Sunday, November 30, 2008

"Clean Coal, Is There Really Such A Thing?"


I have recently become angered by the ads on TV depicting coal as the cleanest and most efficient form of energy on the market. I remember seeing pictures in school of trains, factories, and seemingly whole towns running on coal, spewing black soot into the sky. We later learned that this soot came down as acid rain, killing whole ecosystems. We were taught this for years, but now coal is seen as the greatest thing since sliced bread. What is this?! Have people forgotten the black ominous smog that hovered above cities for days and seemed to clog your lungs with every breath? Or the mass ecosystems that were wiped out because of acid rain? Are we becoming like the people of Oceania, accepting everything that comes out of the telescreen to be true while willingly forgetting what we previously learned? Well for everyone out there that believes in the oxymoron of “clean coal” here is what I found out about it:

- It is a fossil fuel (hey weren’t we trying to get away from those and onto renewable resources?)
- The burning of it produces:
- ash
- sulfur oxide
- nitrogen oxide
- carbon dioxide
- radionucleotides
- mercury
Out of the list above, carbon dioxide, radionucleotides, and mercury are the hardest and most expensive to control and clean, and therefore are the most dangerous. Coal fired plants are the largest source of mercury, a toxic metal. Just a few drops of it can pollute millions of gallons of water. These plants are responsible for about 65% of mercury emissions. While ash, sulfur oxide, and nitrogen oxide can be cleaned from the air by scrubs on the smoke stacks, the scrubs do not catch everything.
“Clean Coal” comes with high economic costs. Because of these costs, many companies either cannot afford to keep up to date with the newest clean technologies, or they are too cheap to do so. While evading the standards might cut costs for companies, it is taking its toll on the environment. Regulation of standards is also very difficult because many people that use coal come from impoverished regions, making it hard to enforce.
Not only is it extremely difficult to enforce, but ‘Clean Coal” is still only seen as ‘promising’. It has yet to become clean. The most promising "clean coal" technology involves using the coal to make hydrogen from water, then burying the resultant carbon dioxide by-product and burning the hydrogen (World Nuclear Association). This brings up the topic of burying our unwanted and dangerous chemical byproducts, which opens a whole new can of worms.
So next time you see one of those commercials, claiming how coal is the cleanest recourse, remember the smog, remember the mercury, remember the acid rain, the deforestation, the animal mutations, the green house effect, the toxic emissions, and the black lungs, and then try and believe what the ad is telling you.