American Clean Power ?

Please stop talking about Clean Coal as some kind of solution for energy independence and/or global warming issues.  It can not do either of these.  Let’s use some common sense.  Coal to replace gasoline ?  Coal to replace home heating oil?  We could build more coal fired electricity generating plants, but that does not reduce our dependency on foreign oil for the other two needs.

The picture used on the left comes from the ACCCE, a new group funded by Coal and Energy companies.  They are in the process of spending millions of dollars on ad campaigns to tell you

1.) Coal generates %50 of our electricity 2.) Coal is cleaner and can be even cleaner with investment in technology.  They run ads on TV, they have a web site http://www.americaspower.org/ Thanks for Sharing!

Clean coal !  Please.  Is there such a thing as clean coal ? It does seem peculiar to me that both Presidential candidates highlight Clean Coal, some oil drilling and nuclear plants (McCain, not Obama), for our short term energy solutions.  Other technologies are always mentioned as an afterthought, oh, yeah, “some of that Solar and Wind stuff too”. One characteristic of the commonly mentioned technologies is they exist (not clean coal), and they are backed by large existing corporate and union interests. I am sure that is just a coincidence.

Clean Coal is NOT ready for prime time.  The more we try to make old solutions work, the more money, time and energy we take away from building RENEWABLE solutions.  What is renewable about Coal, even if it was Clean.  Nothing.  It is currently plentiful so let’s use it, is the logic.  Talk about clinging to beliefs.

The same reasons many conservatives knock newer renewable energy sources, such as ‘it is not ready’, ‘it will not scale’, ‘it is to expensive’, ‘it is unproven technology’…. All apply to clean coal.

The three technologies currently being researched and mostly in a pilot phase are;

Clean it, Filter it, and Capture it.

‘IT’ is nitrous oxide, sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide and of course your everyday mercury and other metals.

Clean it, consists of a bath for the coal prior to using.  It removes much of the sulfur, and some of nitrous oxide, BUT, it leaves a nice slurry of waste water that goes somewhere…oh yeah, in the ground, in a river, in the environment.  It does nothing to reduce carbon dioxide.

Filter it, means catalytic converter type filtering on the smokestake, or new oxygen purification systems where they cook the pollutants in a bath of oxygen.  This second approach is more effective but expensive.

Capture it, means Carbon Sequestration.  Even Al Gore talked about this during his powerpoint theater.  Is it just me, or does capturing the carbon dioxide and pumping it into the ground or better yet into active oil reserves make any sense ?  What a stupid idea.

I want to believe technology can solve most problems, and maybe it can reduce emissions so that Burning Coal produces NO pollutents.  But until that comes closer to reality, just shut up, and focus on alternative energies that actually work NOW and are clean.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080804/ap_on_el_pr/obama_energy
Obama’s new proposal, though, includes two significant reversals of positions he has taken in the past: He had steadfastly fought the idea of limited new offshore drilling and was against tapping the nation’s emergency oil stockpile to relieve pump prices that have stubbornly hovered around $4 a gallon.

Not only did Obama push for drawing from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, he also reiterated his changing position on offshore drilling — first revealed last Friday — suggesting that he could live with it if done in an environmentally sound way and as part of a bipartisan energy compromise.

See posts below;  We could impact the price of gas quickly by releasing from the SPR, or sell reserves to the oil companies for energy funds