Clean coal is a dirty lie
By KEN MIDKIFF
Published Friday, November 7, 2008
(http://columbiatribune.com/2008/nov/20081107comm001.asp)

Healthy cigarette? Clean coal?
Just as there’s no such thing as a healthy cigarette, there doesn’t appear to be any such thing as clean coal.

First, consider how coal is obtained. Either it is dug out from underneath the ground, endangering human health and presenting risks to human life, or it is obtained by extracting the coal after removing the "over-burden" (soil, grass, trees - anything on top of the coal). While the former has immediate problems of risk to human lives and health and long-lasting problems of subsidence and underground fires, the latter is more harmful and probably even longer-lasting.

Take a look at Finger Lakes State Park, where Peabody strip-mined the area decades ago. While relatively modern regulations prevent leaving an area denuded and acidic, strip mining that was conducted before the new regulations, which call for returning an area to its original topography, is exempted. Only after expenditures of millions of taxpayer dollars were Finger Lakes and Cedar Creek where the acid runoff goes - made non-toxic.

The latest gambit tried by coal companies - by the way, the major companies are headquartered in St. Louis - is removing the entire tops of mountains and dumping the "over-burden" into local streams. While anyone with half a brain can discern that such is harmful to water quality and aquatic life, the Environmental Protection Agency has deemed that the practice is not a violation of the Clean Water Act. Because it is obviously impossible to put the top back on a mountain, the "original topography" regulations do not apply.

An organization composed of the hill folk of West Virginia has risen to oppose the mountaintop removal and over-burden practices but to this point have succeeded only in making themselves heard. Among other things, they assert that removing the tops of mountains and dumping them in the creek has changed their entire lives. Lakes once filled with large fish are now dead. Cool, clear, swiftly flowing mountain streams are buried beneath tons of debris and flow no more.

A few years ago, on my way to Washington, D.C., the passenger jet passed over the mountaintop removal area. We were at 35,000 feet, but the devastation was clear. Miles and miles of blasted landscape. Miles and miles of bare rock.

So, no matter the intent of the utility companies that are constructing coal-burning power plants, merely obtaining the raw product is hazardous to the planet and to a way of life.

Second, clean coal technology in this country is still on the drawing board. It is experimental. In theory, it sounds good. The climate-damaging gases - carbon dioxide, primarily - would be removed from the stack and stored or pumped underground into cavernous areas. Storing the tonnages of carbon dioxide created is, to say the least, problematic. But the cavernous areas are there - some previously occupied by natural gas, some now occupied by salt. The cavernous areas are not always located where power plants would be sited; it is assumed that pipelines would take care of that.

But when a clean-coal plant was proposed to be built in east-central Illinois right over the top of a huge cavernous area, jointly funded by the Department of Energy and several utility companies, the energy department removed its funding when price increases threatened to break the bank. FutureGen, as it was tagged, was originally calculated to cost $1.8 billion - a tidy sum in itself - but the rising costs of steel and concrete ballooned the budget, and the energy department blinked.

Several European countries are investigating the possibilities of clean coal plants, but the best I could ascertain is the only clean coal plant now in operation in the entire world is in Germany - and that plant is very small and is being operated on a test or experimental basis. Suffice it to say the jury is still out on whether the plant will work. It will be at least three years before the results are known.

That’s what clean coal is - an unproven technology, an experiment that might or might not work.

So, when you see all those ads by the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, don’t believe what the ads have to say - it’s all based on hope and hyperbole. Some day, somewhere, it just might be possible to remove and sequester carbon dioxide from coal that is extracted with little harm to human health and little risk to life and in environmentally sound ways.

But that day is not yet here. At present, regardless of all the dreams and schemes, there is no such thing as clean coal.