Even Shitstain's Admin Barely Pretending To Care; Dirt Piling Up On Grave Of "Clean Coal"

[hatrack]

This week, a Trump official at the U.S. government's pro-fossil fuel event at the United Nations climate talks made clear that the idea of burying carbon emissions from coal plants is still alive. Wells Griffith, an advisor to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), said at the event: “For the U.S. energy policy, it’s not about keeping [fossil fuels] in the ground but about using them cleanly.” Griffith added: “Alarmism should not silence realism. This is a forum for fact science-based discussions on climate realities.”

His conclusions make for great talking points, but they're far from reality. After more than a decade of failed demonstration projects, a recently rescinded $1.1 billion DOE research program, and the Trump administration's move to roll back requirements that all new coal plants have “carbon capture and storage” (CCS) capabilities, the promise of so-called “clean coal” technology is dead.

For quite some time now, both the coal industry and the U.S. government have been obsessed with the idea of making coal less harmful by pursuing various carbon capture technologies. With scientists ringing the alarm bells as the planet warms, the coal industry is once again trotting out the idea that it can clean up its act using space age technology to capture and sequester carbon before it pours out of smokestacks.

EDIT

An MIT research unit called the “Carbon Capture and Sequestration Technologies program” analyzed and tracked the progress of carbon capture projects worldwide. It was a great tool to watch the implosion of the clean coal dream. Year after year, projects listed on the MIT website went from being listed as “under construction” or “in progress” to “canceled” and “on hold.” As of September 2016, the MIT Carbon Capture and Sequestration Technologies program itself was canceled. A further sign that CCS is not the burgeoning technology that government and industry had hoped it would become. The U.S. government is also losing interest in supporting the CCS dream, at least in some venues. As first reported by Bloomberg, Trump's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) last week proposed reversing an Obama-era rule essentially requiring that new coal plants use carbon capture technologies.

EDIT

https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/12/10/trump-carbon-capture-storage-coal-dream-dead

[appal_jack]

1. "Clean Coal" has always been a myth, from extraction to disposal. k&r, nt