The Green's Black Secret

If true believers frighten you, beware An Inconvenient Truth. Al Gore is at his scary movie scariest as he tries to do the Lord's imagined work by studiously ignoring America's present and future  dependence on its greatest indigenous fuel source.

For all the exuberant evangelism of alternative energy advocates , coal remains the mainstay of America’s power supply ,  lighting half the nation's darkness from reserves reckoned in centuries.

Everyone knew this a generation ago, but while coal still outcrops in parents memory, few post-modern children would recognize a lump if it fell out of a Christmas stocking.  Nor is solid fuel much on Europe's domestic mind.Most homes there are being heated by Russian natural gas-- while it lasts. But when Europeans get up and go to work, carbon taxation makes then realize that what they see rising from their industrial chimneys is more than CO2 -It might be a rebate going up in smoke.

When natural gas is the fuel, the plumes they see on frosty mornings contain mostly water vapor. But even the exhaust of those burning coal can be less than half CO2. The hydrogen that makes natural gas the Green's environmental gold standard is present in coal as well.

But how  much? Enough to matter .  By ignoring what coal is actually made of, and how much it varies, costs America billions of tons of superfluous CO2 emission a year.  This will worsen as oil and gas prices rise ,for the low cost of coal energy  just 12% of the cost of  natural gas - assures its use will grow even in Green Europe where a  a permit to burn a truckload of coal costs as much as an ounce of gold.

The commonsense idea that saving CO2 emissions by burning less carbon should earn a hefty rebate has been displaced by Green polemics that equate coal and carbon. To do so is to ignore material reality-- coal is never pure carbon.

It’s not even a mineral with a fixed chemical formula. "Coal "is geological shorthand for a complex reality -- a spectrum of rocks made largely of organic compounds, some relatively rich in hydrogen. Since America burns far more coal than natural gas, what goes into coal is critical to understanding its impact on climate. A high carbon ‘hard coal’, called anthracite exists- anthrax is Greek for coal--but is rare as high hydrogen bituminous coal is common.

Coal is not alone in its complexity. Not all oil is liquid - we drive on asphalt roads, and some coal is less than solid, full instead  of “bitumen"-- the Biblical name for oozing asphalt.  Tar sands, Trinidad’s sticky asphalt, the viscous oil of Venezuela, and coal rich in bitumen all form a chemical continuum.

All coals contain hydrocarbons, and some far more hydrogen than others. America has these in abundance, and in burning, their hydrogen content contributes considerably to generating this nation’s electrical power. Yet the erosion of chemical literacy in our society leaves few able to recall an elementary fact that gives rise to an environmental paradox. Since carbon atoms are twelve times heavier than those of hydrogen, coals containing 90% can be half as rich in hydrogen as liquid benzene or acetylene welding gas.

Atoms matter because CO2 emissions cannot be reckoned by any fuel’s weight alone-- they all burn one atom at a time. A ton of hydrogen contains twelve times as many atoms as one of carbon. Switching a power plant from low to high hydrogen coal could reduce CO2 emissions by as much as 15 % because burning anthracite to raise steam releases up to 230 pounds of carbon dioxide per million Btu, versus 200 from the best bituminous coal. Such a shift would reduce CO2 emissions as much as a 3 MPG improvement in the nation’s gas mileage.

This scientific paradox is a dark secret coal lobbyists and “Green “natural gas spokesmen share. Solid fuel is easy to demonize, but if the Green’s better corporate angels may want to explore the benefits of shift to mining coal reserves high in hydrogen tomorrow. So far they haven’t even informed themselves as to the possibilities- despite billions spent on ‘alternative’ energy , we lack even a rudimentary data base ranking solid fuel deposits by how much their hydrogen content contributes to the nation’s real-time energy supply.  Elementary geochemistry suggests  the  future difference could  be as large as one of the "wedges " of potential CO2 savings evangelized in Al’s film , why are ardent Greens anxious to keep the media, and the public ,in the  dark about black hydrogen?

In Uncommon Carriers John McPhee shrewdly points out that transport cost, not quality, has historically determined which coal gets  mined first. The high inertia of infrastructure costs makes Big Coal's reluctance to shift to mining environmentally less harmful coal   understandable, but the silence of the Greens on the question is perplexing.  It may pain them to acknowledge that good coal is abundant enough to drive the bad out of circulation, but their denial risks denying many in the developing world the only energy they can afford.  Green politicians may find carbon taxes a bully big stick to swing in  media brawls, but when the dust settles , hydrogen rebates for those who burn better coal may prove a persuasive policy lever.

The author has written on science technology and energy policy in Nature, Physics Today and Forbes. Copyright 2007 Russell Seitz

Comments

[Paul Ding]

People hear "greenhouse gas" and they think CO2, but the most signficicant greenhouse gas is water vapor.

Al Gore is director of a company that builds computers into monitors, so that you have to replace your monitor in order to upgrade your computer, and builds batteries into portable music players that users cannot replace when they reach end of life.

This week in the Wall Street Journal, they announted that 100 million iPods had been sold - and a couple of pages later, they said 28 million man had iPods, only 13 million women. That leaves 59 million that have been landfilled?

It's time to call up our stockbrokers and invest in the Helena Handbasket company, because the world is surely going there.

[Vic]

Why do you show a picture of a cooling tower emitting water vapor when you are discussing CO2 emmisions? Not that it makes any difference anyway since the whole AGW thing is a money making scam anyway.
RESPONSE
To vex readers who start pontificating before they finish reading the text.

[John]

I'm thoroughly bemused...

When I was in grade school, we were related the glories of anthracite coal, over that nasty, dirty bituminous coal. And this in a non-coal-producing state!