The NY Times had a strong editorial this week on the painful reality that trumps the industry greenwashing — coal ain’t clean:
A month of negative news for the Tennessee Valley Authority could lead to positive changes in national policy, including federal regulation of toxic coal wastes and new legal constraints on coal-fired power plants. More broadly, the authority’s recent travails may help persuade the public that coal is nowhere near as “clean” as a high-priced industry advertising campaign makes it out to be.
Hear! Hear! (see The day ‘clean coal’ died). The whole piece is worth reading:
In December, hundreds of acres of Roane County in eastern Tennessee were buried under a billion gallons of toxic coal sludge after the collapse of one of the T.V.A.’s containment ponds. It was an accident waiting to happen and an alarm bell for Congress and federal regulators.
Senator Barbara Boxer of California noted that coal combustion in this country produces 130 million tons of coal ash every year — enough to fill a train of boxcars stretching from Washington, D.C., to Australia. Amazingly, the task of regulating the more than 600 landfills and impoundments holding this ash is left to the states, which are more often lax than not. Ms. Boxer will press the Obama administration to devise rules for the disposal of coal ash as well as design and construction standards for the impoundments.
Just as the T.V.A. was dealing with this mess, Lacy Thornburg, a federal district judge in North Carolina, ordered the giant utility to reduce emissions from four coal-fired power plants that had been sending pollution into North Carolina.
The ruling validated an unusual legal strategy adopted by North Carolina’s attorney general, Roy Cooper, who sued the T.V.A. in 2006 on grounds that pollution from its power plants in Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky constituted a “public nuisance” to the citizens of his state. Mr. Cooper chose this route because the Bush administration had systematically weakened regulations that had been used in the past to force power companies to clean up their emissions.
Taken together, the coal ash disaster and Judge Thornburg’s ruling did much to undercut the coal industry’s cheery “clean coal” campaign, whose ads would have us believe that low-polluting coal is here or just around the corner.
It is neither. Coal is certainly an important fuel, providing just over half of the nation’s electricity. And progress has been made: new coal-fired plants are cleaner than old ones, and older plants that have been required under the Clean Air Act to install pollution controls are cleaner than the many plants that have managed to escape the law’s reach.
But coal remains an inherently dirty fuel, and a huge contributor to not only ground-level pollution — including acid rain and smog — but also global warming. The sooner the country understands that, the closer it will be to mitigating the damage.
Related Posts:
- Like Detroit, the coal industry chooses (assisted) suicide
- Coal industry front group touts benefits of strong emissions regulations
- Clean coal (cough, cough) is cool, just like Joe Camel
- Clean coal: Claptrap or crap trap?
- Does the “Reality Campaign” need new Mad Men?
- Memo to Gore: Don’t call coal ‘clean’ seven times in your ad
- Tennessee not-so-clean coal sludge spill estimate grows to 1 billion gallons
- Is coal with carbon capture and storage a core climate solution?
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Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
Environmentalists want to exploit the Kingston accident to stop further coal development. They care little about the facts. If you don’t believe me just go to United Mountain Defense blog on Kingston.
The Kingston incident doesn’t prove coal isn’t clean. If you drove a 1950′s vintage Chevy with no seat belts or air bags and were killed in an accident nobody would claim that cars were unsafe.
Kingston was built in 1955 with virtuallly no pollution control equipment. Cheap electrical power greatly improved the life and health of rural Appalachia, despite the airbourne pollution from coal. In 1976 stack gas scrubbers were added to the plant to revove ash using a wet removal process. The Clean Air Act further reduced sulfur emissions, so Kingston switched from regionally mined coal to primarily Powder River Basin coal from Colorado and Wyoming. They get a small amount of coal from a surface mine in West Virginia, but NO mountaintop coal.
Kingston is hardly clean coal. It is 50 year old technology.
