clean coal

President Obama has issued marching orders for the rapid national adoption of "clean coal" technology. Last week, shortly after his budget address, he ordered a high-level task force to deliver a plan within 180 days determining how "to overcome barriers to the widespread, cost-effective deployment of CCS within 10 years, with the goal of bringing 5 to 10 commercial demonstration projects on line by 2016."

Obama's executive office memorandum looks like a big victory for the coal industry, which was already handed $3.8 billion in last year's stimulus act for carbon capture and storage (CCS) research and development and deployment. He did not simultaneously order a similar plan for a big roll-out of solar or wind energy to level the playing field.

Making good on campaign promises, the president is throwing the full weight of his administration behind a moonshot effort to make coal the "clean" energy technology of choice and open a federal pathway to a profitable future for one of the nation's most polluting industries.

Three factors have cemented Obama's support for carbon capture and sequestration technology: political necessity, economic opportunity and the backing of some of the most powerful mainstream environmental organizations operating inside the Beltway.

The Obama administration announced the winners of the first phase of "clean coal" dollars from the economic stimulus package, with the largest sums going to oil firms.

Only $21.6 million of the $1.4 billion for carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies was made available in phase one. The money was awarded to 12 companies that will test ways to catch and compress CO2 from polluting plants, transport it by pipeline and pump it underground.

The biggest winners were C6 Resources, a Shell Oil affiliate; ConocoPhillips; and Shell Chemicals, another division of Shell Oil. Each nabbed $3 million to demonstrate their technologies for seven months.

In the announcement, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu recycled the 'clean coal' boilerplate of past releases: "These new technologies will not only help fight climate change, they will create jobs now," although there was no estimate of how many jobs will be generated.

He also repeated this claim:

"The investments will help position the United States to lead the world in carbon dioxide capture technologies."

America still has a long way to go, though. A few subsidy-funded R&D tests are now being carried out, but none is considered economically feasible on a large scale, or even that clean.

Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) has been trying for the past year to get Congress to set up an independent corporation dedicated to clean coal development. He introduced the Carbon Capture and Storage Early Deployment Act (HR 6258), which provoked some hearings in 2008, but it went nowhere and died. So this spring he reintroduced the bill, virtually unchanged (HR 1689).

What happened next is further proof of the enormous leverage Boucher wields as a coal state Democrat in shaping national climate legislation.

His bill was incorporated wholesale as pages 52-75 into the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACES), the climate bill Reps. Henry Waxman and Ed Markey are shepherding through the House.

It fills section 114 of the Clean Energy Title of the Waxman-Markey bill, and it is a giant gift to the utility industry. It would create the Carbon Storage Research Corporation and funnel $10 billion to support the corporation over the next 10 years, with up to $500 million designated simply for "administrative expenses" to be spent at the discretion of its officers.

The most curious part is where all that money is going to come from. The answer: from every ratepayer who uses electricity, in the form of an almost invisible tax that would average 50-cents-a-month, conveniently referred to as an "assessment."

Canada's Conservative government is funneling two-thirds of its $860 million "clean energy" fund into carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. Most of that $580 million is headed to Alberta to clean up the province's dirty tar sands operations, which emit more global warming gases than the entire nation of New Zealand.

If it sounds like hogwash, or rather greenwash, it is.

The tarry bitumen of the oil sands is one of the world's filthiest hydrocarbons. Mining it produces two to six times more greenhouse gases than light oil.

In theory, CCS, or so-called "clean coal," could strip carbon from exhaust gases, pipe it away and bury it in depleted oil and gas reservoirs elsewhere in Alberta. But that doesn't hold up in practice, and there's no evidence that it ever will.

Brian Ross of ABC News has been caught red-handed. He ran a story yesterday claiming that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. called President Obama an "indentured servant of the coal industry." RFK did no such thing.

What actually happened, as a transcript of Ross's questioning shows, is that Ross was trying to get RFK to attack President Obama directly for his support of "clean coal."

But in the resulting story, Ross appears to have fallen into his own trap, putting words into RFK's mouth that he never said. What is even more egregious and offers further proof of ABC's questionable intent is the illustration that accompanied Ross's story online. It's a manufactured composite image, showing RFK and Obama in the same frame, separated by a belching smokestack.

