More Thoughts on Coal
Just days before the election, some tapes from some months ago were dug up and the McCain campaign attempted to use them against Obama. They involved Obama speaking of putting a price on carbon dioxide emissions (which nearly everyone else in the Western World has done) which would make it ungodly expensive to build a new coal-fired power plant unless the carbon dioxide were kept out of the atmosphere. His words were of course twisted into "Obama wants to bankrupt the coal industry" and used in an attempt to sway people who probably know little or nothing about the carbon cycle or energy, but have either employment in the coal industry or are sentimental about it. Obviously, it was too little too late, but in essence the plan gives the industry two choices:
- Build plants with carbon sequestration.
- Build standard plants and pay out the nose for the carbon dumping rights.
While I personally believe that they will lose either way, the industry itself is the one running TV ads and such for these advanced plants that will use technology that doesn't even exist to solve today's energy problems.
Why must we "save" the coal industry? Did we fight to save the cathode-ray tube industry when plasma and LCD screens came on the market? Did we save the companies that made steam locomotives when the diesel models came about? Did we try and save the railroads when cheap oil-fueled trucking became the preferred method of transport? How about the gas illumination companies when electrical lighting was invented? No, we didn't! This was generally accepted as "progress". Just as they say, Video Killed the Radio Star! Progress means moving beyond fossil energy and the dangers that is poses.
We all know (hopefully) the current benefit of coal, which is the fact that it is the source of 50% of all of the electrical energy we use in the United States. This electricity improves our lives in so many ways. These power plants cannot be shut down over night, obviously, but for ecological reasons we must be looking at other sources (as well as different economic policies) in order to preserve our future well-being and sustainability.
My criticism of coal is often criticized by "What about all of the modern health care, information technology, etc. that is made possible by coal?"
Coal does not provide those benefits, ELECTRICITY provides them. It just so happens that we currently make most of that electricity using coal. I'm not advocating getting rid of electricity, only producing it using other energy sources. The environmental movement is often criticized as wanting to send the world back to the "Stone Age", because this impression is created that it would like to eliminate electricity, central heating, etc, because people fail to see and understand alternate ways in which energy can be collected and used.
I am quite certain, though, that the numerous downsides of coal are not so well-known or understood, especially considering the apparently high support for the future development of coal-fired electrical capacity. It is quite obvious, by reading the comments on this article and subsequent forum at the web site HotAir (as well as thousands of others) that there are certainly people who haven't a clue when it comes to understanding the carbon cycle or ecology in general. Rather than getting educated on the issue, they blurt out misinformation.
- They emit more hazardous air pollutants and greenhouse gases than any other energy option. This includes mercury, a bioaccumulative neurotoxin which is postulated to be a factor in causing autism and other neurological disorders. "Playing with Mercury" (as many older people say they did as a child, etc.) is much different than mercury spread around the environment. A one-time handling of some metallic mercury is a completely different experience from living with organomercury compounds in the food chain, and the dangers are often underestimated (or overestimated in the case of a broken fluorescent lamp in the house, with ridiculous reports of people calling in hazmat crews and paying thousands of dollars for cleanup).
- The technology to clean up the emissions is expensive and often unproven (in the case of CO2 sequestration). Better option is to not produce pollutants in the first place. Thankfully that IS an option.
- A new standard coal unit (one boiler and 1000 MW turbine line, not including the cost of the carbon cemetery and burial) costs at least $1.5+ billion to build in addition to perpetual fuel costs over its entire lifetime.
- They throw away at least 60% of the energy originally present in the coal. In addition, carbon sequestration plants will pump another 30% of the useful output into the ground.
- Economy of scale and NIMBYism eliminates the possibility of cogenerating and utilizing the waste heat. We have rejected the idea of district heating anyways, as densified housing is unattractive and fossil fuels have historically been cheap. Now, people are struggling to pay their oil and gas bills as American coal-fired power plants throw away as many joules as are used by the entire continent of Africa.
- The NIMBY issue is not helped by the fact that most American coal plants are architectural monstrosities, complete with exposed, ugly brownish-gray ductwork and no attention to aesthetics. If new units are to be built, there should be attention to aesthetics. This may make the plants more people-friendly and cogeneration may be possible, effectively halving the CO2 emissions (assuming the heat displaces the use of natural gas). Municipalities will need to install a district heating network, however. That is an expensive, long-term endeavor and seems unlikely when municipalities are selling/leasing their water systems, sewer systems, transportation systems, and highways to private companies and banks.
- Coal is a finite resource of which consumerism will quickly gobble up, leaving our expensive coal-based infrastructure subject to high prices and shortages.
- Coal-fired electricity generation does nothing to reduce the dependency on foreign oil unless we channel the electricity into electric vehicles and electrified railroads.
- Converting coal into diesel and gas is a filthy process which results in more greenhouse gas emissions than petroleum-based fuel. It perpetuates the use of the inefficient internal combustion engine for personal transportation and makes any type of carbon capture and storage impossible (how do you capture the CO2 from moving vehicles? )
- Calling coal cheap today is akin to oil in the 1950s and gas in the 1990s; it was burned for power generation and no one anticipated the run-ups in prices due to exploding demand from the "infinite-growth" consumer economy.
- Mining the stuff is an ecological nightmare. To access the "250 years" worth of reserves that the pundits tell us exist would require ripping up prime farm land, cities, towns, etc. Strip mining and blasting are preferred over dangerous and expensive underground mining. In Germany, a town was moved in order to access the lignite reserves in the area, and in Australia there is currently a fight against the coal industry which would like to destroy fertile farmland in order to access the coal below.
- Once the mining sites close, they continue to release acidified water loaded with sulfur as well as iron and other metals. Anyone from Northeast PA is familiar with this phenomenon.
- We think that disposal of a few thousand cubic meters of high-level solid radioactive waste is a daunting task. Imagine 2.5 billion tons per year of gaseous carbon dioxide! (That's only the emission of coal-fired electricity production in the United States, which represents 10% of world emissions! )
The coal industry simply wants to sell more coal, which is the reason for THEIR promotion of high-technology coal-burning power plants with no mention of the vast hydropower, geothermal, solar, and wind capacity which is yet to be exploited. That is business, and it is what is expected.
However, we must, as a nation, begin to prioritize where we put our energy dollars. Despite the industry and politicians saying "We must keep every option on the table" they are more than willing to pump up the fossil fuel business while forgetting about the other superior options. Is it worth it to build all of this fancy technology to "clean up" a dirty and finite fuel when so many options exist which are clean from the start and are renewable resources with much lower ecological (and inherently human health) impact?
If the coal-fired utilities are willing to finance and build the clean-coal projects and prove that the technology works, that's fine, they can do that. They should not, however, be asking for huge sums of public money and electricity rate increases while at the same time discrediting renewables for those very reasons. Maybe a stipulation should be that "You can [try to] build the new plants, but their output must be used to take an old plant offline", not to increase the share of coal in the electrical generation mix - which already stands at 50% - as much as all other resources combined. It does not need to be increased.
See EIA International Energy Consumption, with values in the "All Countries" Excel spreadsheet. African continental primary energy consumption was about 14 quads (14 x 1015 BTU) in 2005. Coal consumption in the U.S. in 2005 was about 25 quads in power plants with efficiency of about 30%. The waste heat from this is about 16 quads.
