UNCLEAN COAL

There has been much made of ‘Clean Coal’ as a solution to the global warming/climate change problem.

We need to establish certain facts about so-called clean coal. Firstly, there is no such thing as "clean" coal. Everything about it is dirty. It is dirty to mine, it is dirty to transport, it creates great ugly gashes in the skin of Mother Earth, and when it is burnt it still produces the same amount of carbon dioxide as old coal.

And the politics of coal are certainly not clean, but represent the worst of distortion of facts, corruption of politicians, and vested interests trying to keep the status quo in operation.

Clean coal is a red herring. It is the sort of ‘solution’ that politicians put forward when they want to appear to be doing something about global warming without actually doing anything (a low cost, put any action on atmospheric carbon dioxide levels off for 10 years option).

The other term used in tandem with clean coal is carbon sequestration. This is the idea that you can take the carbon dioxide produced by burning ‘clean coal’ and pump it back down holes in the ground and hope it stays there - a bit like sweeping the dirt under the rug and believing that the dirt has actually gone away. They hope to put massive amounts of carbon dioxide down into the rock layers under very high pressure, and expect it will remain there for ever and a day.

There was a lake in Africa that had a large amount of carbon dioxide dissolved in it. Some disturbance (probably volcanic) caused all of the carbon dioxide to be vented from the lake. It killed every animal and human for miles around the lake. Carbon dioxide is heavier than air, and will flow like a liquid and fill up all of the low lying hollows and valleys, being quickly lethal to any unfortunate animal or person who walks into the hollow. Would you like to live near a point where they have pumped massive amounts of carbon dioxide under very high pressure into the rock strata?

The Hunter Valley is where much coal is dug up, and there are a number of power stations in the area. This is also an area with active geological faults. Therefore, the next earthquake could fracture the rock strata, and the sequestered carbon dioxide would come to the surface. I wouldn't give much of a chance to anyone who was unfortunate enough to live near a bore hole where they have ‘sequestered’ this gas if its containment is breached. To date, any clean coal / sequestration testing has been on tiny scale experimental plants, and it is not a practical and feasible technology. By the time they have wasted 10 years just to prove that it is very expensive and impractical, we will have lost 10 years of opportunity to address the problem before it becomes almost insurmountable.

Beware of politicians who have quick and cheap fixes for difficult problems. The solution to climate change will involve taking up a range of new technologies such a wind, solar, tidal and geothermal, as well as changing the entrenched behaviour patterns and responses of the past.

This generation and future generations will have to learn to consume less, think more, and have a much lower personal impact on the planet. If we do not learn to change our behaviours, to move out of our comfort zones and face the new reality, then there will be a very bleak future facing us.

-Michael Casey