In the fall of 1990, at a meeting of the American Chemical Society, C. Lowell Miller, then the associate deputy assistant secretary for clean coal at the Department of Energy, took issue with his job title. “There is no point in pretending that coal is what it is not, nor that it is not what it is,” he said. While his office aimed to minimize the pollution caused by the production of coal power, Miller said, emissions of carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and other pollutants were inevitable: “We know that there can never be none.”
Despite their high Rumsfeldian style, Miller’s caveats were well-advised. Coal is not clean, and it’s been creating problems for the atmosphere for as long as we’ve been pulling it out of the ground and burning it for heat and power. On Monday, when the Environmental Protection Agency administrator Gina McCarthy proposed rules that would cut carbon pollution from existing power plants, she emphasized both the health costs of soot and smog and the rising costs of natural disasters intensified by climate change. Both are at least partially the consequence of our continued reliance on coal, the source of forty per cent of the world’s electricity and about the same percentage of global carbon-dioxide emissions.
Miller—whose office was, at the time, charged with reducing the sulfur-dioxide and nitrogen-oxide emissions from coal plants, the primary cause of acid rain—was careful to manage his audience’s expectations. Not so the coal industry, whose use of the term “clean coal” in the decades since has been frequent, enthusiastic, and too often free of caveats.
The phrase “clean coal” appeared in industry advertisements as early as 1921, when it referred to coal that had been cleaned of dirt and dust before delivery. In 1987, a Senate bill defined clean-coal technology as any technology that significantly reduced the amount of “acid-rain precursors” emitted by coal plants. The term was soon expanded to include low-carbon technology, and it got a publicity boost, in 2000, when a coalition of coal, rail, and electric companies called Americans for Balanced Energy Choices—now subsumed into the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity—launched a multimillion-dollar public-relations effort. Ahead of the 2008 Presidential elections, ABEC spent more than thirty million dollars on pro-coal advertising in early primary and caucus states. At the end of 2008, the A.C.C.C.E. drew ridicule with a series of Christmas-carol parodies that included “Frosty the Coal Man” and “Clean Coal Night.” (The accompanying videos featured animated lumps of carolling coal.) “Clean coal means energy security, jobs and economic stimulus along with a cleaner environment,” announced a 2009 suite of ads from Peabody Coal. “The technologies that surround your life are fuelled by clean coal.”
Such campaigns provoked outrage from environmental groups, many of which declared that clean coal was an oxymoron. Some overreached, arguing that coal power could and should be quickly left behind in favor of renewables. (Al Gore famously compared clean coal to healthy cigarettes.)
The rhetoric—from both sides—polarized an already contentious debate over the future of coal power, and contributed to delays in the urgent work of reducing carbon-dioxide emissions from coal plants. While coal use in the U.S. is declining, thanks in part to the domestic natural-gas boom, it is rising worldwide, especially in industrializing countries where it is a relatively cheap, plentiful, and accessible fuel. The Obama Administration’s proposed rules focus on existing coal plants because they are both a big part of the climate problem and a big part of the solution: given the practicalities of existing energy grids, renewable power simply can’t be deployed quickly or widely enough to singlehandedly head off the worst effects of climate change.
The best-developed method for directly reducing carbon emissions from coal power is carbon capture and storage—capturing and compressing carbon dioxide before it is released from power plants, then storing it deep in porous underground rock formations. “I don’t see how we go forward without it,” former U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu recently told Wired.
But carbon capture and storage technology remains complex and expensive, and its progress has been retarded by the lack of incentives for power plants to install and improve it. (Why pay to capture and store carbon when you can pump it into the atmosphere for free?) Even as the coal and electric-power industries promoted carbon capture and storage as part of an Arcadian clean-coal future, they fought legislation designed to encourage it. At the same time, many environmental groups, convinced that carbon capture and storage was a concession to dissembling industries, lent only tepid support to its advancement. This year, two coal-fired power plants—a new one in Mississippi and an existing one in Saskatchewan—are scheduled to open commercial-scale capture and storage systems. If successful, they will be the first of their kind.
The Administration’s proposal would not specifically require coal plants to install capture-and-storage systems. Instead, it would set individual state goals for carbon-dioxide-emissions reduction, and direct each state to come up with its own set of strategies for meeting those targets. While the rules face major political and legal battles, and are certainly not enough on their own to stabilize the climate, they may well trigger more serious experimentation and innovation in carbon-reduction technologies and policies—including carbon capture and storage.
As Lowell Miller might say, there is no point in pretending that carbon capture and storage is what it is not, nor that it is not what it is. It is not a panacea, and not a distraction. It is, most likely, one of the many tools needed to fix our carbon problem. The Administration’s proposal will, at long last, give us a chance to use it.
Photograph by Jim Urquhart/Reuters/Corbis.
