Is ‘Clean Coal’ As Real As Trump’s Hair?

By: Skylar Ferris

During the latest clash between presidential hopefuls Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton just this past October 9, they were both asked a question, “How will your energy policy meet our energy needs while staying environmentally friendly and minimizing job less for energy companies?” The main point that Trump brought up was clean coal and made a compelling argument about it. Even though it was a question about energy in general, meaning wind and solar energy, Trump stuck by his clean coal and even saying this about it:

            “Coal will last for 1000 years in this country….Now we have natural gas and so many                    other things because of technology. We have found over the last 7 years, we have found                        tremendous wealth right under our feet….I will bring our energy companies back,                        they’ll compete, they’ll make money and they’ll pay off our national debt.”

 A protestor holding a sign in Washington DC 

By Linh Do https://www.flickr.com/photos/lmdo/5640303719

What doesn't sound good about that? No debt, no dependence and more jobs for able bodied and willing Americans. Clean coal already sounds like that it is the only way that the coal industry will be able to survive in our environmentally friendly changing world, makes sense to me.

Here is the catch though, there is no such thing as clean coal. Clean coal refers to the progress that is used to make it ‘clean’.

For those of us that have not been on this earth for very long or those of us that just don’t following what energy companies are doing, will think that clean coal is a recent development in the realm of environmental energy. That is not the case, Clean Coal Technology(CCT) has been

around since the late 1980s. Since that time there has been a total of $5.2 billion dollars in showing advanced coal-based technology at a commercial scale; amazingly, state and even industry provided for about 66% of the total amount of funding that this project needed. There are as many as 38 individual power plants that are being built/have been built to continue this project further.

Now, what about the power plants that are already built? To answer this question is the Power Plant Improvement Initiative(PPII); which does exactly what you think it sounds like it will do, improve the already existing coal powered power plants so that they will be able to match the new

ones being built with this new technology. This came in January of 2001 where the DOE(Department Of Energy) issued $95 million dollars in federal matching funds to help these plants match up with the new ones being built.

Now the reason that coal needs an environmental face lift isn't just because of the CO2 that it releases into the air when burnt, but the ingredients in coal help us make plastics, tar and fertilizers, it also helps us make steel which we use in buildings. Most of the coal that the US, 92 percent, is used in power production. When coal burns it releases what is called flue gas, which are the white clouds of smoke that come out of the smoke stacks.

An oxyfuel CCS power plant operation processes the exhaust gases so as to separate the CO2 so that it may be stores or sequestered.

One of the CCT methods is one called Oxyfuel, which burns the coal using pure oxygen. The benefit of this is that the CO2 that is released from the burning is then abled to be captured and able to be stored somewhere underground or in the deep ocean.

When it is being stored in the ocean it is put into liquid form and is released at depths from 500 to 3,000 meters, this form os storage is still in it’s early stages. The other way to store this CO2 is to displace it underground in coal deposits that cannot be

 reached, there the CO2 is absorbed back into the coal.

So in the context of usage from Trump there is no such thing as

clean coal, but there is such a thing that makes ‘clean coal’.  Even though it is possible to  have this clean coal, but it is highly technical and very expensive. Only a few out of the total clean coal plants are actually operational, the rest are either on hold or are delayed for a very long time.

So in all reality of Trump successfully bringing clean coal to a level that will make a difference on a national level? Probably not, but can’t stop a man from trying.