New pulverized coal plants have supercritical steam boilers that achieve better than 40% thermal efficiency, greatly reducing the amount of pollution and greenhouse gasses emitted over the plants they would replace. Conventionial pulverized coal plants don’t use wet removal any more, they all use dry and then recycle the ash into gypsum or cinder blocks or dispose of the ash in lined landfills. Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle plants can achieve efficiencies of around 50% and produce NO ash at all, but a vitrious slag that can be made into roofing shingles or used as aggregate in road building. The acid gas removal equipment in an IGCC is capable of capturing about 50% of the CO2, which can then be used in either enhanced oil recovery operations, where the CO2 is permanently disposed of in an oil and gas reservoir, or it can be pumped into deep saline formations.
Every time environmentalists oppose a modern, efficent, coal plant, they prolong the life of a dirty old plant. I could argue that it is the environmentalists actions that are leading to increases in greenhouse gasses from coal.
Kentucky is a coal state with more mines than any other. Then the Louisville Courier Journal seems to take an unexpectedly antagonistic position on the Chu and Jackson appointments precisely because of their statements supporting coal.
“The list of problems associated with coal mining and coal burning is a virtual civic indictment. It includes greenhouse gas pollution, ash pond failure, health and safety threats faced by miners, poorly managed mountaintop removal sites and sloppily maintained sludge ponds.
Candidate Obama seemed to understand, but his nominees sound like they don’t. They praised coal but failed to acknowledge the cost — human and environmental — imposed by relying on it.”
That NYTimes cautiously understated opinion triggered a coal rant – we should do the math on coal.
( http://www.noenergytomorrow.org/2009/01/fun-with-math-and-global-warming—to-the-ny-times.html )
The World Coal institute says 5,543,000,000 tons combusted globally in 2007. Coal combusts into 3.6 times as much CO2 – This means that 5,543,000,000 x 3.6 = 199,548,000,000 tons of CO2
Globally 200 billion (B) tons of carbon dioxide come from coal alone. And just for the year 2007.
One 200 watt light bulb enables a yearly output of 3 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.
The fact is coal is still dirty. This is all the article is trying to point out. When you burn coal, there is going to be left over toxic matter. No matter how clean coal becomes it will always be a finate resource that changes state into a dirty toxic ash.
Plus the methods used currently with mountain top removal mining methods is disturbing. To think you can look at a US topography map every month and it will no longer be accurate because several mountains will no longer existence. Its irresponsible and needs to me monitored and reduced.
Efficiency wise the amount of energy required to extract coal is a joke. It takes often more energy to mine and convert coal to combustible sources, than the fuel source ultimately produces.
Our industries and government need to embrace infinite resources available with wind, solar, etc energy. The human benefits and environmental benefits of these two kinds of fuel sources, infinite and finite source, are to great to ignore. Hopefully our country will start o agnolize this and move forward.
If you want to read a comic strip from a more innocent time, when it seemed like at least this scourge was under control, check this out:
http://comics.com/peanuts
(today’s strip, 1/24)
“Moderation”? I don’t follow.
Don’t forget: US Coal contains between 4 and 10 ppm (parts per
million) uranium. Not ore, but uranium.
The ash is highly concentrated: between 160 and 180 ppm uranium.
So, for each million tons of coal burnt, we have a ton of uranium,
primarily concentrated in the ash.
What percentage of the ash goes out through the smokestack? Shall we
say, 1 percent?
If that’s the case, then 0.01 tons (or 20 pounds) of uranium per
million tons of coal burnt, that is
distributed in aerosolized form. Weapon of mass destruction right there.
Last year, the US burned about 1.06 billion tons of coal (according to
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_coa_con-energy-coal-consumption).
At 4 ppm uranium, that’s over 4,000 tons of uranium in the coal, of
which about 40 *tons* goes into the air in an aerosol form. (The actual concentration in the ash is 160 to 180 ppm, so this is a *conservative* lowball back-of-the-napkin estimate)
Every.
Year.
That’s *much* worse than a Chernobyl per year.
