What Does Pennsylvania Know About Clean Coal That No One Else Does?
This photo is of a billboard I saw while driving through central Pennsylvania. The other had a similar message but said: “Clean Coal: Now Clean and Green with New Technologies.” The billboard is sponsored by an organization called Families Organized to Represent the Coal Economy (FORCE). I think people would be interested in how FORCE defines “clean & green.”
Image credit: Tim Hurst
I live in PA so I hear this hype about clean coal all the time. To understand clean coal you have to know about Cogeneration plants (wikipedia - cogeneration). Basically traditional mining of coal leaves you with lots of coal dusts. I mean like mountains of this stuff. Instead of properly disposing this material mining companies would just leave it in piles. This would cause environmental problems because it would clog streams with toxins and basically ruin everything around them. The purpose of Cogeneration plants is to take this leftover waste and make electricity out of it. Sounds like a good idea get rid of this waste could it be clean and green? The answer is a big no. It’s proven that Cogeneration plants produce more pollution than another type of power plant. Recently a plant opened about 30 miles north of me in a town called Tamaqua. It’s basically a brand new power plant and has only been in operation for less than a year. Already people are getting very ill in that area. Some of the illnesses reported have never been seen in the United States! I hope this gives you a little insight on the double edge sword of clean coal!
Coal, ground to powder and fed to genetically modified E Coli as food as well as a series of other complex actions and reactions, can result in gasoline, diesel and natural gas like fuels and a fertilizer slurry - I hope! We need to stop the primitive open air burning of this most valuable resource, and hire good, unindoctrinated Chinese or European investors and engineers, who do not believe in waste flows from processes, only resource flows, and get a total processing system that uses even the CO2 and sulfur from the original coal. Without very severe pollution laws, the best part of coal will be wasted as pollutants because it is simply “Cost Efficient” - an American engineering term meaning ‘we don’t know how to do better’ Change these circumstances with a high and well enforced carbon tax, and engineering schools will suddenly know what to do about CO2 emissions, and profitably so! it is the way it currently is - a dirty fuel, because we let them do it to save a buck.-Yankee Doodle!
Uncle B - do you have more details of this process?
I grew up surrounded by strip mines in Northeast PA. The area is just starting to recover from all the damage caused by mining that ended 50 years ago: environmental destruction, Black Lung, etc. To me, “Clean coal” sounds like a bad joke thought up by marketing people. I’d much rather see PA invest in wind power.
One of two such billboards I saw in Pennsylvania. How do they get away with this sh*t?
heres the real story; i’ve been working around coal,culm,silt,slate,and every concievvable mix thereof for 30 years, and unfortunately, co-gen is here and it does produce most of the electricity in our area,and yes it does have an envronmental impact. but until we use up all the coal refuse banks and silt dams, which will not happpen in any of our life-times, we will continue to co-generate and pollute. and in the mean time we need to use wind, solar,and hydro and yes even the dreaded nuke power resourses to their full extent, and maybe some day soon, i’m hopefull in my life time, we will be non dependent on foreign oil and on the way to phaseing out fossil fuels. and one more thing, to commenter SHEA, If you want the real story dig this, my parents are 93 and 88 and they lived near the co-gen plant in mcadoo pa. they and several others, well in their 80’s, lived in that area long before, and ever since that plant has been in operation. and they’ve never been sickend from the rare cancer. However it has been my observation that most of the people that have suffered or died of this cancer were not born or raised here, they moved here from the town of tamaqua! This was a burb/farm area. so think on that one for a while, then E-mail me? Lavender