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Clean Coal

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Clean Coal
Daniel Robinson
DeVry University

Understanding what clean coal means can be confusing and the potential impact on the environment can be confusing. Hearing the words clean coal makes most of us think we have finally found a way to actually make coal a clean sustainable resource to generate our electricity. After reading “The Environmental Injustice of ‘‘Clean Coal’’: Expanding the National Conversation on Carbon Capture and Storage Technology to Include an Analysis of Potential Environmental Justice Impacts” I have come to agree with the article that coal will never be clean in a way that is feasible to anyone that has to live near these coal plants.
First let’s define clean coal, clean coal as Liebert says is “The term ‘‘clean coal’’ is used to refer to burning coal in a way that reduces emissions or otherwise lessens coal’s environmental impact. ‘‘Clean coal’’ technology includes ‘‘washing’’ coal of minerals and other polluting components, gasification, and the treating of flue gases to lessen sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen oxide (NOx), and mercury emissions. In the context of climate change, the term ‘‘clean coal’’ is used most frequently as shorthand for technology that burns coal more efficiently and or decreases its CO2 emissions. While some might read that and think that we could find a way to get coal without having any CO2 emissions which is not the case.
While carbon capture and storage sounds like fantastic technology that has three stages of capture, transport and storage. The technology to get CO2 out of the ground has not even been fully developed to get CO2 of the ground efficiently. There are three different ways to get CO2 but none are considered economical or have the required technology to make it feasible. With pre-combustion capture the CO2 is captured and then converted to gas which can be efficient but is very costly to do

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