Clean Coal is a nice image used by politicians to win votes in coal producing states. It exists only in the minds of hopeful politicians and marketers of coal and coal-burning plants. Excerpts from Ben Elgin's article in Business Week magazine are below.
With coal-rich swing states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia critical to the Presidential race, both Barack Obama and John McCain have endorsed the idea that coal is well on its way to becoming a benign energy source.
The catch is that for now—and for years to come—"clean coal" will remain more a catchphrase than a reality. Despite the eagerness of the coal and power industries to sanitize their image and the desire of U.S. politicians to push a healthy-sounding alternative to expensive foreign oil and natural gas, clean coal is still a misnomer.
Environmental legislation enacted in 1990 forced the operators of coal-fired power plants to reduce pollutants that cause acid-rain. But such plants, which provide half of U.S. electricity, are the country's biggest source of greenhouse-gas emissions linked to global warming. No coal plant can control its emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide.
All the talk relates to the idea of separating CO2 from the coal-burning process and burying it in liquid form so it won't contribute to climate change.
Corporations and the federal government have tried for years to accomplish "carbon capture and sequestration." So far they haven't had much luck. The method is widely viewed as being decades away from commercial viability. Even then, the cost could be prohibitive: by a conservative estimate, several trillion dollars to switch to clean coal in the U.S. alone.
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