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In nearly every speech and debate this year, “clean coal” has been invoked by both candidates as a real solution to America’s over-dependence on foreign energy. Repeated enough, phrases begin to be accepted as truth. But the promise of “clean coal” is a fairy tale, no more possible than spinning straw into gold.
Taxpayers For Common Sense reports that, since 1978, the United States federal government has spent 2.5 billion dollars developing Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) technology, the prime example of “clean coal.” Thirty years later, there are no U.S. coal plants that capture and sequester carbon. Yet the money still flows. According to New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) officials, there is currently $350 million of federal money on the table for states who are able to build a plant that successfully captures carbon. The “winners” will be announced mid-2009. But with every dollar that continues to be poured into “clean coal” research and development, we all lose.
In the still-hypothetical process of carbon capture, the carbon dioxide produced from burning coal is captured before it is released into the atmosphere. It is then pressurized into liquid form, or supercritical CO2, and injected into rock beds deep underground.
Imagine this process from a human perspective. You’re consuming a substance that feeds you and keeps you going, but over time, you realize that a part of that substance is poisoning you. You don’t want to give it up because it’s cheap and easy to get, so instead you concoct a scheme by which you will separate out and bury the harmful element. Content with your new scheme, you keep chugging along and burying the bad stuff. Chug, chug, chug, bury, bury, bury. It’s true, you can’t see it—but you know it’s there and you know that one day you will have to do something about it.
Like Aaron Eckhart’s tobacco lobbyist in Thank You For Smoking”>Thank You For Smoking, spokespeople are used to tout the safety of an inherently unsafe practice—burying supercritical CO2 in porous, underground geologic formations. They explain that CO2 is not “bad stuff.” At the October 10th Climate Change Solutions Workshop in Albany, hosted by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, geologist Veronica Rankin called supercritical CO2 “natural” and explained that over a long enough period of time (think what a “long time” means to a geologist), it will commingle with other liquids and become a solid. She also said that it is being injected thousands of feet underground, too deep to affect ground water. When an environmentalist at the meeting inquired about the potential danger to the water, a government proponent of CCS joked, “Oh, you mean The Perrier Effect?”
Let’s assume the gravest danger that buried surpercritical CO2 poses to water is, in fact, bubbles. There are other issues that challenge the assertion that carbon sequestration is perfectly safe. The first is that, though sequestration sites are supposed to be too deep to leak above ground and cause asphyxiation, the pipelines needed to carry this CO2 from the plant to the sequestration sites run much nearer to the surface. When CO2 is released into the air in high concentration, it is deadly. In 1984, the sudden surfacing of a CO2 bubble from Lake Manoun in Cameroon killed 40 people. Thirdly, as reported by Rising Tide Australia, CO2 leaks from sequestration sites at a rate of 0.1 to 1% per year. This is not enough to be deadly, but will contribute to Global Warming. At this rate, if all carbon were captured and sequestered starting in 2010, by 2060 the amount of leaked CO2 would equal this year’s world carbon emissions from all sources.
Finally, CCS only addresses the dirtiness of burning coal—what about the mining and transport required to get that coal to the plants? When proponents call CCS a “sustainable” use of coal, it is with a willful amnesia regarding everything that happens prior to that coal being set on fire. The extraction and transport of coal have never been and will never be sustainable practices. With the rise of mountain top removal coal mining, they’ve become less sustainable than ever. Fossil fuels are needed to dig out coal with huge machines, truck it to railroads and barges, then ship it to the plants. Coal from Wyoming is hauled off to Kansas, Michigan, North Dakota, even as far away as Georgia. The emissions from that transport, taking into account the extra 11-40% of coal it takes to capture and sequester CO2 and the energy needed to pipe supercritical CO2 to sequestration sites, must be figured into the ultimate projections of carbon emissions from CCS plants. By examining the total lifespan of the coal and its byproducts, it’s plain to see that any technology using coal cannot be labeled “clean.”
Imagine if the 2.5 billion of federal money spent on “clean coal” over the past 30 years had instead been put toward the development of renewable energy. Imagine if the $350 million currently on the table for successful CCS plants was instead an incentive for successful solar, wind and wave power plants. What if the public spoke out and demanded that no more government money go to subsidize coal—a substance that scientific geniuses Nikola Tesla and Lord Kelvin, at the turn of the century, both believed should be foregone in favor of renewable energy. Back then, Thomas Edison balked at their opinion, thinking coal would last for 50,000 years and knowing nothing of the damage it would cause our earth. We are no longer so ignorant.
By the World Coal Institute’s estimates, we know that there are approximately 147 years of coal left on the planet. In June, The Economist reported that even optimistic proponents of CCS do not believe it will be fully online until 2020. Imagine for a moment that the myth of clean coal were true—that the mining, transport and processing of this substance yielded a carbon footprint on par with that of wind and solar. If deciding which to fund, should it be the one that won’t last much longer than a human life, or the one that will last as long as earth’s life? I appreciate the enthusiasm of those who support “clean coal”—that enthusiasm for new technology is what we need. But we need it pointed in a direction that has a future.
People in high places are standing up and saying no to coal. In a recent speech, Al Gore promoted civil disobedience through protesting the building of new coal plants. This September in Kingsnorth, England, a jury historically ruled not-guilty on charges of property damage for a group of protesters fighting construction of a new coal plant. Leading expert on Global Warming James Hansen testified in their defense. Last May, North Carolina House Representative Pricey Harrison introduced a historic bill to ban mountain top removal coal in her state. And just last week, financial guru Jim Cramer told viewers of CNBC’s “Mad Money” that there is no such thing as “clean coal” and advised them not to invest in coal companies.
To put this carbon-heavy rock in the past where it belongs, citizens need to voice opposition to coal, in any form. Write or call your state representatives asking them to put a moratorium on new coal plants in your state, including those with proposed CCS technology, and instead push for legislature that supports renewable energy. Include a request to ban the use of mountain top removal coal at existing plants. Start conserving energy. Part of the ammunition of coal proponents is the sheer amount of electricity Americans use and the hope that they’ll keep using more—throughout Appalachia, billboards read “Coal Keeps the Lights On.” Turn the lights off, get a smaller fridge, line dry clothes, unplug appliances not in use, and switch to energy efficient bulbs.
Remember that only a hundred twenty years ago, Americans didn’t have electricity. Our experience with this form of energy is young; it is natural to innovate beyond the system we started with. The primary reason we have not done so sooner is because of the power and wealth of coal companies who secured an early monopoly on electricity generation. For so many reasons, it is time to break that monopoly and invoke not alchemic fairy tales, but the possibility of truly clean alternatives. And don’t let anyone tell you the little things don’t matter. When everybody in this country makes a small change, that change is multiplied by 300 million. Spread the word.
For more information on “clean coal”, visit Coal is Dirty. For more information on mountain top removal coal mining and efforts to stop it, visit I Love Mountains.
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For the next several weeks, we will be discussing Aldous Huxley’s Island. Click here for all the book club posts.
