Skip to Content

Cleaning Up Coal

October 1, 2003

Today’s coal-burning power plants are among the dirtiest sources of fossil fuel power. Gasification power plants-huge pressure cookers that convert coal into a stew of superheated gases that power a turbine-release fewer pollutants than conventional coal plants but still emit vast amounts of carbon dioxide, the leading cause of global warming. Research on cheap carbon dioxide removal, though, is gathering steam-and could make coal gasification a nearly zero-emission fossil fuel power source.

Research funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and a consortium of  companies, including ChevronTexaco, British Petroleum (BP), and Royal Dutch/Shell, is yielding one of the most promising methods for improving coal gasification: metal-ceramic membranes that  only allow hydrogen to pass through, effectively trapping carbon dioxide. The compressed carbon dioxide gas can then be piped off to underground repositories or other permanent storage sites.

Anthony Sammells, president of Eltron Research-the Boulder, CO, company that developed the technology-says the membranes are 10 times more efficient than competing experimental membranes. That means the membranes approach the efficiency levels needed for commercialization of the technology, says Gary J. Stiegel, the gasification technologies program manager at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Lab in Pittsburgh. By September 2004, Eltron Research hopes to move its membrane testing from lab-scale devices to pilot-scale reactors.

If the tests succeed, coal gasification plants could emerge as the cheapest ultralow-emission fossil fuel power plants, trouncing oil or gas plants that use scrubbers and pressurizers to remove carbon dioxide, says Cliff Lowe, an engineer with ChevronTexaco in Richmond, CA.

Indeed, this would make gasification “the technology of choice for coal,” says Dale Heydlauff, a senior vice president at a leading coal plant operator, American Electric Power in Columbus, OH. That would help coal overcome its dirty reputation and become a clean power source in the decades to come.

KEY PLAYERS IN COAL GASIFICATION R&D
Company/Agency
Technology Effort
U.S. Department of Energy (Washington, DC) $1 billion, 10-year program to build FutureGen, a nearly emission-free coal gasification power plant
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
(Oak Ridge, TN)
Low-cost nanoporous membranes to separate hydrogen and carbon dioxide in gasification plants
Clean Coal Power R&D
(Tokyo, Japan) Low-cost, air-fired coal gasification demonstration plant scheduled for construction in 2004Nexant (San Francisco, CA)
Simteche (Redding, CA)
Los Alamos National Laboratory
(Los Alamos, NM) Pilot plant to be built by 2005 to capture high-pressure carbon dioxide in solid form from coal gasificationEnCana (Calgary, Alberta) Dakota Gasification (Bismarck, ND) Use of oil fields to store carbon dioxide from coal gasification<

Keep Reading

Most Popular

Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.

And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.

OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora

The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.

Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.

Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.

This baby with a head camera helped teach an AI how kids learn language

A neural network trained on the experiences of a single young child managed to learn one of the core components of language: how to match words to the objects they represent.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.