In recent weeks, if you live in America, you’ve heard a ton
of how the coal industry has been oppressed under the Obama administration. You
have heard that President (excuse me I just threw up a little) Trump is
bringing back coal. Putting them miners
back to working their ass off, etc. Well
actually his tweet said minors, but whatever, I’m about 50% sure he means
miners.
In this post, I’m not going to get into the actual numbers
of mining jobs, or how much coal is produced.
Nope, I’m going to talk about what “Clean Coal” is. Sit back and relax as we toddle down the road
of clean coal half truths and alternate facts!
First things first, what is Clean Coal? Well, according to the Department of Energy,
who I must point out is led by none other than ‘ol pointy boots himself Rick
Perry, clean coal is a series of processes and technologies that make coal less
harmful, help it produce more power, and other really nice sounding
things. The big-ticket item in clean
coal is carbon dioxide capture or sequestration.
Basically, burn the hell out of it, and pump
the CO2 underground and hope for the best.
At no point in the process is the coal any less hazardous than it always
was. Clean coal should really be called “cleaner
coal smoke” because that’s where whatever improvements in the process are can
be found. The exhausted gases if the
system works as describe will be lower in CO2, and sulfur. There could be some reduction in the heavy
metals leaving the stack, but the majority of that is not from clean coal tech,
but rather the stack scrubbers operating at higher levels of efficiency, or the
scrubbing elements of the stack being improved in general.
While speaking of higher efficiency, clean coal tech reportedly
is being used to make the process of power generation with coal more efficient. Pushing the process to higher levels of efficiency
is awesome, right? Well, there’s one problem with that statement, combustion
has a maximum efficiency of that relates to the amount of oxygen present in the
process. That is the ONLY factor that
can improve the process, assuming that the coal you have is the same type from
one test to the other. Now for the
record, there are five primary types of coal they are peat, lignite, subbituminous,
bituminous and anthracite. In my geology
studies, we didn’t count peat, since it is the parent material for coal, and
not readily used in the coal energy production model for power generation. In general, however they are harder and thus
more energy packed per unit in the above respective order. The hardness is related to how the coal
formation was deposited, the amount of pressure and heat it underwent and the
amount of plant material remaining in a sample.
Anyway, so let’s say you have a pound of high quality West Virginia
anthracite coal and you have a fire roaring along, then throw that coal in
there. In normal oxygen levels, that one
pound of anthracite will produce 12,700 BTU’s, which are British Thermal
Units. Now, let’s say I start blowing
air into the fire with a fan or some sort of apparatus. The fire will get hotter because there is
more air, i.e. we are in excess, and the combustion becomes more efficient. At the end of the day this is great, but
there is a limit on the efficiency of combustion. Under most models that I’ve seen, the limit
on the best coal burning power plant translates to around 60% efficiency, while
some of the worst are down into the range of 15%. Older plants, by in large were less efficient
than newer plants. The efficiency is
also effected by the coal type burning, but again, that difference is minor
compared to how the reaction is managed.
Now the clean coal folks would have you believe that
gasification and other processes improve efficiency and while that statement isn't wrong per say, it’s not telling the whole story. The process overall can be improved by using
gasification in so much as it can reduce levels of sulfur or in some cases CO2
in the gas product BEFORE its reacted.
The process doesn’t improve the burn because again that is limited by
the amount of oxygen present in the reaction chamber. There is a point also where you can feed no
more oxygen into the chamber and not start reducing the heat output because it’s
being lost to all that air blowing in.
Long story short, clean coal is a lot of smoke and
mirrors. The coal itself is just as
dirty and dangerous as it always was.
The men and women mining it are getting just as sick from black lung and
all sorts of other aliments from the work as they always were. The danger is that under the guise of science,
the truth of their plight and the truth of coal is being hidden. The real dangers are being overlooked in
favor of profit margins and frankly the deaths of the miners and the illness
that plague the communities is simply blood on the hands of the government who
allows the use to expand and the people making money off the effort.
Those who would deceive you have gotten really good at
making the tech sound “sciency” and cutting edge. And to be complexly fair some of it is novel
and does help clean up the exhausted product, but nothing and I do mean
nothing, can make the coal coming out of the ground less dangerous.
Remember, the fight for our environment is not a sprint, it’s
a marathon. We all need clean air, clean
water and clean land to survive, and no amount of political rambling and
certainly no amount of hot air from the GOP and Trump can change the biology of
survival. Keep resisting!
Below you will find links to various sources that discuss
coal, clean coal and the economics of it all.
Until next time ~
