How Does Clean Coal Reduce Carbon Dioxide Emissions?

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What is Clean Coal?

In a world of short sighted selfishness, Clean Coal technology stands out as one of the worst possible solutions to the emission of Carbon Dioxide from coal burning power stations. Carbon Capture and Storage, CCS, is at the heart of the concept. The aim is to capture and store CO2 from power station emission fumes. Several methods of achieving this are currently under development though it is worth noting that at present none are commercially viable and none are 100% effective, so CO2 still escapes to the atmosphere.

CCS requires the captured Carbon to be stored. The most popular scenario at present is to extract the gas from power station exhaust fumes, then liquefy the gas and pump it underground into places such as empty oil wells.

There is a huge risk to this behavior. If there is geological activity in the area of one of these storage areas, which is inevitable, there is a chance that the gas stored within could escape. This would create a huge Carbon Dioxide burp. With vast amounts of CO2 being planned for this type of storage, a breach could release enough CO2 in one hit to have a significant effect on the balance of gases in the atmosphere.

CCS does not remove the problem of Carbon Dioxide, it only buries it for a while and so leaves it as a gift for the future generations to deal with. The way things are going at present, our children and grandchildren are going to need all the help they can get, not an extra burden such as the ticking time bomb of billions of tonnes of buried CO2.

The Carbon Free Coal Power Station

The Swedish company Vattenfal, based in eastern Germany, is operating a pilot 30 Megawatt power station that is using CCS technology. The station only produces CO2 gas, with no other contaminants in the exhaust fumes. The high purity and concentration of CO2 in those fumes means capturing it in an economically viable way is much easier. Once captured and compressed into a liquid, the CO2 is trucked to and buried in an underground storage site.

Those pure exhaust fumes come from burning the coal in pure oxygen as opposed to using regular air. Pure oxygen has to be obtained by the fractional distillation of liquefied air. This reduces the profitability of this method of energy generation through producing less and more concentrated fumes, but does nothing to remove the long term threat of addition of those gases to the atmosphere.

I'm Alright Jack

CCS does not stop carbon emissions. It just pushes the problem into the future so that we can continue to live an exorbitant lifestyle on time borrowed from future generations. It is this self centered "As long as I'm alright" attitude that has led to our present environmental difficulties. Carrying on with that attitude is not a valid solution. To build a cleaner world for our children we need to focus on developing proven renewable energy sources on a global scale, those being solar power and wind power.

Clean coal. It's just not possible. We may as well claim to have clean dirt.

About the Author:
Read more about Fossil Fuels at Roger Vanderlely's website www.green-planet-solar-energy.com. You might also like to read about finding cheap solar panels to help reduce your electricity bill.



Article Originally Published On: http://www.articlesnatch.com


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