Montana Kaimin: An environmental take on coal energy

Story by Oriana Turley | November 2, 2007

Montana Kaimin

Gov. Brian Schweitzer wants to build 11 new power plants in Montana to process 120 billion tons of coal pulled from the Eastern part of the state to create fuel for cars. Some people say that the strip mining technique used to extract the coal from the ground is bad for the planet and not the best way to provide Montanans with fuel. Also, some say that the processing technique, the Fisher Tropsch Process, is not eco-friendly. Director of the Environmental Studies Department, Len Broberg, sits down to discuss the controversial issue from an environmental prospective.

Is it possible to cleanly convert coal to energy?

It depends on what you mean by clean. If you mean zero CO2 (carbon dioxide) emissions, no. If you mean without putting demand on water resources in the region where you’re doing that, no.  If you’re talking about does it mean no surface disturbance, obviously not, because of strip mining.

What does Schweitzer mean by clean energy?

Well, I think by clean energy he must mean getting rid of the limitations of the process that will somehow reduce the amount of pollutants and CO2 that would be produced if we burned that coal to produce energy directly with conventional methods.

Can the proposed process be applied on such a large scale with limited impact to the earth?

Probably not. Part of the process that is used to convert the coal is actually releasing CO2. So while it may reduce the amount of CO2 released compared to when we would burn the coal directly to produce electricity, it doesn’t really reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere substantially. We’re still producing quite a bit of CO2. Moreover, the other issue is we are taking geologic carbon and converting it to atmospheric carbon. So you are continuing to add to the carbon dioxide load in the atmosphere by doing that. Whereas processes like bio-diesel at least take carbon dioxide that was fixed in plants – it was atmospheric carbon – they return it essentially to atmospheric carbon by burning it. So the synthetic fuel process creates CO2 in its production, and you are also burning it at the end of your tailpipe and create CO2 that way. So it’s a different process, it produces CO2 both in electricity generation to power the plants in the process of producing it, and it also produces CO2 at the end of your tailpipe.

What is your response to Gov. Schweitzer saying that we can just put the CO2 underground?

That may work. I don’t think that we have tested that out and whether or not we have the right geology in the places they want to put it. They don’t really want to put it in the best places for it. The basaltic formations more toward the Cascades in Washington and Oregon would be better perhaps for doing carbon sequestration because it is not later released from the earth again, it is converted to a solid over time. But we’re not going to build pipelines from Roundup, Mont., over to Washington and Oregon. That’s almost as bad as some of the other alternatives. So I think we really need to look at some smaller projects that pilot whether or not carbon sequestration, even off of regular coal plants, work. That might be the best thing to do, take existing coal-fired plants and try and convert them to some kind of carbon sequestration rather than building a new plant which burns more coal and then trying it out.

Is this an answer to weaning the United States off foreign oil?

No. Quotes I’ve seen is that it would take roughly 55 of these plants to supply one percent of our current oil imports. So it could play a role, but a very minor role. It certainly would not replace what we now import.

Is it a good idea to subsidize research on this, and is it a good way to spend taxpayer’s money?

I would prefer to see the money used to work on carbon sequestration and used to help subsidize the development of renewable energy resources like wind and solar, rather than focusing more money on this process that seems to not really, to any great degree, help us get us to where we need to get to.

Why wind and solar over coal?

Quite simply, because they don’t generate CO2. At least not directly in the process. So what it does is change from methods using fossil fuels that bring up geologic CO2 and release it into the atmosphere to something that doesn’t do any of that. And it will need to be a diversity of sources that we work with to transition toward a more sustainable, climate-friendly energy future. But certainly I think that those areas are receiving less attention than it should be.