By Amrit Kaur
Clean coal. It sounds like a pretty neat thing, right? Well, not quite. It’s a lot trickier than that. Trust me, before I did my fair share of research about this term, my head was in the clouds regarding what “clean” coal is and what exactly its purpose is. How come coal became clean all of a sudden? As soon as I heard the word “clean”, I immediately dismissed any doubt that it could be bad, but I forgot the second word, coal.
Well, we can start by defining what clean coal is. It’s essentially capturing carbon emissions and storing them under Earth permanently. Clean coal is an industry term that is linked with a range of technologies that burn coal more efficiently because they are supposed to eliminate or significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions from coal-based power plants.
The most popular form of clean coal technology is called carbon capture and storage (CCS). Using combustion, gas from burning coal is turned into almost pure carbon dioxide that is sent through pipelines somewhere into the ground near the power plant with the hopes that the CO2 will just sit there and in millions of years, it will have chemically bound into the surrounding rock. But there is a big catch with CCS technology. While it can capture a significant amount of CO2 that would otherwise have been emitted into the atmosphere, there are MANY other poisonous contaminants such as mercury and nitrogen oxide that will still find their way into our planet’s atmosphere and continue to wreak havoc on the planet. This is because CCS technology was only made to capture carbon dioxide, and there is no single technology that can capture all the gases to really make coal cleaner (Grossman, 2020).
Additionally, CCS is so expensive and hard to build and maintain, and retrofitting it into old power plants will not only prove to be expensive but it will also require an increase in power, leading to unsustainability. In accordance with the Global Carbon Capture & Storage Institute, there are currently 51 CCS plants across the world but only 19 are in use(Grossman, 2020). The coal industry itself states the greater use of CCS coal power has the potential to improve health in developing countries by reducing air pollution, but the five degrees of global warming that the rapid expansion of the coal industry would become responsible for says otherwise.
A very interesting statistic that has been shown by endcoal.org points to how energy use can be analyzed in Kenya. Studies have shown how an off-grid, decentralized renewable energy system can provide household energy services faster and more cheaply than coal-centralized household generation services can, without hurting health, clean air, and water. In Kenya, to connect to the electrical grid can cost a single household anywhere between $900-$4000. But theoretically, the same household could purchase a home solar electricity system capable of chagrging cellphones, powering lights, computers, fans, and even a small refrigerator, all just for $900 and without monthly bills, the same starting price to connect to the electricity grid. This shows a far sustainable option using a renewable energy source without the use of coal at all!
So far, it makes sense to say that clean coal isn’t actually all good. To be honest, I have heard of carbon capture technology before and even thought it was the future. Maybe you’ve even heard this term before. So how come the media can tell us that it’s good but we don’t really know its cons until we do research? The term “clean coal” is like a political umbrella term because it’s something that politicians can use to say coal, our oldest, filthiest, and nonrenewable resource can be transformed.
Coal cannot be clean, and the biggest reason being that even the most efficient coal-fired power plants operate at around only 44% efficiency, meaning 56% of the energy content is lost. Also, these plants emit twice as much as gas-fired power plants (Coal Myths, n.d). Factor in air and water pollution, and that is still a lot of collateral damage. Also, the coal industry has used the excuse in the past that this new innovation can help solve energy poverty but without the investment of poles and wires, 1.3 billion people all throughout the Global South cannot connect to the electricity grid (Coal Myths, n.d). Think about it, would they really be willing to spend this much money when they would already have to spend so much money having to build infrastructure to support CCS technology?
Having and using clean coal technology is essentially like making empty promises in the long run- so far, because yes, this is being implemented throughout the world, but at what cost?
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