Coal – Plentiful & Now One Of The Cleanest Fuels

The U.S. has a whole bunch of Coal.  Our coal reserves make the Saudi oil reserves look small.  Coal is especially plentiful here in central Utah.  I live in Carbon County which got its name from all the coal in our mountains.

The big problem with coal has been the environmentalists who worry about pollution.  I worry about pollution, too, but the exhaust from our power plants (we have three coal fired plants within 30 miles) is so filtered and scrubbed that I’ve never really noticed any sort of pollution myself.

Well, it looks like that pollution problem may have been solved:

From Fox News:

Researchers have discovered a stunning new process that takes the energy from coal without burning it — and removes virtually all of the pollution.

The clean coal technique was developed by scientists at The Ohio State University, with just $5 million in funding from the federal government, and took 15 years to achieve.

“We’ve been working on this for more than a decade,” Liang-Shih Fan, a chemical engineer and director of OSU’s Clean Coal Research Laboratory, told FoxNews.com, calling it a new energy conversion process. “We found a way to release the heat from coal without burning.”

Fan discovered a way to heat coal, using iron-oxide pellets for an oxygen source and containing the reaction in a small, heated chamber from which pollutants cannot escape. The only waste product is therefore water and coal ash — no greenhouse gases. As an added benefit, the metal from the iron-oxide can be recycled.

Plans are already in the works to use this new process to power cars which would move the U.S. even further toward energy independence.  That would also be a huge benefit to this corner of Utah and I’d love to see it happen