Clean Coal

Coal, like other fossil fuels, powers our economy and our lifestyle. Coal is cheap and abundant, which means its power is too. The downside of coal use is the environmental impact. Like other fossil fuels, coal is blamed for emissions that contribute to global warming and for producing acid rain. A major benefit of coal is that the United States has extensive deposits, which means we don’t have to rely on imports from foreign sources.

In order to keep this "local" resource in the energy mix for the future, the government began looking for ways to overcome coal’s environmental problems. In 1986, the U.S. government instituted the Clean Coal Technology Program. The program was a partnership between national and state government and private industry to research and develop technologies to burn coal in cleaner ways. The program ran from 1986 through 1993 and funded 38 separate projects across the country.

Technologies in use that resulted from the original program:

Scrubbers	Devices that clean pollutants from flue gases before they exit the plant smokestack. Scrubbers are a good "fix" for older power plants.
Gasification process	Instead of burning coal, this process converts coal into a gas similar to natural gas which can then be burned much more cleanly.
Fluidized bed combustion, low NOx burners	New devices to burn coal that keep the pollution from forming during the combustion process.