I will first state for the record that I believe there is no such thing as clean coal. I would be incredibly happy if there were no new coal fired powered plants ever built. Even if I believed it were true, which I don’t, I would still believe that investing in Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) is worthwhile. In an ideal world, not only would no new coal fired power plants be built, existing plants would be shut down.
However, we do not live in an ideal world, and we need to do something productive until we get there. There are still many problems with CCS, including expense and lack of storage locations large enough. Despite the fact that renewable technologies are the best choice for new development, it will be a very long time until there will be enough production or the necessary infrastructure changes will be in place to support it. There are so many hurdles to wide scale renewable adoption, it would be in our best interest to invest in parallel efforts to reduce the impact of current technologies, even if only temporary.
The belief of many is that coal fired power plants will continue to be a widely used energy source until the renewable alternatives are cheaper per kilowatt hour overall. My personal belief is that it will take decades for renewable energy to be cheaper than coal on its own. However, subsidy of renewable energy technologies, coupled with legislation requiring coal companies cover the external costs to society of burning coal, then there may be cost parity sooner. Even if production became cheaper than coal tomorrow, the necessary changes to the grid would take years to implement, not to mention the time it would take to build the generation capacity necessary to meet current demand.
Coal has so many problems, but the sad fact is that we are stuck with it for the foreseeable future. While CCS is only a transition technology, embracing its development is not the same thing as abandoning the belief that coal is extremely bad. Some may say that adoption of CCS may lead to the use of coal for longer, but that’s a separate discussion.
