Carbon Free Coal?
One of the most pernicious results of “energy independence” rhetoric is the second-chance it’s given American coal producers to remake themselves as modern and even green. Thankfully, most can call out Big Coal’s BS when it tries to present themselves as the energy source of the future, and so they had to try to build a zero-emission power plant — too bad it didn’t work:
That bold step forward stumbled last week. With the budget of the so-called FutureGen project having nearly doubled, to $1.8 billion, and the government responsible for more than 70 percent of the eventual bill, the administration completely revamped the project.
The Energy Department said it would pay for the gas-capturing technology, but industry would have to build and pay for the commercial plants that use the technology. Plans for the experimental plant were scratched.
The plan was to take the carbon dioxide, and then sequester it deep in the ground, so that it would never get out into the atmosphere. Many energy wonks and scientists think that coal sequestration could work, and if they could find a cost-effective way, it would be a boon for reducing or at least stabilizing carbon emissions. But the question that seems most relevant is whether carbon sequestration is the best use of all the time and energy spent on it. That 1.8 billion dollars could have been used to build a nuclear power plant, implement green building standards, paint roofs white are all sorts of green measures that actually work. It makes sense, I think, to actually be biased against sequestration because, ultimately, if we want to see any real movement on climate change and energy policy, we’re going to have to marginalize the influence of coal companies, not try to co-opt them.
