It's official: New coal is not cheap

[Willinois]

The coal industry and its allies in the press have long engaged in a creative bait and switch. First, they tout the cheap and efficient nature of coal as an energy source. Those facts are cited to justify building new coal gasification and carbon capture facilities, which are euphemistically referred to as “clean coal.”

If we’re talking about an existing dirty coal plant that was built several decades ago, then yes, it produces relatively cheap power (if you don’t count government subsidies and externalized costs of pollution). But do new clean coal facilities live up to the promise of providing a cheap power source?

A battle over the Tenaska company‘s coal gasification and carbon capture project proposed in Taylorville, Illinois provides a definitive answer: absolutely not. In fact, clean coal would produce some of the most expensive energy in the world. That’s why it was opposed by much of the state’s business community, including the Illinois Chamber of Commerce and most utility companies.

Several episodes of this debate are instructive for the rest of the nation as we determine our new energy future. An important piece of evidence is a study by the Illinois Commerce Commission, which found, using Tenaska’s own estimates, that power produced from the plant would cost more than wind, nuclear, or natural gas. That was true even considering the millions in state taxpayer subsidies and billions in Federal Department of Energy loan guarantees pledged to the project. Even a highly subsidized carbon capture project can’t produce power at competitive rates.


Read the rest at Democrats for Progress. http://www.democratsforprogress.com/2011/01/14/its-official-new-coal-is-not-cheap/

[Name removed]

1. Deleted message

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[NNadir]

2. Thanks. K&R n/t

[RufusTFirefly]

3. Not cheap. And it would require mining even more coal per unit of energy

That means with "clean coal," we'd have even more of this to look forward to:

[madokie]

8. I'd like to read the link with that info please

Peace and have a great day Rufus

[txlibdem]

4. Sometimes the truth hurts

If existing coal power plants were required to pay for the externalized costs of their operation nobody would utter the phrase "cheap coal" again. It is positively criminal that big coal is able to get away with this today.

Carbon Capture and Sequestering (CCS) equipped coal plants use 30% more coal for the same electrical output than full-polluting coal plants that are rampant in America today. That means 30% more mountain tops being removed, 30% more coal sludge floods destroying towns and polluting ground water sources.

No matter how you look at it, coal is a bad deal for America.

[Nihil]

6. And, even then, ...

> Carbon Capture and Sequestering (CCS) equipped coal plants use 30% more coal for
> the same electrical output than full-polluting coal plants that are rampant in
> America today. That means 30% more mountain tops being removed, 30% more coal
> sludge floods destroying towns and polluting ground water sources.

... you don't end up with anything "captured" or "sequestered" - it is a big con game
where the coal industry (and, no doubt their paid supporters) are making out like
bandits at the cost of everyone's health and the futures of other living creatures
across the planet.

:mad:

[txlibdem]

7. There are only a few areas where true "sequestration" could happen

And even those few could be breached by an earthquake.

I posted a link a while back with an assessment of the nation's potential sites where CO2 could be safely stored for hundreds of years. http://pubs.usgs.gov/ds/414/downloads/DS414_map.pdf
...with credit to http://www.livescience.com/environment/090309-co2-rock-map.html

The map shows that only thin strips along the east and west coasts provide stable geological storage. I wonder, though, about the sites that run up and down the west coast due to their proximity to several of the nation's most active earthquake fault lines.

[diane in sf]

5. and neither is nnukular power when you look at the externalized costs