Our Suicide Mission with Coal

As the global energy/climate crisis deepens, coal has become the starkest symbol and most telling measure of our predicament. Coal produces more carbon emissions than other energy sources -- more than twice that of natural gas per unit of energy output. Consequently, coal-fired power plants are responsible for about one-third of US emissions of carbon dioxide. Despite this, we are mining and burning more coal than ever.

On March 18, the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project (EIP) released an analysis of EPA data showing that carbon dioxide emissions from the electric power industry increased by 2.9 percent in 2007 and have risen 5.9 percent since 2002. Coal is the culprit.

According to an Associated Press report, the cause of last year's increase was a combination of three factors: increased electricity demand; a shortage of hydroelectric power, leading to greater reliance on coal, and the reduced efficiency of aging coal-burning power plants.

While utilities around the nation have plans to construct more than 100 new coal-fired power plants, public concern over global warming and toxic pollution has put the brakes on many of them. Last year in Texas, public interest groups prevented TXU Energy from going ahead on eight new coal-fired plants that would have increased the state's emissions by 24 percent, according to the EIP report.

But as demand for electricity rises and cleaner fuels like natural gas get scarcer and more expensive, the relentless pressure to burn coal fuels delusions such as "clean coal."

"Clean coal" is a combination of two technologies, one of which is expensive and the other completely unproven. The expensive one is coal gasification, and it is a genuinely cleaner way of burning coal. It involves baking coal to drive off gasses that aren't much dirtier than natural gas, and the gasses then are burned for power production. This technology costs a minimum of 20 percent more than a conventional pulverized coal plant, which is why only two such plants exist in the United States.

The other part of the "clean coal" scheme involves carbon capture and storage. This technology is not proven and the potential costs are enormous. A US Department of Energy pilot project called FutureGen was recently canceled with the DOE citing soaring cost projections among its reasons for ending the project.

But even if the "clean coal" idea were workable, the realities of the coal fuel cycle ensure that coal can never be truly clean.

At the Public Interest Environmental Law Conference in Eugene, Oregon, in early March, a panel of citizen activists talked about the front and back ends of coal use: mining and waste disposal. Teri Blanton, of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth spoke about the heartbreak of mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia. The mining technique is dynamiting hundreds of thousand of acres of biologically diverse forest ecosystems to get at the coal underneath, and dumping the waste into streams. Blanton told the story of one of her neighbors who lost his land to a mining company. "When I say he lost his land," she said, "I mean he literally lost his land. One day he found that his land was just gone, blasted away to nothing."

According to the group Appalachian Voices, more than 800 square miles of mountains have already been destroyed by mountaintop removal and if the blasting continues unabated it will devastate an area the size of Delaware by 2010.

Coal mining also uses great quantities of water and pollutes streams in the process. Slurries of waste laden with toxic heavy metals are leaching into streams and river systems. Earthen impoundments that hold back the sludge are unstable and threaten communities. A sludge dam breach in 2000 in Martin County, Kentucky, dumped more than 300 million gallons of toxic sludge, killing virtually all aquatic life for 70 miles downstream of the spill.