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Clean Power From Coal
| Article
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15890 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1989 |
3,002 Words |
| Author
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Michael Woods
Michael Woods, a contributing editor for THE WORLD & I, has
received numerous science-writing awards. |
A number of new and largely unheralded technologies are quietly resolving a dilemma that, until now, has prevented full use of coal, our cheapest and most abundant fossil fuel, to meet our energy needs. These technologies promise to permit electric power plants and industries to burn more coal while continuing to reduce the air pollution often associated with this geologic relic.
Collectively called clean coal technologies, these new processes are the offspring of basic research conducted in hundreds of laboratories in the 1960s, '70s, and early '80s. Today, they are moving out of the laboratory and quietly stepping over the threshold to commercial viability in electric generating stations and industrial settings.
"We stand at the threshold of one of the most fundamental and revolutionary changes in the combustion of coal in history," says Kurt E. Yeager, director of the generation and storage division at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in Palo Alto, California.
Clean coal technologies have emerged from a research and development program pioneered by EPRI, the research and development agency of the electric power industry, which consumes 8 out of every 10 tons of coal mined in America. Today, however, the clean coal initiative has grown to be a national effort, involving not only private sponsors but also the federal government and state governments. Major coal-producing states, particularly Illinois and Ohio, are conducting their own clean coal programs in an effort to expand use of their abundant deposits of high-sulfur coal which, with traditional combustion processes, produce more atmospheric pollutants than do low-sulfur coals.
The federal government has played a critical role since 1984, when the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) formally began to explore the possibility of a major clean coal initiative that would be jointly funded by government and industry. Congress in 1985 passed legislation providing $400 million for the first phase of the joint program, known as Clean Coal Technology-1 (CCT-1). Under this program, DOE selected 11 demonstration projects for funding, and for each project, private-sector sponsors agreed to pay at least 50 percent of the costs.
They key event, however, came on March 18, 1987, when President Reagan announced a new $2.5 billion program to fund the demonstration of innovative clean coal technologies over a five-year period. Reagan acted on recommendations made by a joint
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