Brandon Cole – do you have some facts to back the efficiency comment up? Coal provides 50% of the electrical power in the US. If mining and burning coal consumed more energy than it consumed, we would just burn the primary source of energy and not bother to mine the coal – problem solved.
It amazes me that so-called environmentalists can spout off about energy issues – something they clearly know nothing about.
Combusting coal does leave ash. Gasifying on the other hand takes it through a chemical process that releases heat, creates a safe and non-toxic slag similar to black gas that can be used as building or road material.
Very little of our coal comes from mountaintop removal. Most comes from underground mining and surface mining in Wyoming. The vast majority of the people living in and around the mines support mining, and they have to live with the environmental consequences.
If you applied the coal mining argument to cars, nobody should ever buy a hybrid or plug hybrid. After all, they still burn gas and produce CO2. Hybrids are just more efficient versions of the same 18th century technology. We should just all walk or ride bicycles or wait for wind power or something else.
More uranium nonsense. Read:
http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html
That comes from a 1997 USGS report. (You will recall who was president then.)
“Summary
Radioactive elements in coal and fly ash should not be sources of alarm. The vast majority of coal and the majority of fly ash are not significantly enriched in radioactive elements, or in associated radioactivity, compared to common soils or rocks. This observation provides a useful geologic perspective for addressing societal concerns regarding possible radiation and radon hazard.
The location and form of radioactive elements in fly ash determine the availability of elements for leaching during ash utilization or disposal. Existing measurements of uranium distribution in fly ash particles indicate a uniform distribution of uranium throughout the glassy particles. The apparent absence of abundant, surface-bound, relatively available uranium suggests that the rate of release of uranium is dominantly controlled by the relatively slow dissolution of host ash particles. ”
So as our good friend here Joe Romm likes to say. Show us the peer reviewed studies that show that uranium exposure from coal is bad.
However dirty it may be, coal remains indispensable for providing base load power — reliable electricity. Renewables are intermittent, so not more than 20% of the grid can be from renewables. The ash disposal problem, acid rain, and now CO2 stand as obstacles to continued reliance on coal, but on the other hand we all need the power that only coal can provide reliably.
The legacy of the Bush years is now a blight on the TN landscape. Why not condemn the land, and name it George W. Bush National Park?
Reference Oak Ridge [Tennessee] National Laboratory report:
http://www.ornl.gov/ORNLReview/rev26-34/text/coalmain.html
Coal is carbon except for the impurities. The impurities include: URANIUM, ARSENIC, LEAD, MERCURY, Thorium, Antimony, Cobalt, Nickel, Copper, Selenium, Barium, Fluorine, Silver, Beryllium, Iron, Sulfur, Boron, Titanium, Cadmium, Magnesium, Calcium, Manganese, Vanadium, Chlorine, Aluminum, Chromium, Molybdenum and Zinc. All of the radioactive decay products of uranium are included, such as the super-poison, POLONIUM and the radioactive gas, RADON. Of course the radon seeps out gradually as it is made. Radon decays into Polonium. Coal smoke and cinders are commercially viable ORE for the above elements. Coal cinders and ash were considered as a source of uranium during the Manhattan project. The cinders and ash from a coal fired power plant contains more energy in the form of uranium and thorium than the coal fired power plant produces. We could get all of our fuel for nuclear power plants from the coal ashes. It is true that there has always been background radiation both from cosmic rays and from rocks in the ground, but do you really want parts of your house made of coal ashes?
Coal is a kind of rock. Reference: “Energy in America” by Ingrid Kelley, 2008, pages 21 and 23: Coal carbon percentages
hardness………….name…………..% carbon
hardest………….anthracite……….86 to 98
hard…………….bituminous………45 to 86
soft………….sub-bituminous……35 to 45
softest…………….lignite……………25 to 35
The remainder in each case is rock that is not carbon and the atoms of organic molecules other than carbon atoms. Some of the organic molecules are hazardous. UP TO 75% OF A LUMP OF LIGNITE IS ROCK OTHER THAN CARBON!!!!
