An abandoned coal mine belt in Benham, Kentucky.
More than 50 building plans for coal plants were scrapped in 2007, but the fossil fuel isn’t going down without a fight. According to the London Guardian, the White House has earmarked $237 million for coal research in the fiscal year 2009, a 40 percent jump from 2008. The spark comes just in the nick of time for the coal industry, which has struggled recently to obtain loans from major banks.
Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and Morgan Stanley have each made concessions to environmental groups saying they will not finance most new coal plants unless they are able to capture and sequester their CO2 emissions, a technology that is at least several years away from becoming a reality.
“That’s like requiring a jackhammer to be silent,” writes David Sasoon, who notes that even “clean coal” optimists have their doubts.
“Though no doubt possible, the logic is questionable, the proposition expensive and certainly a long time coming - at least two decades for clean coal. That’s the recent “best case” estimate of one conservative, fossil-fuel friendly thinktank - Cambridge Energy Research Associates.”
Still, there’s a bright side for the industry to what the Wall Street Journal has called “the latest obstacle for coal.” The U.S. Air Force has expressed interest in converting coal into jet fuel by way of an environmentally menacing technology known as coal-to-liquid, something the Nazis used during World War II when oil reserves were low. The process would nearly double the release of greenhouse gasses, according to the Washington Post:
“That’s because liquefying coal releases huge amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Proponents of CTL say that could be remedied by capturing and storing the carbon underground. Yet this new technology is so untested on a large scale.”
