including carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, mercury, and nitrogen oxides.”
HowStuffWorks.com notes that coal still generates half the electricity in the United States. Clean coal technology aims to “contain its emissions.” One of the most promising ways of doing this is through carbon capture and storage. Essentially, this is a way of sequestering “carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from stationary sources like power plants.” Whether they then take the emissions and launch them into space, I’m not sure.
The Department of Energy sums up the history of clean coal, while Greenpeace argues that clean coal does “nothing to mitigate the environmental effects of coal mining or the devastating effects of global warming.” In other words, even when the coal is “clean,” it’s still dirty.
If you’re still curious about this controversial issue, the BBC offers an excellent summary of the benefits of and problems with clean coal. Based on what you know about clean coal, do you think it’s a good idea? Does clean coal make the best of a bad situation? Or, is that not good enough given the environment’s perilous state? It’s a big issue this election–what are your thoughts?
Thanks for reading,
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What is clean coal? It’s an oxymoron. It is a non-renewable source, so when it’s gone, it’s gone. Go green, go nuclear!
The benefits of coal are obvious: it’s incredibly cheap, can be used as “base-load” power, and we have tons of it right here in USA.
With the right environmental controls the emissions from it can be controlled. Carbon sequestration involves pumping the CO2 underneath the earth into old water reservoirs where it will never escape. An experimental clean coal plant was supposed to be built in Illinois to test this, but thanks to lack of funding that project was scrapped. There has, however, been a plant in Austrailia that claims to have succeeded in sequestering carbon.
While I believe the idea of ‘clean coal’ is an oxymoron, I recognize it is abundant and finding a way to use can be compelling.
The part that is not well publicized, by either the ‘for’ or ‘against’ sides, is that the sequesteration technology is still an early-stage technology that will require a large input of R&D, read that as ‘government’, money. The total costs estimated by the developers themselves is greater than the costs associated with building wind or solar power plants.
Coal power is cheap when discharged freely, but even the stack scrubbers in use since the 1970s has made coal costlier than other sources and many coal plants have been shut down because the scrubbers cost too much to operate. These scrubbers are nothing compared to sequestration technology. How do they expect to add the sequestration technology and still be a low cost source? It appears ‘clean coal’ may not be ‘cheap coal’.
Greenpeace is mostly interested in generating headlines
What is “clean coal?”
That would be coal that has a lower sulpher content than other sources of said same, which cuts down on sulpher dioxide innisions. It’s like the difference between “sweet” and “sour” crude oil.
“clean coal” is a sales pitch. there’s no way that we’re going to bury the CO2. consider that coal is as concentrated as carbon can get. once you make CO2 out of it, turning it into a gas, you multiply it’s volume several fold, assuming you can make a solid out of it. but burying it does not make it solid. electricity generators know clean coal as “low sulfur” coal. what it really means is that the coal has less other “stuff” (sulfur, nitrogen, ???) in it.
i find it’s use today, particularly in politics, to be misleading at best.
why are you worried about clean coal destroying the environment. we are closer than ever to nuclear winter, especially with Pakistan turning rogue.
our nuclear arsenal can only destroy the world 8 times over, the Russian can destroy it 10 over. my thoughts are that you only can destroy it once.
i remember seeing a news article on this subject a while back, even though i can;t remember the specifics of it i do recall that the waste gasses produced by this particular type of (for want of a better word) refinery are stored somehow which i believe defeats the object of the word ‘clean’
“Clean coal” is a sale pitch used by power companies and coal producers to delude the public and con the politicians into thinking that “science” has the answer and we (the public) need to get behind it and untie their hands. That is either bankroll it or deregulate it.
The idea behind it is to sequester the carbon 2 miles below the ground into porous clay deposits. There is no research to show that a) this can be done and will work and b) that it is an environmentally viable technology.i.e. won’t leak.
Until such a time that the coal plants can produce limestone from carbon emissions, I will not believe a word they say. Like the oil industry, they were founded by con men, liars and thieves.
It’s many things. One of them is better trapping of the CO2 and soot that is expelled from a coal fired plant. natural gas and nuclear is much cleaner than coal will ever be.
