Clean coal: It's not just bad marketing, it's bad physics
12/18/2008 at 22:41 from (47.683479, -122.266725)
Recently, I got this message from some progressive mailing list about a new awareness campaign they're launching to combat the marketing of "clean coal" by the coal lobby. What they take issue with is that there currently aren't any "clean coal" plants in operation in the United States and that the term is merely marketing "greenwash" (if you like ridiculous oxymorons, you'll love Partial Zero Emissions Vehicle).
My objections have little to do with whether the coal industry is "walking the walk", though. The source of my frustration is the fact that "clean coal" itself is junk science -- an act of greed, not a solution. More than that, though, "clean coal" constitutes an active regression in energy technology and a very real threat to the general public.
Good intentions
The email goes thusly:
Dear Brian,
It's everywhere -- advertising from companies claiming that coal is clean. The stark reality is that there is literally no such thing as clean coal electricity in the United States today -- not one American home today is powered by a coal-burning plant that captures and stores its carbon pollution. And coal plants are responsible for a full third of America's carbon dioxide pollution -- the chief cause of global warming.
As Barack Obama and Congress begin to chart a new course on energy, we feel it's crucial to help shatter the false illusion the coal industry is promoting. Let's be clear: until U.S. coal power plants capture and store their carbon dioxide emissions, they cannot be considered "clean." And right now, none of them do. So today, in partnership with several prominent environmental organizations, the Alliance for Climate Protection is launching a major campaign we're calling, quite simply, Reality.
To see the great ad the Reality Coalition is launching and to help out, just go to:
http://www.ThisIsReality.org
Coal companies seem to be spending their money marketing coal as "clean" rather than actually making it clean. This has got to stop. That's why we're calling them out boldly and publicly on their rhetoric. We're expecting a major response from the coal industry, and we need your help.
The tag line and core message of the Reality campaign is simply "In Reality, there's no such thing as clean coal" -- highlighting that in America today, no such thing exists. We're insisting that the coal industry do more than "talk the talk," but that they now "walk the walk." We're challenging them to immediately invest in the technologies that can stop carbon pollution from entering the atmosphere. Over 600 coal plants operate now without such controls and more than 60 new dirty plants are proposed. None of these plants are "clean."
We're going to need your help to get out the word, because the coal industry has a lot of money and resources to move their message. Today, to start, we're asking folks simply to sign up to help -- to join the movement and help form a new "Reality Corps."
Their hearts are in the right place, but I can't say their brains are. While I absolutely agree that the coal lobby is deliberately muddying the waters on the topic of energy to avoid obselescence, I can't in good conscience support the idea of them actually implementing carbon capture and sequestration, which this letter seems to encourage, if not openly endorse.
Why? I'm glad you asked.
Coal is cool!
The reason that coal is such a good source of fuel is because it has tremendous energy density (meaning that it is really efficient at storing loads of energy) and because it's relatively easy to release that stored up energy. In fact, there is an entire class of chemical reactions -- exothermic reactions -- that share coal's characteristic "eagerness to release heat".
Lots of everyday and not-so-everyday things, from instant hot packs to cluster bombs, are powered by exothermic reactions. They're super handy. In the case of coal, as is the case for most things we burn (gasoline, candles, Presto logs), the chemical reaction for burning can be summarized like this:
Essentially, all that coal and oxygen need in order to unlock all that energy stored in the coal is a hot spark. After that initial spark, the system provides its own starting heat, galluping along until there's no more fuel to burn or oxygen to pair up with. This should all sound extremely familiar if you've ever built a campfire or played with a lighter.
The energy from this reaction is used to do work, in this case generating electricity. The electricity generation piece usually consists of gasifying some liquid (typically water) and capitalizing on the increase in volume from this phase change to spin a turbine.
From the time of extraction until electricity is made to power the computer you're reading this on, the overall efficiency of coal is quite high. About 30-35% of the energy in the coal is converted to electricity. Wind power, by comparison, can only extract about 20% of the energy in a mass of moving air.
Or maybe coal isn't so cool
So, after reading all that, coal sounds like a pretty good deal. All we have to do is dig up some seriously rotten vegetation from 300 million years ago and BAM! (almost) free energy.
Not quite.
See, as with anything so clearly powerful and cool, coal has some pretty ugly downsides. As it turns out, it's not only hydrocarbons in there. There are also lots of other chemicals mixed in that, when burned, are toxic for humans to breathe or eat. Pollutants such as sulfur dioxide, mercury, and ash contribute directly to acid rain, soil pollution, and widespread respiratory illness. In fact, a recent study of the impact of air pollution in Los Angeles and the San Joaquin Valley found that over 3,000 people in the area die prematurely every year because of the kind of particulate matter released by coal plants. That's almost double the number killed in car accidents.
But it gets better.
Coal also contains a rather high concentration of radioactive elements. This nasty stuff stays in the environment for a very long time, getting into the water you drink, the food you eat, and the air you breathe. It causes the sorts of genetic mutations that lead to higher rates of cancer and developmental disabilities in children. Coal plants are actually greater emitters of radioactive waste to the environment than -- get this -- nuclear power plants!
And coal plants aren't just killing us locally, they're trashing our planet.
As the email at the beginning of all this mentioned, coal-fired power plants pump out a whopping 1/3 of the nation's carbon dioxide. They're a major contributor to global climate change (don't think global warming, think global weirding), which threatens to desertify some areas of the planet, inundate others, and just generally make this world a less hospitable and more violent place to eek out a living.
