mountains and economic ruin of many coal-mining 

 regions, the medical bills for treating the heart attacks 

 and asthma caused by air pollution, the lost future in- 

 comes of children adversely affected because they were 

 exposed in the womb to mercury from fish eaten by 

 their mothers. Using data from a widely respected ten- 

 year study by the European Commission, Robert H. 

 Williams, a physicist at Princeton University, estimates 

 that the effects of air pollution from U.S. coal plants 

 on public health would add about thirteen dollars, or 

 25 percent, per megawatt-hour to the price of coal- 

 fired energy. For the oldest, dirtiest plants, the added 

 costs could reach thirty-three dollars. In comparison, 

 the cost of such "externalities" for a natural-gas plant 

 is only about forty cents. In a market that accurately 

 reflected true energy costs, coal would not be such an 

 attractive option. 



Water and pulverized coal are formed into cakes at a farm in 

 China's southern province of Guangdong. Residents of cities 

 and rural areas alike burn the cakes for cooking and heating. 



There is a better way to take advantage of coal's 

 abundance: a relatively new technology that 

 goes by the unfortunately complicated name of in- 

 tegrated gasification combined cycle, or IGCC. In- 

 stead of burning coal directly, as conventional coal 

 plants do, IGCC plants cook off major impurities 

 as they convert coal into a synthetic gas, which is 

 then burned to generate electricity. IGCC plants 

 burn nearly as cleanly as natural-gas plants, are 10 

 percent more efficient than conventional coal plants, 

 consume 40 percent less water, and produce half as 

 much ash and solid waste. 



But more important, it is far easier and cheaper to 

 remove C0 2 from coal at an IGCC plant — 

 because C0 2 is concentrated during gasification — 

 than it is at a conventional coal plant. The CO, could 

 then be sequestered underground or perhaps under 

 the sea. Carbon dioxide sequestration is still a con- 

 troversial idea that is just beginning to be tested. But 

 the combination of IGCC technology and C0 2 cap- 

 ture and sequestration at least offers a plausible way to 

 continue burning coal without trashing the climate. 



Out of the hundred or so coal-powered plants slat- 

 ed for construction in the U.S., however, only a 

 handful are now planning to incorporate IGCC 

 technology. Why? First, Big Coal argues, the plants 

 are expensive: an IGCC plant costs between 10 and 

 20 percent more to build than a conventional coal 

 plant does. That may be true, but if you factor in the 

 likelihood of future limits on C0 2 emissions, the ad- 

 vantages of carbon capture and sequestration would 

 enable IGCC to operate more cheaply by nearly 20 

 percent. In the long run, electricity from IGCC 

 plants will almost certainly be cheaper than elec- 

 tricity from conventional coal plants. 



Second, Big Coal asserts, IGCC is still an unproven 

 technology. Yet engineers have been gasifying coal for 

 150 years, and coal-gasification plants in the U.S. and 

 elsewhere have been generating electric power since 

 1984. Some of the biggest names in power-plant en- 

 gineering — General Electric Company, the Shell 

 Group, Bechtel Corporation — are starting to promote 

 IGCC. But Big Coal has been pushing instead for one 

 more generation of old combustion plants, rebrand- 

 ed as "clean" by bolting on some new scrubbers. 



In China, coal is everywhere. It's piled up on side- 

 walks, pressed into bricks, and stacked near the back 

 doors of homes. It's stockpiled into small mountains 

 in open fields, and carted around behind bicycles and 

 old wheezing locomotives. Plumes of coal smoke rise 

 from rusty stacks on every urban horizon. Soot cov- 

 ers every windowsill and rings the collar of every white 

 shirt. The Chinese burn less coal per capita than 

 Americans do, but in sheer tonnage, they burn twice 



40 



NATURAL HISTORY May 2006 



