Maybe you’ve seen the ads: A man playing a blue-collar worker at an energy plant talking about the wonders of clean coal, leading the viewer through the plant to the place where the magic happens. Then he opens the door onto an open field, a desolate plain, saying this is where it all happens. “Amazing,” he says, shouting over the nonexistent machinery.
The ad was produced by a new coalition — the Reality Coalition — which is advocating against the false promise of clean coal technology.
Author Jeff Biggers in The Washington Post earlier this year offered a damning assessment of the clean-coal scam:
Orwellian language has led to Orwellian politics. With the imaginary vocabulary of “clean coal,” too many Democrats and Republicans, as well as a surprising number of environmentalists, have forgotten the dirty realities of extracting coal from the earth. Pummeled by warnings that global warming is triggering the apocalypse, Americans have fallen for the ruse of futuristic science that is clean coal. And in the meantime, swaths of the country are being destroyed before our eyes.
Biggers is focusing on the tangential costs — the destruction of coal-producing areas and the people who work the mines. Extracting coal will remain a deadly pursuit, no matter what kind of technology is devised for cutting down on polluting emissions.
And that assumes that coal emissions can be cleansed. While there are some benefits to clean coal — replacing coal with something else will be difficult — the fact is “Coal is the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, and not easy to clean,” or cheap, according to Charles Q. Choi on Live Science.
“You’re taking an inherently very polluting fuel, with each pollutant
posing myriad problems, and solving each with different technologies, and that
keeps adding up in terms of cost,” Freese said.
Opponents claim — with some legitimacy — that costs could skyrocket.
It could easily increase the cost of energy from a pulverized coal plant by two-thirds to three-quarters, “way more than any of the other technologies needed to control the other pollutants,” Freese said.
In the end, the cost to the environment may just be higher than any benefit that so-called clean coal technology generates, because
“you’re depending on a nonrenewable resource for energy, and one that’s notoriously destructive on the environment when it comes to mining it out,” she added.
If carbon capture and storage do not work properly, “obviously there’s the problem of carbon dioxide leaking into the atmosphere, and that undermines the whole point of capturing it in the first place,” Freese said. “There’s also the risk that leaks from pipelines or storage facilities carrying the concentrated gas can be fatal. Dissolved carbon dioxide is also acidic, and if it migrates into groundwater supplies it can carry toxins with it, poisoning the water.”
