Relevance of Clean Coal Technology Today

As intellectuals’ world over are harping on the clean usage of coal or how cleaner coal can be, industrial nations are once again on the back foot, and many of them have asked their scientists to actively pursue Clean Coal technologies, and come up with a viable solution to cut down on CO2 emissions. Any way, one thing is quite evident, and it is there on the wall to be seen for all; with global temperature constantly on the rise in the last few decades, and significant climatic changes sweeping down on all parts of the world, time is fast running out for humanity to find a way to check CO2 emissions.

Coal today, or for many decades in fact, has been the major source for power generation in most countries across the globe, thanks to its cheap availability on earth. But the byproducts of coal combustion are what actually are causing all the troubles. In order to contain the environmental impact, scientists have come up with method such as gasification, chemically washing impurities/minerals from raw coal, chemical treatments to remove sulfur dioxide from flue gas, and certain methods to capture and store carbon compounds from the flue gas so that it is no more released into the open atmosphere. All these technologies/methods are described by the umbrella term ‘clean coal technologies’.

If our scientific community has been so successful in devising clean coal technologies, then why CO2 emissions from burning of coal still remain a thorny issue? Well, that is mainly due to the prohibitive cost of implementing methods for the capture/storing of CO2. Lack of will from the industrial nation’s part is also partly responsible for the non-solving of this issue, even though government funded research on the finding reliable technologies are now pursued actively in countries like US, Russia, and the EU. For example, US’ FutureGen, a public-private partnership project, and Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) are a couple of clean coal initiatives under development today.

Given the current pace of research, it may take some more years realistically before somebody actually comes up with a reliable and economic clean coal technology that has pan world relevance. Until that happens, the onus is on individual nations, and its people, to play their part in checking CO2 emissions, and follow a green lifestyle as much as possible. It is time we take things into our own hands to protect our environment.