The damage isn't limited to esoteric things like the air or global temperatures, either. There are more tangible environmental and social costs, as well. The unquenchable hunger for ever more coal has driven coal-rich communities to completely level their mountains and pilfer the ground. The quest for coal is currently destroying whole ecosystems, poisoning water sources, creating hazardous material zones out of working communities, and grinding away the lives of the men and women who dig for low wages in horrendous conditions.
If coal's so dirty, "clean coal" must be the answer!
Proponents of "clean coal" claim to want to address some of these very real global and social health risks. Their solution is to scrub out the nasty bits from the coal emissions before they ever leave the smoke stack through a process called "recapture", then inject the goo they scrub out into the ground via a process called "sequestration". The combined practice has been dubbed "Carbon Capture and Sequestration", or CCS.
Now, at first blush, this appears to take care of the major problems with coal. After all, most of the issues listed above have to do with power plant emissions. If carbon recapture actually does reduce the level of emissions, it would be worth it, right?
Not quite.
Sure, not much would be going into the atmosphere, but if the "clean coal" gurus get their way, that scrubbed carbon (and all the heavy metals, radioactive elements, and toxic chemicals concentrated therein) would be pumped into the ground, somewhere near you. This has raised major public health concerns. Even worse, there's no guarantee that the "sequestered" carbon would even stay put. According to the IPCC, the risks associated with a leak would be similar to those of current drilling, which isn't exactly a vote of confidence.
But we don't even need to wander into those weeds to discern whether this is a good idea. There's a more fundamental issue with CCS: it's the exact opposite of efficient.
Some things look stupid at 30,000 ft
When discussing any sort of energy system, it's necessary to think of the system in its entirety. In the case of a standard coal plant, the path seems pretty straight-forward: Coal is mined, processed, transported to plants, then burned. Mining, processing, and transporting coal are energy-intensive steps, but the final act -- burning the coal -- unleashes so much energy that the earlier energy costs are eclipsed.
CCS adds two more steps to that equation: capture and sequestration. Now, it doesn't take a genius to realize that extracting the carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, mercury, uranium, ash, and assorted badness from coal plant flues takes lots of energy. In fact, according to the IPCC, just scrubbing the nasty from flue exhaust will come at the expense of between 10% and 40% of the plant's generated energy.
But wait, there's more!
After dramatically reducing the efficiency of our coal plant (and significantly increasing the cost) by sticking an expensive scrubber on the smoke stack, we have to punch a hole in the earth's crust and pump the resulting goo into the ground (or ocean) as hard and fast as we're producing it, which is about as far from "efficient" as we can physically get. Scientists have yet to even venture a guess at how energy intensive this would be, largely because proponents of CCS have been so hand-wavy on where they'd put the offending substance.
While we're on the subject, I should point out that the oil companies love this idea. In fact, they've been using it for years because forcing pressurized carbon dioxide into partially-tapped oil deposits displaces the oil that's in there, resulting in lower drilling costs for them. Of course, now that CCS is part of the national energy debate, they can get the taxpayer to foot the bill for this expensive enterprise! Win-win (coal-oil)!
CCS: Not just inefficient, but actively wasteful
From a simple physics standpoint, CCS is a massive energy sink, which, if accomplished on even a regional scale, could double the amount of coal needed to produce an equivalent amount of energy to that produced today. The rate at which we mine coal today would have to substantially increase, even as we find out that our estimates of current coal reserves were dramatically overstated.
In the face of shrinking supply and rising demand, how can any rational person advocate a more inefficient process?
The fact is this: There is no magical cure whereby we can continue to use the same 19th century technology we've gotten by on for so long and leave behind a planet suitable for living to our children. The whole process is an exercise in waste, indulgence, and passing the buck. It's expensive, not only in terms of energy, but also in terms of real dollars.
The pure energy efficiency of the coal burning process is almost entirely eliminated by the massive amount of money and effort we have to put forth as a society to clean up the mess these power plants make. Just because we haven't made the cleanup effort a priority yet doesn't mean we won't or shouldn't. It's our solemn duty as human beings to fix what's broken and pass along a better world to the future.
There are solutions.
More efficient appliances and smarter use of energy at home would have a greater impact, and sooner, than any of the energy proposals floating around. Simple, unsexy solutions, such as California's requirement that commercial buildings have white roofs instead of black ones (to reduce air conditioning costs), result in remarkable savings, obviating the need to keep expanding our energy infrastructure. Large scale endeavors, such as high speed rail (to reduce flight waste), regional mass transit, mandated efficiency in our automobiles, and emissions caps are also necessary, and will hopefully constitute a major piece of our new president's economic and energy agenda.
And we have better alternatives for power, too.
Wind power is cheap, efficient, simple, and clean. Remember how I said above that wind power is about 10-15% less efficient than coal? Well, that's just generation efficiency. When the social, environmental, and economic costs of coal are factored in, it's clear to anybody that wind power wins hands down.
Wind turbines don't pollute. They don't require that entire communities live in third world conditions to keep them running. The wind itself doesn't need to be shipped across the country or regulated or monitored or pulverized or sequestered. In fact, the biggest complaint leveled against wind turbines thus far is that they're "eyesores".
Apparently some people have never seen a coal-fired power plant up close. See if you can spot the eyesore:
