What does clean coal mean?

it usually refers to starting with a hard coal such as anthracite which has less impurities than softer coals such as bituminous or lignite coal then using a cleaning process to remove some of the sulfur & heavy metals before burning it.

it also refers to an expensive & complicated process to remove & sequester pollutants from the smoke after it is burned.

as you can see from the following news link about the capitol power plant its not very practical.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090302/ap_on_go_co/co...

near the end of the article it mentions that it requires burning even more coal to power the sequestering equipment. this naturally makes the sequestering process very popular with coal producers.

as usual with lawmakers when reality conflicts with their imaginations of how things should be they exempt themselves & pass laws that only effect everyone Else's electric bill but not theirs.

their motto is, "do as we say, not as we do"

or "we cant figure out how to do it so its your problem"

It means politicians are not scientists. Clean coal produces as much CO2 as regular coal, and contains less of the other pollutants (which contribute to acid rain) but not really enough to make it as pretty as it sounds. I like the potato chip analogy. I think it's more like "clean booze". We're drinking a fifth of cheap whiskey a day, mixed in with some Coke. Switching to Grey Goose straight will lessen your hangover, but you'll still get cirrhosis or liver cancer eventually.

www.coal-is-clean.com

www.this-is-reality.org

Or just google search clean coal. Experts without financial ties to the industry (like Obama and McCain and most people in government have) see this as one of the sorrier attempts at pulling the wool over American eyes.

Hahaha, I like Johns answer he is so right! There are different kinds of coal. For example bituminous is a certain type of coal and it burns well without putting to much Sulfur and Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere. By no means is it clean its just burns cleaner than other kinds of coals out there. It is not the answer to our problems. Americans as a whole need to learn how to consume less and stop being so wasteful. Unfortunately, I doubt that will ever happen.

Clean coal is just a higher grade of coal. Lower grades of coal contain a lot of junk so when you burn them you're not only burning coal, you're also burning the junk that is embedded in the coal. That causes more emissions. If however you burn clean coal you are only burning coal because all the junk has been removed, thus reducing emissions.

I'm sure what Obama meant was to take on the technology that has been developed to burn coal cleanly. They now have coal burning plants that produce low CO2.

I think coal, in general, is the most overlooked form of fossil fuel there ever was. They certainly have ways and means to make it clean as you well know. The germans used it to fuel planes during WWII. UCLA got their hands on the technology but strangely, ran out of funding during research (interpretation from German). Maybe the greedy oil companies and their cronies have something to do with that! Yeah, your on the right track-Coal will surface when the oil companies fall on their asses.

It's a fairy tale. The latest sludge/ash disaster was the result of clean coal. We are now talking about sequestering the emissions, but that is all theoretical at this point.

It's like "low fat chips." You know how "low fat chips" just means lower fat than regular chips, and how only a dunce would think it means that "low fat chips" are as nutritionally beneficial as carrots or spinach?

Well "clean coal" means cleaner than regular coal. It doesn't mean you can eat it or wipe your baby's bottom with it, and nobody ever said it meant that. Nobody's trying to "fool" anybody.

CLEAN COAL AND SANTA CLAUS AND DAY-LIGHT-SAVINGS-TIME ARE ALL POLITICALLY CORRECT.

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