The truth about “Clean Coal”

Before I get flamed for suggesting retrofitting older coal plants for coal gasification is a good solution, I would like to point out that it is. Gasification is “Clean Coal”, and compared to regular coal, Cean Coal is a huge improvement. Regular coal burns the coal as is and tries to capture the pollutants on their way out the chimney. (This means along with the CO2 and water, sulfur, toxic and radioactive metals, fly ash, and NOXs are released as well.) Clean Coal, pre-combusts the coal in an oxygen starved environment, so there is no fly ash or clinker, then the gas (mostly CO, CO2 and H2) is scrubbed, removing the sulfur and metals, before burning the gas. Yes, there is a lose of energy content from the gasification, so you need to burn more fuel to generate the same amount of electricity, but regardless of the sulfur content of the original fuel you burn a “clean” fuel and the flue gas is nearly pure CO2 and water. (In theory you can recover the flue gas, dry it and pump it underground or bubble it through bioreactors to “feed” algae to make biofuel.)

Here is the truth about “Clean Coal”, it isn’t clean like solar power, it is clean the way your floor is clean after you mop. All the filth and dirt doesn’t disappear, it is moved from the floor to the mop water, which gets dumped down the drain. Everybody can see the clean floor, but not everyone has to see the nasty mop water. It is the same with Clean Coal; the flue gas is clean, because the filth has a separate waste stream.