Wanted to share with all of you the following article from Thomas R. Blakeslee, who gives a first-hand account of his recent visit to a showcase 845-megawatt “clean coal” power plant, the Huaneng Beijing Co-Generation plant.

There is a fierce debate about the merits of so-called “clean coal” technologies raging worldwide, and the stakes are especially high for China and India. As we’ve noted in this blog (statistics here), both share a severe dependency on coal that’s widely expected to worsen in the decades ahead, as supplies of imported oil become unaffordable or difficult to secure. This is painful, because although both have fast-rising energy needs and abundant domestic coal resources, burning coal has a notorious impact on quality of life (air pollution, acid rain) and on global warming.

Thus the allure of new “clean coal” technology, which promises to bring all the benefits of an existing industry while transforming it into something green. Too good to be true? Critics like Mr. Blakeslee think so, but you have to recognize that they have an axe to grind: most of them are supporters of renewable technologies competing for government support. In their view, clean coal is nothing more than an expensive mirage, while more reliable technologies for solving the sustainable energy problem aren’t getting the funding they need.

The strongest advocates of clean coal technology, not surprisingly, are from the coal industry and coal-producing areas. The US Senate draft of President Obama’s pro-green economic stimulus legislation would allocate a whopping $3 billion for clean coal and carbon-capture & sequestration technology development (news report here), and Senator Robert Byrd of coal-rich West Virginia was behind these provisions. Mr. Obama himself often spoke about clean coal technology as a senator and presidential candidate (his home state of Illinois also having significant coal mining), but it remains to be seen whether his enthusiasm will persist as president. Outcomes in the US are meaningful for China and India, as the multibillion-dollar R&D programs (if succesful) would lead to technology and industrial scale that will be transferrable worldwide.

One thing’s for sure: No-matter how clean technical advances can make the coal-burning process or how good or bad the ROI involved, coal will remain a non-renewable fossil fuel.

(Image courtesy of ecoworld.com)