Ziptrek Ecotours

Clean Coal

November 2008

If you were able to watch any of the debates between the Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates in the United States, you would have seen a demonstration of unequivocal support from all sides for the use of “clean coal”. I know that regular old coal is not an environmental winner. Mining it destroys land, not to mention the miners themselves. In the U.S., coal accounts for more than half of nitrogen oxide emissions and about a quarter of sulphur dioxide pollution. It doesn’t fare well on the greenhouse gas emission scale when compared to its fellow fossil fuels. So I was left wondering what exactly “clean coal” is, and whether I should be in favour of it.

It really depends whom you ask. The industry-sponsored American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity defines it as “any technology to reduce pollutants associated with the burning of coal that was not in widespread use” prior to regulations from 1990. By that definition, the group can call any newer coal-based power plant clean. Outside industry (and likely, political) semantics, “clean” coal by this definition is not very clean at all.

Outside the industry, “clean coal” usually refers to something different: Namely, the idea that the carbon dioxide produced from burning coal in power plants might be captured and stored, preventing it from contributing to climate change. This technology is not imminent. Carbon-capture techno logy has been demonstrated n a small scale, but even supporters within the industry admit that a target of 2020 for large-scale tests of the technology is “very aggressive”. It is also an extremely expensive process. According to a widely respected MIT study, coal power plants will use that technology only if they are going to suffer financially from their carbon dioxide emissions.

So is “clean coal” worth our support? We are not going to stop using coal any time soon, so any improvement helps. Developing and exporting carbon-capture technology will likely provide great benefits in the future, but what’s burning now and for the foreseeable future is loaded with greenhouse-gas emissions. Most of the talk right now about commitment to “clean coal” is full of that hot air.