Why Is It So Hard to Clean Up Coal?

Two words: money and politics.

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/redarrow101/4414917091/">John Mueller</a>/Flickr

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

The dream of taking the crud out of coal has been around for a long time. As far back as 1918, a West Virginia United Mine Workers leader extolled the “absolute necessity of producing clean coal.” Back then black soot was the main problem. Today, scrubbers are trapping most of coal’s visible grime before it leaves the smokestack, though what’s left is still enough to sicken hundreds of thousands. The industry has resisted calls to clean up further, and the White House last year ordered a key clean-air rule delayed until 2013; still, the technology is available to handle most of coal’s dangerous byproducts—but what about invisible, climate-wrecking CO2? Here’s why that’s harder to tackle.

Energy: To de-carbonize a coal plant, you must first separate out the carbon, then store it somewhere. That requires a lot of energy, meaning you have to burn coal to clean up coal. “That’s by far the biggest barrier to the whole thing,” says Revis James of the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), an industry group. The “energy penalty” for carbon capture and storage (CCS for short) can be as high as 28 percent.

Cost: With current technology, CCS increases the price of coal-generated electricity as much as 94 percent—and in the absence of a price on carbon, there’s zero incentive for companies to invest in it. Even if they did, it would be cheaper and simpler to just apply the technology to natural gas plants: A new coal plant with CCS runs $135 per megawatt-hour ($75 without), while a carbon-capturing natural gas plant costs about $109/mwh.

Politics: Coal companies have generally been more interested in promoting the idea of clean coal than actually making it happen. Case in point: As the debate over a climate bill ramped up in 2008, members of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, an industry-funded group, had pledged $3.6 billion to developing CCS technology. These companies made a combined total of $297 billion in profits between 2003 and 2008—in other words, for every $1 in profit, they committed to spend a penny on clean-coal research. Now, with no new carbon regulation on the horizon, there’s even less incentive to push toward clean-coal innovations, says EPRI’s James. “People feel like they can invest in other research priorities.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate