We have all seen the "Clean Coal" commericials and they are actually pretty funny, poking fun at Obama's hope for clean coal technology. Opponents to this, including Al Gore, say that there are more negative issues to this than positive. First of all, they are against mountaintop removal. My family is from the Appalachian mountains in Pikeville so I can relate to this concern. If any of you have seen the documentary "Sludge" about the drawbacks that come from mountaintop mining, you would see the opposition's point also. Secondly, the price of converting coal to clean, not to mention the research that goes into it would be ridiculous!One project announced in 2003 was envisioned to cost about $950 million dollars. The project was to be a 285-megawatt lab that would test advanced clean coal technologies. One of the positive things clean coal is said to do is generate power at lower cost than other fossil fuels. According to the Energy Information Administration, October 2008 electric utilities paid "2.19 per million BTU", as opposed to $6.94 for natural gas and $16.68 for petroleum."According to the article though, a 2008 study estimates that adding this technology would increase the capital cost of a power plant by half and that doesn't even include the costs of transporting and storing the captured CO2 or operating costs. Third, the clean coal technology still releases detrimental gases into the environment.
This new technology is a nice thought and would help the U.S. become more energy independent but personally I don't believe it can ever happen. As Obama said "Why couldn't be do this, because we put a man on the moon!" I think theres more of a chance putting a whole colony on the moon than cleaning up coal emissions.
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Hey dawn, I totally agree with you. I would much rather be making more history with the whole moon thing rather than more gases from coal being exposed to everything on our Earth.
ReplyDeleteI really liked Dawn's post. I feel it was well written, and since her family is from an area that depends on coal for a living, it makes it all the more important to her. My wife's family is from the Appalachian region, and they depend on coal for their very livelihoods. I have seen the effects of coal on the human body, and I agree with her assessment that clean coal is not very likely to be seen in our time.
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