I work at the newest large coal fired power plant in the usa it was built in the mid eightys it has what was at that time the most modern polution control systems avalible we run at an average 96% efr smoke dose not come out of our stack only hot gasses we pride ourselves at being the leader in the industry . we are clean coal and if the invironuts would get out of the way and let industry and enginering go to work we could have all the cheap and clean power you could want
The CO2 issue is a red herring. More and more proof that global warming is not related to the CO2 content in the atmosphere is coming to light. You guys need to get out more and quit reading the “usual suspects”. Try researching some real, repeatable scientific evidence instead of organizations chasing federal research dollars. Here’s a correlation for you: global warming is caused by federal research grants.
As to “clean coal”, coal is what it is and you cannot change that. HOWEVER, scrubber technologies on smoke stacks have come a long way, a much longer way that the Sierra Club. Two of the three largest power generating stations in the US are coal-fired. Nearby residents are not complaining, because (a) the plants don’t cause any problems and are constantly improving, and (b) the plants are heavily regulated and inspected by the EPA.
So, go ahead and be Know Nothings. History will laugh at you.
We have the technology now to capture almost all of the carbon dioxide produced by burning coal in a power plant. And this technology is NOT prohibitively expensive. We just have to implement it. Unfortunately, whenever there are plans to rebuild a coal power plant, it comes against resistance from environmentalists who don’t understand that the end result will be a cleaner process. The additional benefits of coal power, assuming we DO successfully capture the CO2 is that we have it here in this country.
However, we have yet to address the problems inherent in the coal MINING process, which has devastating effects on the environment from where it is mined.
It is treated somehow so it burns clean but no one is making enough that they are using it yet.
Am I the only one here old enough to remember the old days, when the sight of a smoke stack belching out thick columns of black smoke was an all too common sight?
Where have they all gone?
They are still there, running full tilt, but the smoke they used to put out is scrubbed now, having chemicals like magnesium oxide sprayed into it. This is the last in a long list of things being done to make burning coal a much cleaner process.
The process starts with the type of coal you burn. The term “clean coal” refers to the low sulphur coal others have mentioned. Having less sulphur to start with, makes cleaning the smoke put out an easier process.
The term “clean coal technology” is a broader term, meaning the entire process from beginning with the lower sulphur coal, to removing most of the harmful chemicals from the smoke.
I am in no way involved with the coal industry, but I do drive a truck. I had a job a while back where I hauled Magnesium oxide to Philladelphia Electric’s generating plant in Eddystone, PA. I once asked a guy with a degree in chemical engineering, at the plant, exactly what the product I brought to them was used for. It was amazing just how much cleaner the plant’s output was, compared to just 20 years ago.
If you don’t like coal, that is fine. You have a right to your views, as much as I have a right to mine. Coal is not perfect, but it does a lot of good for us. To call the term “clean coal” an oxymoron is a bit on the simple side of a complex issue.
Clean coal is not clean. The coal is not modified. They just found a way to prevent toxic emissions from entering the air. What they do is pump or bury the emissions deep into the ground. If the emissions are pumped directly into the ground, the emissions chemically bind to the rocks and soil. They might not directly pump the emissions into the soil from the place where it is burned. They may use filters and then bury the toxin filled filters deep into the ground, such as at an abandoned section of a coal mine.
CLEAN COAL is low-sulphur coal.
It burns much more efficiently (produces more energy in conversion) and cleanly that regular coal. And THIS country (USA) has more coal than the Arabs have oil.
Obama & team oppose clean coal conversion becuase they say is too damaging to envirnoment, only a temporary solution, etc. This is pure B/S. The USA can and should move forward immediately with clean-coal technology to start, then regular coal & nuclear (which takes longer to develop)
*sigh*
“Clean coal,” as it is used in lay discussions today, is short for “clean coal technologies,” a growing set of technologies used to mitigate or eliminate the many harmful effects of extracting coal and using it for industrial purposes, mainly for generating electricity. Those who say clean coal means low-sulphur coal are either giving a too-narrow definition or confusing clean coal with clean diesel.
Please, read the web page given in the article’s links, to the DOE:
http://www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/powersystems/cleancoal/
Technologies include, but not limited to: sequestration of carbon dioxide; reduction of sulfur, nitrogen and mercury emissions; ‘fluidized’ bed; gasification; liquid fuels; neural-network control of emissions.
*sigh #2*
Obama, and pretty much every senator, along with Bush, is just as much for this work as McCain is, Vince. It is a bit pork-y, and no powerful mid-west politician could ever be against coal 100%, so enough with the conspiracy theories.
