Subscribe in a readerEnergy Series, Part II: The Dirty Truth About “Clean” Coal
With a series of very expensive ads, the big money interests of Big Coal have seized upon our nation’s Presidential debates to spread propaganda about clean coal as a solution to our energy problems. There’s a good chance industry front groups will be airing more commercials as we all tune in tonight.
Don’t believe the hype. There’s no such thing as clean coal.
All coal is nasty, dirty, polluting and a serious health risk to you, your family and your environment. Clean coal hasn’t been scrubbed with soap or run through a washing machine. It’s exactly the same as every other kind of coal: dirty, from start to finish.
Coal is blasted from mountaintops, scraped from surface strip mines and ripped from underground mine shafts. 260 million gallons of water are used and polluted by the mining process every day. More than 1,000 miles of once-pristine streams have been literally buried by mountaintop removal coal mining operations in the Appalachian Mountains. And if you think coal mining has become safer in recent years, consider the 12,000 American coal miners who died from black lung disease between 1993 and 2002. All this destruction, and the coal hasn’t even been burned yet.
Coal fired power plants across our nation use an incredible 12 million gallons of water every hour. That’s like leaving your tap running for four and a half years. Every hour. Their smoke stakes belch out a toxic haze of pollutants, including soot, smog, mercury and all the necessary ingredients for acid rain. And, let’s not forget all that carbon dioxide. American coal fired plants exhale more than a third of our total carbon dioxide emissions.
“Clean coal”, according to the industry’s propaganda, would eliminate this global warming impact by storing coal plant emissions in underground storage facilities. In theory, the idea could work. In practice, we are more likely to teach pigs to fly. This is a speculative and highly costly technology, a rhetorical place-holder used to help the coal industry by banking on a technology that has never been successfully implemented.
Storing coal exhaust underground isn’t a simple matter of setting up some sort of vacuum at each smokestack. This is an immense and complex project; one with no real-world support on a large scale. To store just one-tenth of annual coal-fired power plant emissions would require an infrastructure larger and more complex than all the existing oil pipelines worldwide. Trillions of dollars and decades of construction would be needed. And that’s just to store 10% of current emissions. What about the other 90 percent?
And, if what happens if we do somehow succeed to get substantial quantities of carbon dioxide underground? Well, then our problems start getting serious. By pumping underground caverns full of pressurized carbon dioxide, we could be creating global warming bombs. No one knows how secure these storage vaults could be, or what would happen if one should rupture. Some worry the condensed coal wastes may shift subterranean water tables around or even find their way into our drinking water supplies. Nothing clean about that.
Clean coal is nothing more than an industry-funded ad campaign. Words are words, and reality is something else entirely. No word will ever make coal clean.
Related Posts:
Energy Series, Part I: We Can’t Solve Today’s Problems With Yesterday’s Ideas
Energy Series, Part III: Nuclear Energy: Not In My Watershed
Energy Series, Part IV: Ethanol: Too Good To Be True?
Energy Series, Part V: Curing Our Fossil Fuel Addiction, One Alternative At A Time
Energy Series, Part VI: Have More Energy By Using Less Of It
Posted on September 26, 2008 | Filed Under Global Warming and a New Energy Economy | 2 Comments
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- Clean Energy? Part 2 – The Clean Coal Con
- Energy Series, Part IV: Ethanol: Too Good to be True?
- Energy Series, Part VI: Have More Energy, by Using Less of It
- Energy Series, Part III: Nuclear Energy: Not in My Watershed
- Energy Series, Part I: We Can’t Solve Today’s Problems with Yesterday’s Ideas
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In my area of North Central PA, a lot of home owners have reverted to burning coal for home heating as electricity costs rise. They not only think they are saving money, but they say they are burning only the clean type of coal – that is, anthracite. I say, that all coal is dirty – some types more so than others. But rising electricity bills and the targeted ads of the coal industry convince my neighbors otherwise as they pollute their air and mine!
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