Why is nobody accusing coal ash emissions or products of causing some disease?
Asteroid Miner — Coal combustion causes many problems, including what I will call ‘tree deseases’. Animals, such as humans too.
Kojo Vance: We are dealing not only with the greenwashing of coal but also with the blackwashing of nuclear. That is why it is important for the public to hear about the uranium in coal and for the public to hear about background radiation. The public also needs to know that we have been working on reactor safety for 60 years and nuclear is now by far the safest source of electricity. Chernobyl was a PRIMITIVE reactor that killed only 52 people. No urban legends please. It can’t and hasn’t happened here.
Wilmot McCutchen: Nuclear is the cleanest, safest most reliable and only full time everywhere replacement for coal. If we recycle nuclear fuel and breed thorium into uranium and U238 into plutonium, we have a 5000 year supply of nuclear fuel. We now have factory built nuclear reactors. See:
http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/why.html
Global warming from coal shouldn’t be so dismissed.
But there seems to me to being a solution to the ash problem and that is to put the ash that’s left after coal burning back into the coal mine that the coal came from.
The transportation system of bringing tons of coal to coal burning plants is already there. Why not modify some of this equipment to put the ash back into the coal mines? The train engines and train coal cars all have to go back to the mines to pick up more coal, just have them bring back coal ash. Some modification of the equipment that brings coal to the surface might need to be done, but I’m sure it’s possible.
Isn’t it also true that in below surface mines that cave ins sometimes cause surface land cave ins. If coal ash was stuffed into these mines, that might allow for less that being less of a problem.
It’s not true that new more efficient coal plants would greatly reduce CO2 release. The only thing that will greatly reduce CO2 is to use a non carbon fueled power system whether that is nuclear, wind, solar, geothermal. New coal plants can only produce less CO2 than older plants, they can’t produce greatly less CO2. There’s a hope from some that sesquestration of CO2 might work and building these might be called greatly reduced CO2 release, but until that hope is realized in actual power plants, there are no greatly reduced CO2 power plants.
It amazes me how some carbon fueled energy advocates know nothing about what they spout out about.
Ronald – actually you are wrong. We have old cold fired power plants with heat rates around 15,000 BTU/kWh. That is efficiency in the low 20%. By replacing such a plant with a modern 40%+ supercritical PC or a 50% IGCC we can cut the CO2 emissions in half or more. In my book cutting in emissions nearly in half is greatly improving.
On a percentage basis, modernizing coal beats residential/commercial building improvements and hybrid vehicles in saving CO2 emissions.
No carbon fuel energy advocate I know is against other non-carbon sources of energy or conservation. We should do a bit of everything.
We like wind and solar too, but you can’t solve the intermittancy problem without some baseload carbon-fired power generation.
Ronald – actually you are wrong and Kojiro has made a good point.
Lets do the math:
a 1000 MW coal-fired power plant operating 85 % of the year produces 7.446 billion kilowatt hours (Kwhr) of electricity.
At 15000 Btu/Kwhr, the plant needs 111.7 trillion Btus of heat.
If a 1000 MW utilized an ultra-super critical steam boiler (China is consutructing such plants and US is resarching and demonstrating) the heat rate would be about 9000 But.Kwhr. That plant would require 67 trillion Btus.
Assume a bituminous coal with a Btu content of 13,000 Btu/lb:
The first plant would require 4.3 million tons of coal per year.
The more efficient plant would require 2.6 million tons of coal.
Further assuming a pound of Wyoming bituminous coal emits about 206 pounds of CO2/mmBtu and WY lignite about 215 lb CO2/mmBtu:
The first plant’s coal burn would release 11.5 million tons CO2/year if burning bituminous coal and 12 million tons/Yr CO2 if lignite is burned.
The more efficient plant’s coal burn would release 6.9 million tons of CO2 if bitunious coal is burned and
John McCormick Says:
[This is not a repeat post. My previous effort kicked me out before I finished. John McC]
Ronald – actually you are wrong and Kojiro has made a good point.