*sigh #3*
Let the poor spelling of so many entries here give you an idea of the half-baked opinions of the writers. There’s a built-in spell checker in the form; how hard can it be?
*sigh again*
CO2 doesn’t “chemically bond” to rocks and soil very well, Gregory Dittman. CO2 is pretty happy as it is, that is a problem. Pretty much the only way for the earth to deal with CO2 is for plants, blue-green bacteria, and phyto-plankton to convert it.
All these sighs, because I am realizing how much better a source Wikipedia is than Yahoo! Answers. Wikipedia tends to dissolve opinion and distill issues to the facts and significant history. Yahoo! Answers allows equal time to individual, unscientific opinions, and even allows definitively uninformed questioners to select any answer as the “best answer.”
To those of you who neglected to do research on this topic before babbling:
Meaghan:
How is nuclear energy renewable? When radioactive material is gone, it’s gone as well! So, nuclear is no more renewable than coal. They are both alternative energy sources, but certainly not renewable! This earth only contains so much coal and so many elements to create nuclear power. Forms of renewable energy include solar, wind, tidal, hydrodynamic, etc.–But certainly not nuclear.
Rudy:
Clean coal technology includes, but is not limited to, the practice of “gassification.” In this way, one is not combusting coal. Rather, the coal is converted to methane, CH4. Methane can be used in existing natural gas pipelines and can be converted from coal at ~65 % efficiency. By converting the coal to methane, sulfur and the heavy metals can be removed without “scrubbers” and is therefore cheaper. In fact, the production of methane can be done to produce a product cheaper than natural gas per BTU.
Linwood Lyons:
You seem to know just enough about stoicheometry to be dangerous. You would be correct that converting a mole of carbonaceous material, coal, to several moles of gas, in your example CO2, would produce a very large volume of CO2. But, what you don’t understand is that this is not the case. Instead, the carbonaceous material; coal, biomass, or petcoke; is converted to methane, CH4, and smaller amounts of CO2. Then, the CO2 can be captured, sequestered, and sold to oil companies to be pumped into oil wells to get more oil–And stay trapped there for a long time. This CO2 could be sold to chemical companies as well, for research in Biology or Biochemistry, where anaerobic environments are necessary. Also, of course burying it doesn’t make it a solid! Solid CO2 is dry ice and would instantly be converted back to a gas at standard temperatures and pressures. So, as you can see, clean coal does not mean just low sulfur coal–It mean new technology that avoids the old sulfur and heavy metal problems with coal combustion. (see Shawn’s response for a more exacting definition)
I find this article and most of the commenter’s (though not all) understanding of this subject “misleading at best”. Please do some independent research before blathering on!
In drilling well for Oil and Gas, actually there are some nimeral deposits called CBM,Coal Bed Methane, not to deep to drill through, in other words, mineral deposots can be capitalized depending on exploration and operation expenditure depending the goals of achievement.
COAL goes GREEN and CLEAN !!!!
Because of my investment profile as an accredited investor I see information on new companies that the general public may not know about for another 5 years, if ever.
There is currently a working clean coal plant in Italy, and there is one in the works to be built in the US. The plant site has been bought and the resources to mine coal have been leased. The liquified output can be used to power cars or fuel homes in the winter. And it’s a lot cleaner and greener than oil processing and refining.
Less than 1% of the gaseous byproducts escape into the atmosphere with the process called “coal gassification.” No oil company refining crude to gasoline can make that claim. This is not only a fact but the US has already issued the license for the process and the plant should be operational in less than 3 years.
Coal got a bad environmental name in the past because of all the gaseous byproducts spilled into the air. When this new process becomes commonplace America would be positioned to process another 20 to 30% of it’s fuel needs without the need to transport or import barrels of crude oil. I tried to buy stock in this first plant being built, but it wasn’t for sale.
Americans are the highest contributors to green house gases. All this clean coal technology aside, u ppl should change ur high life style and ur attitude so dat u wont need more energy to b produced coz already u r using enough energy. So all u lazy fat people shun ur cars and go on bicycels or go walking to ur offices
Carbon dioxide is released in the process of Clean Coal.The process of pumping the CO2 underneath the earth into old water reservoirs where it will never escape is called Carbon sequestration
the term ‘clean’is used to export that idea to the minds of the public. it means nothing more than to be rid of dirt,impurities,or extraneous matter.in other words ‘pure coal’. the word ‘clean’ also means ‘strip’,thus ‘strip mines’. the ‘trickery’ of words have always been used by the cons of this world. especially, in the gobbledygook of fine print that credit lenders use,as well as thousands of other scam artists.
