The fraternal duo that gave us Barton Fink and Fargo is now lending a hand to the effort to debunk “clean coal” technology. In this spot by Joel and Ethan Coen, a lovely family gets fooled by a slick-talking salesman into freshening the air in their idyllic home by spraying it with black coal dust. Take that, “clean” hucksters!
Apart from being vaguely amusing, it’s also generally accurate. Which is to say, coal should be actively shunned as part of our national energy strategy. As the world’s leading climate expert put it recently, coal-fired power plants are “death factories.”
Unfortunately, Obama is still on board with clean coal. Why? Coal’s a huge part of the energy pie and has so many interest groups behind it, that it would take a huge act of political courage to say what needs to be said on the subject. For a while there was even a $2 billion trial project in his home state that might have inclined him to believe the hype, although that seems to have been dropped.
The real answer is two-fold. First, to build out our renewable capacity, particularly wind and solar. And second, to become more like France by replacing coal with nuclear. As a nation, we seem to be engaged with the first challenge, but totally ignorant of the second. It would be interesting to see a major Hollywood director take on the latter, politically trickier issue.
February 27th, 2009 at 11:58 am
Being in the world of academia, I can tell you that carbon capture and sequestration, in the typical sense of the phrase, is still far from leaving the lab. Separating the carbon dioxide from the flue gas from coal plants is energy intensive (the “capture”), and compressing it into liquid and pumping it underground is energy intensitve (the “sequestration”).
But I attended a lecture last week that brought me some optimism about “clean coal”. It was by Brent Constantz of Calera, who claims that their pilot plant captures 85% of CO2 from the flue gas produced by the Moss Landing Power Plant (gas turbines, in this case). They use a chemical process that converts the CO2 into calcium and magnesium carbonates (i.e. limestone). They claim it would add only 15% to the cost of electricity generation, and they can sell the carbonates in the forms of sand or gravel (of which there is a huge worldwide demand). Of course, there’s only a business case for it if there’s a price on carbon emissions, but it looks like that might happen soon.
I think it’s too bad Calera hasn’t more publicly advertised how far along it is. It looks like the company was founded to try to replace traditional cement production, but from the lecture it seems they decided not to tackle such an established industry. Using their aggregates with traditional cement can still yield a net-carbon-negative concrete.
Of course, we’ll have to see whether this will work on a large scale, but I wouldn’t rule out “clean coal” just yet.
February 27th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
Eugene,
I’d be interested to hear more about this — drop me a note if you get a chance: jr@infrastrucurist dot com
Jebediah
March 4th, 2009 at 12:35 am
That’s all fine Eugene, but CO2 is not the only contaminant coming from coal. What about the mercury, acid mine tailings and other contaminants? Often what gets “scrubbed” out of the flu (to improve air quality) makes the coal slurry & sludge more toxic. Plus that is not to say where the coal is being mined from (i.e. our moutaintops). When water runs red from the AMD, you can’t really consider it a clean industry in the least bit.