Clean Coal!!!!

Coal is what keeps the lights on at night. It is also the most carbon-intensive fuel we use. The clean coal concept is the latest pursuit in the industry to cut down chemical emmisions.

Coal and Electric power industries are using exisiting technoloigies to take the sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxide out of the emissions at electrical coal powered electrical plants.

The new technology is called CCS, or carbon capture and storage. In theory, it is said to reduce CO2 emmisions by as much as 90%. The process involves capturing a plant's carbon emissions before they escape into the atmosphere and storing them where they can do no harm.

From here, scientists claim to inject large quantities of CO2 underground into depleted oil fields and sandstone beneath the North Sea. Others think that gas could injected into volcanic basalt abundantly located in the Western states causing the interaction to produce a harmless mineral. Although skeptics believe the land would be far to pourous and the gasses would leak out of the land.

On top of that, there is no infrastrucute for a program like this and the process would cost billions of dollars to simply develop storage facilities and transport the CO2 . Something tells me this is not the governments first concern right now!!!

Alex Sanjuan