We have all heard the sock with sandals crowd spouting the evils of coal for decades. Yes, global warming is real, but if you want to be taken seriously stop wearing socks with sandals. No matter what some hipster told you that combination of footwear was never meant to exist. It also doesn’t change the fact America is the Saudi Arabia of coal. The more people try to kill it the more it survives. It’s kind of like the Jason of fossil fuel.
Instead of spending all of their money and energy trying to kill coal, costing what could be tens of thousands of jobs if one totals up all of the supporting industries around coal production, further decimating the economy, actual intelligent people set about trying to “fix” coal. There have been various stabs at it. Many of them were along the lines of our first venture into unleaded gas. You have to be old enough to remember how the very first catalytic converter and EGR (exhaust gas recirculation) system equipped engines not only sucked but got worse mileage than the “regular gas” engines of the year before. For the first few years there were a lot of catalytic converter “test” pipes and fuel nozzle adapters sold, then things settled down as the technology became better.
Most of you have heard about carbon capture or carbon sequestering where the CO2 emissions are filtered out of the exhaust and stuffed somewhere underground. Politicians seem to always want to bury stuff to avoid having to actually deal with it. Kicking the can down the road is standard procedure for any elected official. The problem is these hidden problems always surface.
Londo Mollari: Big concerns grow from small concerns. You plant them, water them with tears, fertilize them with unconcern. If you ignore them, they grow.
Even the world nuclear organization has been getting on the band wagon of fixing coal. We have known since before World War II that coal gasification produces liquid fuel suitable for diesel and jet airplane engines, but, there is a stigma associated with it. Nations with evil leaders got cut off from oil so they had to use it. For whatever reason politicians and socks with sandal wearers alike view coal gasification much like they view cannibalism, something only done during extreme circumstances. There is no justification for this view, yet it persists.
Other intelligent people in the green energy world have realized fuel cells have issues. Since “Big Oil” won’t let us use the molecule separation technology developed to make fertilizer from tap water to run our fuel celled cars, the fuel cell energy crowd has went down a new road, CO2 filtration via co-located plants. What boggles my mind is why anyone still pursues sequestering unless it is only for temporary staging because output cannot keep up with processing.
Processing you say? Yes. If we already have the technology which has been built to scale to separate water molecules into two hydrogen, one oxygen elements, why can’t we, at scale, separate CO2 with the same technology? The pure carbon could then be used for industrial purposes and the oxygen could be both bottled for sale and released into the atmosphere.
How did I get on this topic? I was looking through the September/October 2016 issue of Popular Science and they had a short article on coal. It reminded me, sadly, that no real technology improvements would ever be made to coal until an identity theft enabling idiot phone got tied to it. Well, someone has finally gone and done it, not with an app, but a manufacturing process.
Most of the Rare Earth Elements needed to make your idiot phone are in short supply, hence the Rare part of their name. There are only a few places to mine them yet we can mine coal in large sections of the world. Turns out the elements tend to survive the burning process, existing in the ash and soot. You know, that stuff people complain about.
Guess what they are going to learn with their continued research? That coal gasification is the most efficient way to get to the minerals they want. Yes, they will still need a process to pull them out of the soot and ash, but that will mostly be to get rid of the huge piles, landfills, and ponds of the stuff we already have.
The Department of Energy (DOE) is funding pilot projects which will go live within a few years at existing coal processing facilities. We are about a decade away from idiot phone and computer manufacturing moving back to the United States en masse because the minerals are available in greater supply here and you can thank much maligned coal for that.