Lets do the math:
a 1000 MW coal-fired power plant operating 85 % of the year produces 7.446 billion kilowatt hours (Kwhr) of electricity.
At 15000 Btu/Kwhr, the plant needs 111.7 trillion Btus of heat.
If a 1000 MW utilized an ultra-super critical steam boiler (China is constructing such plants and US is researching and demonstrating) the heat rate would be about 9000 But/Kwhr. That plant would require 67 trillion Btus.
Assume a bituminous coal with a Btu content of 13,000 Btu/lb:
The first plant would require 4.3 million tons of coal per year.
The more efficient plant would require 2.6 million tons of coal.
Further assuming a pound of Wyoming bituminous coal emits about 206 pounds of CO2/mmBtu and WY lignite about 215 lb CO2/mmBtu:
The first plant’s coal burn would release 11.5 million tons CO2/year if burning bituminous coal and 12 million tons/Yr CO2 if lignite is burned.
The more efficient plant’s coal burn would release 6.9 million tons of CO2 if bituminous coal is burned and 7.2 million tons if lignite is combusted. See the difference?
This is not a commercial to endorse coal for electric power generation. It is simply the fact that efficient coal-burning power plants matter. Old, inefficient coal-burning units are operating longer and harder because electricity demand is rising and these plants are already capitalized and cheap to operate (unless you consider the externalizing costs to our children). This is a fact and the transition to renewable electricity sources will take time, transmission and backup power sources such as base load plants.
Kojiro made a valid point even if it is not what we want to hear.
John McCormick
Vance says: On a percentage basis, modernizing coal beats residential/commercial building improvements and hybrid vehicles in saving CO2 emissions.
If true, that is wonderful. I do hope no one is suggesting that it comes to a choice. Surely an overall reduction in energy consumption is vital. Otherwise these vaunted improvements in coal efficiency won’t help for long.
The Good News:
“Climate Progress selected as one of Time Magazine’s Fifteen Favorite Websites for the Environment”
The Bad News:
The deniers have come out in force because of the intelligent approach taken by Climate Progress crew.
Solution:
You know the scene in Young Frankenstein when Froedrick and the Monster go thru an exchange? Well, I am thinking if we could get Professor Joe to lie down and then entice Rush Limbaugh into the lab…
You’re both wrong about new coal plants. It’s not about the efficiency numbers, it’s about the principles involved. If the new coal plants get built the utilities are going to want to use them thru their physical life. We can’t afford them in terms of CO2 burning for multiple decades, they need to be replaced as soon as possible.
It then also depends upon what the words ‘greatly reduced CO2′ means. Twice the efficiency is not ‘greatly reduced CO2′ if that means they will be running for many many more years.
Double the efficiency means ‘reduced CO2′, not “greatly reduced CO2.”
If the new coal plants can be called ‘greatly reduced CO2′ then what are you going to call solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear, etc, ‘super greatly reduced CO2′ plants?
KILLER COAL
Thanks John.
And to Dan G. – nobody says we can’t do both. Increasing energy efficiency should be part of the solution.
The Sierra Club and other environmental groups have been going around the country killing new coal-fired power plants, they make it nearly impossible for utilities to retire the old inefficient ones. Nobody seems to be pointing this out.
Ronald – I call solar and wind plants 25% availabile, incapable of providing power 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Fossil fuel or nuclear are required.
You seem to be advocating for a 0% carbon standard, not even Joe Romm thinks this is necessary.
If we could magically replace the existing coal fired power fleet with IGCCs and super-critical pulverized coal plants, we could achieve the emissions reductions.
But progressives, like Joe have an anti-coal reflex and are unwilling to consider that efficient coal is at least part of the solution.
I don’t usuall post a reply but this is good work, keep it up How To Build A Windmill.
We should all be giving wind power a second look, the end of oil crisis is coming soon Build Wind Generator.
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