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Can Coal Be Green?
wap writes "A coal-industry sponsored group, Americans for Balanced Energy Choices thinks coal is green, and has been running television ads to make its point. The ad shows an eagle unable to fly because of smog, and then talks about how much cleaner coal is now and will be in the future, with a sub-title saying that this is because of EPA regulation. Coal burning is much cleaner now than it was due to new scrubbing technologies, but it still emits just as much carbon dioxide as ever. Carbon emissions can be reduced by increased efficiency through gasification, but the only way to stop coal from emitting carbon dioxide is carbon sequestration. Everyone agrees that sequestration is expensive, but not everyone agrees that it's even effective in the long term. Should we instead follow the suggestion of James Lovelock and go nuclear as has been discussed here before?"
Coal can be Black or maybe Brown, but never Green..
But seriously, there is now a massive power struggle for power - all the different interest groups are jockeying for position to be the next big "green" fuel.
My own 2c (per kw/hour) is that the very simple obvious non-polluting green alternatives - wind, tide, wave, solar, etc - have quietly evolved to a stage where they could take over as the western worlds main source of energy. Why do we need to mess around with nuclear/coal/oil? All the supporting technologies have developed sufficiently that they are either already economical, or at worse should be soon with a little more work. If you just take wind alone, the latest batch of offshore wind farms are contracted to supply power to the UK grid at 0.03 pounds/kilowatt/hour - pretty competitive, and set to come down with scale. (British Wind Energy Association page) (American Wind Energy Association page)
The latest windmills do not present loading problems for the grid, probably kill less wildlife than other things (ie tall structures in general, glass windows, cars, oil rigs etc..) & do not really mess up the landscape for 99.99% of people.
The UK alone has many times its energy needs already available in potential off-shore sites. The USA and Australia have similar huge (and worryingly largely unsurveyed) potentials - off & on shore.
And then you can look at other sources - tide, wave, solar.. For instance, Australia is building 1 km high towers that can generate power by solar power.
Ok, back to coal - can it be green? Well if you can safely bury 100% (or close to) emmissions - dont forget all the other by-products (CO, SO2, mercury, lead.. ) and you mine it in a green manner, you would have something resembling a green source of power for a short while - until all the easily minable resources were gone, then renewables become cheaper anyway..
Nuclear? Oh sure its "cheap" - until you have to decommission the sites, and get rid of the waste safely - which has to be looked after for centuries.. Billions of pounds were wasted on Nuclear power generation in the UK to no avail - the money would have been much better spent on researching renewables, which have had a pittance by comparison.
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
Coal is a very versatile resource. It can be cracked and liquified for home delevery and it's even more abundant that crude oil albeit harder to gather. But advances in robotics should, if corporations really cared about their workes, make mineing it safer and more efficent. As for the emmisions, why cant we just pump is back where we got it in the first place. Or perhaps some form of plant reactor could be created to resolidify it through natural processes and then the plants( a form of alge imagine) could be used a fertlizer. I could go on and on... It just seem sucudial to polute the air we breath fot the sake of the bottom line.