In the article, Mr. Lucas, ABEC executive Director, points out that “every major plant currently under construction or proposed makes use of cleaner, more advanced technologies”. Why would people oppose coal-fired power plants projects if they use clean coal technologies?
Many efforts are made to find a clean way to produce electricity from coal. The efficiency of the plants keeps increasing and capture and sequestration of CO2 is being tested in several places all around the world. Companies try to build power plants that will be able to capture CO2 once this technology is available for large scale plants like Electrabel’s project of two 800 MW coal-fired power plants in Northern Germany, close to a potential sequestration site.
In spite of all these efforts, it is not certain that coal will be clean one day. The 2007 MIT study “The Future of Coal” discusses the cost of CO2 sequestration. For example, the cost of electricity of a 500 MWe supercritical pulverised coal power plant is 4.78 cents/kWh without CO2 capture and 7.69 cents/kWh with CO2 capture. CO2 capture is expensive because of the cost of the capture system itself and because it reduces the efficiency of the plant (in his interview with Enerpresse published on March 10th 2008, Mr. Paul Boutin, coordinator of the Castor Programme, says that the decrease of the overall power plant efficiency due to capture systems is around 10 percentage points). The report also points out that it is a false assumption to believe that today CO2 capture and sequestration is a demonstrated and available technology for very large scale sequestration. Besides being expensive, CO2 capture may not be feasible. An article published in Modern Power Systems in November 2007 is titled: “IGCC stumbles and falls in the US. The spate of cancellation is becoming a flood”. This article gives several examples of IGCC projects that were cancelled such as Southern Co’s $850 million plant in Florida. Even IGCC, a promising clean coal technology, is in difficulty regarding technology and cost. Therefore, clean coal technologies are not yet mature and it is not certain they will be mature in the future.

I agree with John Busby’s comment above that the estimates of the remaining coal reserves are vastly overstated. Check out “Big Coal” by Jeff Goodell that suggest that only about 10 to 20% of estimated coal reserves in the U.S. are economically recoverable. “A good percentage of the coal that’s left is too dirty to be burned in conventional power plants, and much of it is buried in inconvenient places — under homes, schools, parks, highways, and historical landmarks.” (Big Coal, p. 7)

In the United States, the coal lobby is saturating the airwaves with commercials that minimize the dangers of coal — while conveniently leaving out any mention of global warming, acid rain, smog, heart attacks, lung disease, asthma or any of the other bi-products of coal-fired power.

I got tired of watching the coal lobby’s ads during the Presidential debates on TV. So I took one of their ads and remade it — stripping out the coal industry’s lies and replacing them with facts about the dangers of coals and the benefits of solar, wind, and geothermal power. You can check it out here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PPxYCDKVec

It seems to me that the coal industry is fighting a losing battle and they know it. They’re just trying to squeeze every last drop of profit out of the system before they go extinct. By trying to build all these power plants now, they’re trying to squeeze 50 more years of profit out of this dirty energy source — which seems pretty cynical to me.

In the US the era of high quality coal is nearing its end. Anthracite and bituminous coal production has been steadily declining since 1950 and 1990, while total coal production has been rising. Lower quality sub-bituminous and lignite have been making a rising contribution.

The MIT report “The Future of Coal” warns that theoretically “clean coal technologies” (CCT) will draw between 27% and 37% more coal from the reserves for the same generation, excluding sequestered CO2 transportation and injection, which means in practice around 50% more coal would be burned.

This means that if universally applied CCT would reduce the coal reserves by a third. It is difficult to imagine the willingness of an industry abandoning so much of its production for climate alleviation and it means that CCT is unlikely to be enforced.