| Researchers May Breath New Life Into Coal Industry |
| Feb-20-2013 |
| Keywords: coal, pollution, new process, clean energy, the ohio state university |
According to a new report on FoxNews.com, researchers at The Ohio State University have developed of process of extracting energy from coal, with virtually no pollution.
"We've been working on this for more than a decade," Liang-Shih Fan, a chemical engineer and director of OSU's Clean Coal Research Laboratory, told FoxNews.com, calling it a new energy conversion process. "We found a way to release the heat from coal without burning."
The discovery is 15 years in the making at a modest cost of just $5 million in federal funding.
Fan discovered a way to heat coal, using iron-oxide pellets for an oxygen source and containing the reaction in a small, heated chamber from which pollutants cannot escape. The only waste product is therefore water and coal ash -- no greenhouse gases. As an added benefit, the metal from the iron-oxide can be recycled.
Fan's process, called "coal-direct chemical looping," has been proven in a small-scale lab at OSU. The next step is to take it to a larger test facility in Alabama, and Fan believes the technology can be commercialized and used to power an energy plant within five to 10 years, if all goes smoothly. The technology generated 25 kilowatts of thermal energy in current tests; the Alabama site will generate 250 kilowatts.
If Fan's process proves viable in large scale testing it could be the answer the industry's been looking for as the Obama administration attempts to pressure the industry into extinction.
Despite the possible breakthrough, liberals are still skeptical of the new technology in an era when solar and wind are seen as the energy sources of the future.
"Claiming that coal is clean because it could be clean -- if a new technically unproven and economically dubious technology might be adopted -- is like someone claiming that belladonna is not poisonous because there is a new unproven safe pill under development," wrote Donald Brown at liberal think tank Climate Progress.
Approximately 70% of all electricity used in the United States is generated by coal burning power plants.
Read more about the
promising coal energy breakthrough on FoxNews.com. |
|
|
Posted by Lou Dobbs Staff at 1:00 PM Email to a friend |
| < Back to Today's Issues |
|
 |
|
|
|
