How do we get clean coal and what makes it different from regular coal?

Coal is made of dead, fossilized plants.

The reaction for coal is essentially C + O2 --> CO2 where the carbon reacts with water to make Carbon dioxide and water, and heat. The heat is what we want to make steam power to get electricity. The problem is that coal isn't the same everywhere you go. Coal is composed of carbon, hydrogen, and whatever else gets trapped in with the dead plants (mostly oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur). Some places has coal with a lot of sulfur, others don't have much sulfur at all.

The "clean" coal has a low sulfur content, and dirty coal has lots of sulphur. Almost all of Illinois is sitting on a HUGE coal deposit but it has a high sulfur level, and is unusable by todays EPA standards.

Whats the deal with sulfur? When carbon, hydrogen, and sulfur each react with oxygen, they make CO2, H2O, and SO2. Carbon dioxide is bad, but its an acceptable product. Water is harmless, it just comes out of the reaction really warm. Sulfur dioxide, thats bad stuff. SO2 goes up in to the atmosphere, where it reacts with water and oxygen to form H2SO4, sulfuric acid. That comes out of the sky as acid rain. Which we know is bad.

Coal releases 65% of sulfur in the US, which is millions of tons.

So, the lower amount of sulfur in the coal, the less acid rain made. Therefore, if we remove the sulfur (and other baddies) in the coal, we get "cleaner" coal.

Scrubbers, or "flue gas desulfurization units," are put on smokestacks. They have limestone in them that reacts with the SO2 and pulls it out of the smoke.

Nitrogen is usually okay in the environment, but when it combusts and forms NOx, its a pollutant; its taken care of by burning the coal in stages and at really really high temperatures so none of the oxygne will react with the nitrogen.

Another way to clean the coal is to smash it into a fine powder, then blow air on it from below so it floats or hovers while it is burned. Limestone is added during the reaction. The limestone absorbes the sulfur dioxide and the floating action and fine powder lets the coal burn at temperatures low enough that the Nitrogen wont seperate to react with the oxygen.

Whew.

There is no such thing as clean coal! That's an oxymoron if I ever heard one.

The only use that coal has is to produce heat energy when you burn it. In perfect combustion of coal, the only byproduct should be carbon dioxide, and that's far from clean if you believe the global warming theories.

But coal contains a lot more than carbon. When you burn coal, you also burn all the impurities in the coal - things like uranium, thorium, sulfur and ash producing rock particles. A coal fired power plant produces more gamma radiation than a nuclear power plant.

Really there is no difference between the actual caol. Its just that the carbon dioxide emitted when the coal is burned in clean coal is pumped into the ground making it harmless to the enviroment.

uhhhhhhhhh.........

10 points please?!