The problem that we have in the Arab world to use
Carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and mercury, and nitrogen oxides. ”
Even thought the food in this
Thank you
Http://www.b-99.com
Even the choice of words “Clean Coal” is a contradiction.
Coal is dirty from the start and dirtier at the end and worst of all
it will cost more money to clean the air from burning all the coal
than what it is worth! Get real and take responsibility there is only
one “real” solution and that’s for people to rethink how they can
do with less of this resource.
Take your bike to work or work from home.
Grow your own fruit and veggies
so they don’t have to get transported from Costa Rica via truck, ship and train.
Use solar energy in your homes and at work.
Please, I have a long way to go on this earth!
Chris
14 yrs old
My appologies. that did not post correctly.
Analytical Alchemist:
concerning ++ “To those of you who neglected to do research on this topic before babbling:”
may i submit that my research is at least as good as yours.
++ “what you don’t understand is that this is not the case. Instead, the carbonaceous material; coal, biomass, or petcoke; is converted to methane, CH4, and smaller amounts of CO2. Then, the CO2 can be captured, sequestered, and sold to oil companies to be pumped into oil wells”
WHAT?
– Converted to CH4? where are you going to get the hydrogen? that’s an energy absorbing process.
– What’s going to happen to the CH4? It’s going to be burned. What carbon, from the original coal, is not going to be converted into CO2? None.
– Sold to oil companies? they’re going to pay for it? when it’s free all around them?
++ “This CO2 could be sold to chemical companies as well, for research in Biology or Biochemistry, where anaerobic environments are necessary.”
– Excuse me, but soft drink companies use more CO2 than probably all of your other imagined buyers. why wouldn’t they get theirs from the same place? I’ll grant that there’s more of it when your burn a train load of coal every day, which is not unusual, but capturing that much just isn’t going to happen.
++ “So, as you can see, clean coal does not mean just low sulfur coal–It mean new technology that avoids the old sulfur and heavy metal problems with coal combustion.”
– “Clean coal” has, for many decades, been defined as coal that contains low amounts of sulfur, mercury, and other such contaminates. the Anti-Global Warming gang has hijacked the term to pretty up their image, and pretend that it’s “magic coal” that doesn’t produce CO2.
++ “Methane can be used in existing natural gas pipelines and can be converted from coal at ~65 % efficiency.”
– Great. we’re going to burn 1/3 more coal, to get the same amount of energy. that’s helpful — NOT.
++ “Please do some independent research before blathering on!”
– i’ve been around this block enough times to know that when someone says, “do some independent research” (more frequently phrased as “do your own research”) what that really means is the opinions being posted are entirely of the poster’s own imagination, and have no support in the real world.
I know what you’ll do without coal…..You’ll sit in the dark wishing you let us old coal miners mine coal !
Ed Rife, in all of this, you probably have my sympathy more than any one else. I’m aware that coal mining is what you do, and it’s a dangerous job, both physically, and medically. It’s not that I want to put you out of work. However, I really, honestly, think that global warming is a very serious threat to the whole world. I think that there will be wars fought over both food, and fresh water. And in these times when many small countries have nuclear weapons, the danger to the world economy is serious. I don’t think that the human race will be wiped out, but it is not at all inconceivable that conditions could be sufficiently catastrophic that the world will return to a large number of waring feudal states.
If I was a coal miner, I might well take you position. I do understand that. One does not have the luxury of worrying about future generations is one’s own fate is questionable. I’m sorry. However, I really think my concern is well founded, and I owe it to my daughter, and the whole next generation to do my best to see that the problem is addressed as soon, and as well, as possible.
Lin
Lin,
I honestlty think that your fears are legit butthatbeing said emissions from coal fired plants are being reduced drstically and new technology being developed daily.Yes I’m glad your worried about your daughter and I too belive we will fight wars for food and water mostly because of people who will rally for any cause that is detrimental to working Americans..We need coal Lin,plain and simple..We need to keep developing technology to clean up the emissions I actually know for a fact that Progress Energy has plants that can burn 5% sulfur coal so the technology is there and is being put to use..
I respect you and your argument but I dont believe you have all the facts.