Is Clean Coal Simply an Oxymoron?

With all the talk today about "clean coal", my mind always tends to run back to the days of my childhood when we had a coal bin and coal was delivered to our home and shoveled into the coal bin which was located in the basement.

I also seem to remember how dirty coal was during those days. It seems that every winter my brothers and I always had bout after bout of respiratory problems. Coal was a very popular and readily available form of heat in those days, but I never once thought of it as being "clean".

I also recall visits to my grandparents' home in Kentucky. They did not have the luxury of the central heating system we had in our own home, but they still used coal for their heat which came from fireplaces that were located within just about room of their house. The fireplace was an especially warm spot in the room and I loved sitting in the big rocking chair in front of the fireplace just before going to bed. My eyelids would become so droopy I could hardly hold my eyes open and then I was whisked away to burrow into one of my grandmother's featherbed mattresses for the night. Sometime during the night, my grandmother would appear with a bucket of coal in order to keep the heat going.

I also remember driving throughout the Kentucky countryside that was once green, lush and beautiful and seeing all the devastation brought about my strip mining. Coal was not clean and it certainly left an ugly mark on the soil once it was removed from the earth.

So, in this day and age, I can't help but wonder what is meant by "clean coal". How could coal ever be considered a clean source of heat? And how can the mining of coal ever be a good thing for the environment or for the workers who pour their very lives into the removal of coal from the earth? Is clean coal simply and oxymoron?

I began a search to discover more about clean coal. Here are some of the things I learned. Coal is fossil fuel and when it is burned it releases carbon dioxide and other emissions into the air. In order to make coal "cleaner" some technologies purify it before it is burned. This involves mixing crushed coal with a liquid and allowing its impurities to settle to the bottom. Other clean coal systems use a controlled burn in order to minimize (not completely removed) sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and other particulates from the coal. Being able to remove sulfur dioxide is very important since sulfur dioxide is the main cause of acid rain.

According to "How Stuff Works", "Low-NOx (nitrogen oxide) burners reduce the creation of nitrogen oxides, a cause of ground-level ozone, by restricting oxygen and manipulating the combustion process. Electrostatic precipitators remove particulates that aggravate asthma and cause respiratory ailments by charging particles with an electrical field and then capturing them on collection plates".

Yet another technology called "gasification" allows steam and hot pressured oxygen to be mixed with coal which causes the particles of carbon molecules to fall apart. The remaining mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen is then "cleaned" and burned in a gas turbine to make electricity.

I still don't know or understand much about what is being called "clean coal technology". It still seems that no matter how much they attempt to "clean" it, it still comes out as a very dirty and environmentally unsafe way to generate the fuel that is needed by our country.

Perhaps my earlier life experiences with coal as a heat source override the modern ways of using coal. Perhaps I am way off base when I think of coal as "dirty". After all, I'm not a scientist and I don't know much about all the processes that are available today in order to clean up the image of coal as a usable heat source.

One thing I do know, however, is that it still takes men who are willing to risk their lives in order to put food on the table for their families. These men daily trudge their way into the bowels of the earth in order to extract "dirty coal" so someone else can take that coal in its natural "dirty" state and attempt to clean it up. It still seems that coal comes with a very high price tag.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/clean-coal.htm