Coal

In West Virginia and Tennessee we visited main sites of the national debate on America’s energy future. American Electric Power, the nation’s largest utility and single largest emitter of carbon dioxide, gave us a tour of their Mountaineer Plant where the first testing phase of a new technology just got underway. On-site carbon capture and sequestration is the name of the process, which filters the coal plant’s emissions, separates CO2 from the gaseous output, and stores it underground.

The coal lobby, which coined the term “clean coal” in reference to CCS, is banking on the success of the project. The industry knows that their business model is not sustainable in a carbon-constrained future, a future that could start as early as next year if lawmakers in Washington pass federal climate change legislation. Consequently, lobbyists are intensifying their efforts to stymie critics and ensure a profitable future. (Firms in the United States have access to 27 percent of the world’s known coal resources.)

Meanwhile an increasing number of citizens are objecting to the notion that coal power could ever be clean. The detrimental impact coal-fired power plants have had on public health, Johannes and I witnessed in Kingston, Tennessee. Here 1.6 billion gallons of coal fly ash, a toxic waste product of electricity production from coal, spilled across 300 acres of private land after the embankment of a wet-storage-facility broke last December. The result: Heavy metals like arsenic, lead, mercury and selenium are finding their way into regional aquifers and the air thousands of people are breathing every day.