Posted on 07/30/2018 4:26:29 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
When it comes to coal, the United States is what the Middle East is for oil. That fact is not lost on an industry competing for relevancy at a time when it’s undersold by natural gas and renewable energy. It’s not lost on the coal-producing towns in the nation that have long relied on the mineral for jobs and economic development.
And it’s certainly not lost on Greg Merle, whose company is pitching what he hopes — what he believes — might just be the answer for a declining industry desperate to remain viable.
Merle is the president of Riverview Energy Corporation, which is proposing to build a “clean coal” diesel plant in Spencer County. It would be the first such plant in the U.S., quite possibly pushing Indiana to the forefront of the nation’s often contentious and political debate over clean coal.
“We firmly believe this is an important project,” Merle said, “not just for us and the state of Indiana, but for the U.S. and the world and the energy industry as a whole. “For the near term, we are at least going to slow down taking a lump of coal and lighting it on fire, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need fuels.”
But as energy companies, local development corporations and mining communities cling to the promise of “innovative” technologies to keep coal relevant, skeptics are asking whether the risk of such projects — which often involve cost overruns, produce an expensive product and emit significant pollutants — is worth the reward.
For the rest of this article: https://www.indystar.com/story/news/2018/03/18/clean-coal-technology-promises-revival-face-industry-decline-indiana/423202002/
“Clean coal” has been around for decades.
How clean? How economical?
I worked on a coal fired power plant 47 years ago in Wyoming. They sure seem to have had clean coal burning down way back then. Nothing came out of the stacks but white steam.
Appalachia is littered with clean coal projects that failed despite government subsidies. The market and tech just was not there. Hopefully this time is the charm but then again it might just be someone trying to get a federal handout.
I think someone will make a break through on fusion reactors soon that will blow away all other forms of energy production.
Fusion has been 25 years away for the last 50 years.
My bet is on zero point energy.
Many of these gases and such are still useful in manufacturing plastics and medicine and other materials besides their uses in energy production, so mining and drilling will go on.
Are you sure they didn’t have baghouses, more formally called “fabric filters?”
No opinion offered until i see better what technologies he’s proposing. Diesel? ??
Many, many thousands of ideas work better in the lab than in the field and factory.
The Nazis were the first to make liquid fuel from coal. South Africans also made large scale liquid fuel from coal. It depends on the price of oil whether it is economically viable or not. https://sasoldcproducts.blob.core.windows.net/pic/products/home/index.html
Electrically charged precipitators and steam.
Got you. I forgot about precipitators. We had one ESP for a boiler constructed in 1975, and baghouses on the other three. I was responsible for the baghouses, but not the precipitator. That was the electrical guy’s responsibility.
Clean coal or dirty coal, getting out of ground rapes the land here in Ketucky.
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