Clean Coal Does Not Exist
J.E. Robertson | CafeSentindo | 11 January 2010
Despite the widespread debate in the US, China and other heavily coal-burning countries, about the degree to which “clean coal” can be a solution to the daunting challenge of how to reduce carbon emissions that contribute to global warming and climate destabilization, the technology does not yet exist. There are no clean coal plants in the US. And none of the immediate plans for new coal-fired plants would achieve anything close to the theoretical proposals loosely denominated “clean coal”.
There are a handful of projects planned to test technologies that would allow coal-fired plants to “capture” carbon emissions and other harmful pollutants, but there are numerous technical challenges to doing so, and so far, the existing technology has never been proven to be cost-effective for industrial-scale deployment.
The carbon-capture technology that is theorized to be able to “clean” the coal-burning process would actually only partly reduce the carbon pollution resulting from burning coal —which is essentially the burning of raw carbon— the dirtiest way known to produce electricity. In the meantime, the same coal industry that is advertising as yet untested and nonexistent “clean coal” technology is actively advocating for the construction of the dirty plants it already knows how to make.
Clean coal remains, at this moment in the evolution of energy technology, a hypothetical proposition used entirely as a front for an industry that fully intends to continue polluting in the most pervasive and irresponsible way. Clean coal is used as a palatable concept to help sell the coal industry’s argument that 1) renewable energy is not needed, and 2) burning coal is not a dangerous or destructive endeavor.
Coal has been shown to be of serious direct harm to human health. As reported by the Washington Post:
Many Americans think that coal went out with top hats and corsets. In fact, we burn more than a billion tons of coal each year in the United States — about 20 pounds a day for every man, woman and child. We don’t burn it in coal stoves, of course, but in big power plants that generate about half the electric power in the country.
Politically, the war in Iraq has been a boon for coal, allowing coal-friendly politicians to tout America’s 250-year supply as a substitute for our addiction to Middle Eastern oil — even though, in the real world, there is no overlap between coal (used to generate electricity) and oil (used for transportation fuels, among other things).
That “250-year supply” is misleading for a number of reasons. First, accessing the entire reserve could mean massive, widespread environmental destruction. “Mountaintop removal” mining is increasingly relied upon by coal companies to access hard-to-reach coal and is turning lush forested mountain country into toxic lunar wastelands with far too little money invested in long-term environmental clean-up and security.
It is also far too little reserve to really generate the energy demand over 250 years from now into the future. For one, energy demands are increasing, even as other energy-production methods are rapidly increasing their efficiency. Between the 1990s and the 2000s, solar-voltaic cells increased their energy production per volume of silicon by roughly 10-fold. Now, new glitter-sized solar-voltaic cells are more than 100 times as efficient in terms of energy generation per volume of silicon.
For all its convenience of use and centuries’ old well-worn technological specifics, coal has no such potential for increased efficiency. Continuing to invest heavily in coal-sourced electric energy could have an adverse effect on the technological innovations that are achieving such efficiency gains in other forms of energy production, thus leading to higher-cost energy, reduced capacity to ease out of carbon-based fuels, even as environmental impacts mount and costs become corrosive to economic growth.
Over time, the long-term costs of burning coal will continue to mount. Failure to prepare for a smooth transition away from carbon-based fuels to safer, more efficient clean energy sources, will result in degradation of the foundations of economic output, and an eventual decrease in quality of life. Health risks will also mount, as continued investment in coal means the further proliferation of the world’s dirtiest fuel across the developing world, intensifying China’s smog crisis and the risks posted to the western US from trans-Pacific contaminants.
Global climate patterns are already breaking down and at risk of sustained destabilization, due to the unnatural concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. CO2 levels already far exceed what the organic environment can absorb, and coal is already and will continue to be the single most prolific contributor to the acceleration of that process. The achievement of anything like the proposed “clean coal” technologies may be too expensive for the existing industry to finance without massive subsidies, making a transition to clean energy the more economical choice over time.
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