RFK is an outspoken opponent of the coal industry. He doesn't mince his words. Here's what he said to an anti-coal protest in Washington, D.C., last month that succeeded in stopping the use of coal at the Capitol power plant:

Massey Coal and Peabody Coal and Arch Coal: These are criminal organizations (cheers) and the only way they can get away with what they are getting away with is by corrupting our pubic officials and subverting American democracy. They're not just destroying the environment, they are doing that as well.

Watch it:

That is RFK's message in a nutshell. The transcript reveals Ross wanted to see if he could make RFK paint the president with the same brush and succeeded only in learning about the boomerang effect. Ross is the one who actually ended up calling the president an "indentured servant of the coal industry," though he tried to pin it on RFK.

The European Union has pledged to have 12 demonstration carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) power plants -- so-called "clean coal" -- up and running by 2015 and the technology fully commercialized by 2020.

But there is not a single utility-scale CCS plant now functioning in Europe, nor on the planet, and not one on the horizon. On top of that, some experts say EU dollars have all but dried up for funding the overpriced, pie-in-the-sky fossil fuel "fix."

Cloudy forecast? Yes. But it's way too premature to write off "clean coal" on the continent, because even as the economy crumbles, projects press on. A full reality check on the state of CCS technology in the EU follows, courtesy of an analysis by global research firm Innovest Strategic Value Advisors.

Coal ash deposits in the USA are now under renewed scrutiny after a giant spill just before Christmas released 5.4 million cubic yards of toxic sludge into Tennessee waterways. Water tests near the spill from the Kingston Fossil Plant showed elevated levels of lead and thallium, which can cause birth defects and nervous and reproductive system disorders. The spill muddied the waters in the Emory river and is flowing into tributaries of the Tennessee River - the water supply for Chattanooga and millions of people living downstream in Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky.

So now a big question mark hangs over the hundreds of coal plants all across the country which store their fly ash in unlined embankments and ponds -- like the one that failed last week. Most are situated near rivers that supply water needed by the coal plants to operate.

The NY Times reported that in the US, coal plants produce 129 million tons of postcombustion byproducts a year. It's the second-largest waste stream in the country, after municipal solid waste, and its storage and handling is unregulated. Who knew?

It is yet another measure of the high price of addiction to fossil fuels, which is not only polluting the air and warming the earth, but fouling the nation's terrestrial and aquatic environment as well. The Tennessee coal spill is a wake up call not only for the coal industry, but the oil industry as well, and not only for America but for Canada, too.

Both nations, still in pursuit of endless supplies of fossil energy, are collaborating on the exploitation of Alberta's tar sands -- one of whose byproducts will be toxic spills like the one in Tennessee, only on a massively larger scale.

The Reality Coalition has just released a new ad that's laugh out loud funny.

Click here to view it.

No big surprise at the DNC on Day 4: Obama’s acceptance speech was the story of the night (transcript).

The New York Times’ Chris Suellentrop rounds up early reactions in this aptly titled post: Well Spoken. More reax here from Andrew Sullivan, from the left and right.

Obama put energy squarely in the spotlight, as he dangled this whopper of a promise in front of Americans:

For the sake of our economy, our security, and the future of our planet, I will set a clear goal as President: in ten years, we will finally end our dependence on oil from the Middle East.

Here’s how:

I'll invest 150 billion dollars over the next decade in affordable, renewable sources of energy - wind power and solar power and the next generation of biofuels; an investment that will lead to new industries and five million new jobs that pay well and can't ever be outsourced.

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• Stacy Feldman's blog
• 2 comments

Political cartoonist Mark Fiore fires well-aimed shots at all the mythological virtues of "clean coal" in one of the most clever commentaries ever delivered on the subject.

Click play above. And prepare to bust out laughing.

The production comes courtesy of an excellent and important new website created by the folks at DeSmog Blog, Rainforest Action Network and Greenpeace USA.

It's called: Coal is Dirty.

Don't miss it, any of it.