Brian Williams, Clean Coal, and Oxymorons [w/video]
In celebration of NBC’s “Green Week”, the network ran a couple of stories on the Nightly News about the politics and technology of “clean coal”. Unfortunately, there was more coverage of the latter than of the former. While Nightly News host Brian Williams does delve briefly into ‘the political’ by raising the clean coal is an oxymoron discourse, he does so only briefly.
In this next one, NBC’s Anne Thompson talks to Lars Stromberg, CEO of Vattenfall Group, as they walk around the world’s only clean coal power plant, where an East German energy research team has devised a $100 million pilot project that burns coal with pure oxygen—a cleaner process than using air—and stores the fly ash in concrete.
Coal, like it or not, is cheap and abundant. Yet, so-called clean coal technology is nowhere near ready for prime time. China alone is building two coal-burning power plants each week, with no let-up in sight. What proportion of our available resources should be spent on looking for ways to burn coal cleanly versus developing other clean technologies like solar, wind, geothermal, that we have available to us right now?
We do need to continue the push toward clean(er) coal, as it will one day play a larger role in our energy generation, like or not.
That said, the biggest push needs to be directed toward efforts to reduce consumption, both through conservation (less waste) and new technologies that maximizes efficiency.
Solar and wind are next on the list, as there are so many opportunities to take advantage of these technologies, but we still need to recognize that coal will be in our future.