Our environment needs us more than ever right now. Our atmosphere continues to get polluted, water streams continue to get polluted, and our health is negatively affected by this. A huge contributor to our current environmental state is the burning of fossil fuels for energy. We have alternate renewable energy sources like, solar, wind, water, hydroelectric, geothermal and nuclear energy. The question remains can mining for coal be clean? Unfortunately, clean coal does not exist, mining for coal does not have the capabilities of being clean energy; it is simply just a marketing catch phrase.
The idea of clean coal has been in existence since 2008. Congress was discussing a a climate change legislation, due to this the coal industries coined this term. The idea behind it is that coal plants would harness carbon dioxide that's released from from the plants and bury to reduce air pollutants. This idea doesn't fully exist, it is not practiced among mining companies. According the article What 'Clean Coal is - and Isn't published by the New York Times, written by Brad Plumer, states - "This technology, known as carbon capture and storage, is still in its infancy. Only one coal plant in the United States, the Petra Nova project in Texas, actually captures CO2 in this fashion...The carbon dioxide is pumped underground into nearby oil fields to help extract hard-to-reach crude" (Pulmer, Brad). The issue with this technology is that its far from cost efficient, its complicated and expensive. Because it's not as profitable, coal mining companies are not going to implement this type of technology. Even if this idea was used more commonly, it is still not the best option for our environment, pollution will still occur. Renewable energy sources are a far better alternative than the idea of clean coal - carbon capture.
There are many safety issues with carbon capture technology. Attempting to create clean energy by storing carbon dioxide in the ground would not effectively work long term. Business Week published an article titled The Dirty Truth About Clean Coal, by Ben Elgin, where they discuss that idea behind carbon capture is to liquefy the burning process of carbon dioxide and explains why it wouldn't work -
"Then there are the safety questions. One large, coal-fired plant generates the equivalent of 3 billion barrels of CO2 over a 60-year lifetime. That would require a space the size of a major oil field to contain. The pressure could cause leaks or earthquakes" (Energy).
The term clean coal is misleading, and just a marketing ploy to make people believe the energy they use is not damaging the environment. In the same article What 'Clean Coal' is and Isn't talks about how President Trump discuses clean coal and creates a misleading idea clean coal exists. Brad Plumer stated that Trump said in speech - “We’ve ended the war on beautiful, clean coal,” Mr. Trump said. “And it’s just been announced that a second brand-new coal mine where they’re going to take out clean coal — meaning they’re taking out coal, they’re going to clean it — is opening in the state of Pennsylvania" (Plumer, Brad). This leads people to believe the government is creating clean coal energy and is practicing this nation wide and this just isn't true. It's just a sales pitch, selling a product that doesn't do what is says it's supposed to. To conclude, clean coal is a myth that does not exist. We are led to believe clean coal exist by our political figures, when mining for coal can never be clean, like meth can never be healthy, it just doesn't work that way.
References
“Energy - the Dirty Truth About ‘Clean Coal.’”Business Week, vol. 55, 2008, p. 55.
Plumer, Brad. “What 'Clean Coal' Is - and Isn't.”The New York Times, The New York Times, 23 Aug. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/08/23/climate/what-clean-coal-is-and-isnt.html.
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