'Clean' coal technology?

Question

Surely this kind of technology should be given every priority?

If successful, the process could be passed on to places such as China and all of the other countries that burn massive ammounts of coal.

http://www.kristv.com/Global/story.asp?S=7793798

A no lose situation, don't you think?

Answer 1

Surely any method of burning fossil fuels will result in producing carbon monoide/dioxides.

I take it that the resulting products of reaction of coal burning are removed from our current enviroment by hiding it underground in oil-wells.

This is really no different than hiding the resulting by-products of  nuclear reaction underground.

Both may leak out into the enviroment over time...the difference being that CO/CO2 will be less likely to break down into another form...where as the uranium/heavy elements have a determined half-life that can be calculated as to when it's no longer an enviromental hazard again.

Answer 2

Unfortunatly it doesn't address the huge devastation caused by Mountain top mining in Kentucky & west virginia http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con...

Answer 3

Listening to the news this morning I heard they pulled the plug on FutureGen....same day as that town in Texas announced they were the site. $1.5 billion was the price tag and that was too much.  They are now looking at smaller scale research projects to send the funding to.  Too bad.  

While I don't think coal is a long term answer, we don't have any short term answers.  Sequestering carbon dioxide underground is the best option we have right now (putting it in the air is the only other).  It'll take years to get more nuclear plants on line.

Answer 4

This is a gassification followed by F-T synthesis to produce hydrogen and sequestration of the CO2.  Besides the cost, there are questions as to where the CO2 will be put and what the unintended consequences will be.