Clean, cheap coal?

• April 1, 2010
• Teresa Foster
• Boulder Weekly

It appears that the coal industry is trying very hard to convince us that burning coal is the cheapest and the cleanest way of generating electricity. Last week in the Camera and Denver Post, “American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity” bought three very expensive full-page ads touting that coal is low-cost, reliable, increasingly clean and it is the better choice than burning natural gas. What is their motive?

The fact is, the coal industry doesn’t want us to move beyond coal. Certainly, it has been proven to be fairly reliable, but “low-cost” and “clean”? Leslie Glustrom of Clean Energy Action (a Boulder nonprofit that is exposing the true costs and availability of coal — www.cleanenergyaction.org) recently noted: “The coal industry fails to mention that the price that Xcel Energy paid for coal in 2009 ($1.52/million British thermal units) is the price that in 2008 they had expected to pay in 2035. That means coal cost estimates were only off by about a quarter century.” Folks, the price is going up, and there is hard evidence that we don’t have a 200-year supply.

Coal is not exempt from the law of supply and demand. Furthermore, “clean coal” is an oxymoron. Heavy metals (especially mercury — a deadly poison), particulates (asthma and lung disease) and toxic coal ash (poisoning our water supplies, feedlots and more) are being dumped into the environment every day, not to mention mind-boggling amounts of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide and others).

When they say “clean coal,” it means that they will have to build a new kind of coal plant that can strip the carbon dioxide out of the exhaust and pump it into the earth. Carbon capture and storage is an unproven and costly technology with a host of serious problems (groundwater acidification and, “Oops, it leaked”). How many clean coal plants in the U.S.? At last count there were two demonstration plants.

This is the answer to cleaning up coal? And what is the cost of a clean coal plant? Burning coal to generate electricity isn’t going away any time soon, but now that Colorado has a 30 percent Renewable Portfolio Standard, the coal industry’s dominance is starting to fade. Don’t listen to their propaganda. The health of the planet and of future generations is at stake. Renewable energy is the answer and the faster we bring it on board, the healthier we’ll all be. Teresa Foster/Longmont