Clean coal?

By stoat on January 10, 2008.

Clean coal - as in burning and capturing the CO2 - is an idea being floated. There are obvious problems (apart from anything else, the capture and storage costs extra energy and so burns even more coal...), and AFAIK only a few pilot schemes exist. So the story that a commercial-scale plant was being built was interesting. Desmogblog commented on it under the heading "The Expensive Myth of Clean Coal" (and just in case youre not inclined to follow the link, there's an extra bonus of a gratuitous tart-in-a-bikini awaiting you). It looks to be a coal-industry boondoggle: for a $1.8B plant there is a $1B subsidy, which according to DSB makes it about 2* as expensive as wind and about as expensive as solar. I wonder how much subsidy the US solar industry gets?

Tags
climate fuels

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I may be foolish but I hold out hope for this technology. I have a post, Plug in hybrid vehicles could save the Planet, on my blog. The statistics are amazing, including the fact that many say we could save well over half the oil we import. If we could get coal clean enough it could be a big factor in cleaning the environment and loosing foreign oil dependency. More jobs in the USA too!
Dave Briggs :~)