Can Automation Clean-Up The Coal Industry, Make It Competitive Again?

The coal industry is in crisis. In China, for example, 70% of coal firms are losing money; much the same is in the cards for coal plants in the United States and elsewhere; the outlook couldn’t be any darker, blacker, murkier.

Coal faces a stiff headwind from new alternative energies such as wind and solar and a ballooning clean(er) natural gas market; many plants that were in the works or on the drawing board have been scuttled.

If the coal industry is to make a rebound, and the sooner the better, it needs to produce cleaner energy. Increasingly, achieving this goal, will fall on the shoulders of companies that can help automate coal plants, such as ABB and others.

Problems & Solutions

CornerStone, the official journal of the world coal industry and World Coal Association, states that carbon dioxide (CO2) is now defined as an air pollutant under the Clean Air Act, making coal plants, major producers of greenhouse gas (GHG), the main targets of efforts to reduce CO2 emissions.

In an article penned by Edward Rubin “Climate Change, Technology Innovation, and the Future of Coal”, Rubin cites the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Atmospheric stats showing that concentrations of GHGs including carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) have increased because they are byproducts of human fossil fuel energy use.

Climate-Change (Image Courtesy IPCC & cornerstonemag.net)

The difficulty with GHCs is they don’t dissipate quickly through rainstorms and other atmospheric processes and can stay in the atmosphere for centuries and millennia. According to Rubin “GHGs trap heat, affecting global temperatures, air flows, and the amount and intensity of precipitation around the world.”

Exponential Technology Growth Could Solve This Quickly

Rubin reviews the technologies that have been created recently allowing coal burning plants to “produce less CO2 during their entire lifetimes than they used to produce in a year or less.”

Modern particulate collectors and flew gas scrubbers are now part of modern coal-fired power plants reducing the emission of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide.

According to Ruben, much more is needed in terms of technological change and advancement on a massive scale,to achieve global GHG emissions targets. Ruben sites four general strategies for cleaner energy use in the future:

1. Reducing demand for energy in buildings, transportation, and industry to reduce the demand for fossil fuel supplies.
2. Improving efficiency of energy utilization to the demand for fuel is reduced.
3. Replacing high carbon fossil fuels with low carbon or zero carbon alternatives.
4. Capturing and sequestering carbon dioxide from fossil fuels to prevent release into the atmosphere.

Rubin describes how new technologies funded by government and private investments in R&D can result in cleaner coal. Rubin believes getting the ball rolling with technical advances is likely to result, over time, in an exponential expansion in capabilities vastly reducing GHGs produced by coal.

For more on this topic and a myriad of well written and insightful articles by Rubin and colleagues, visit CornerStone Magazine.

Tags: clean technology, coal

This entry was posted on July 28th, 2014 and is filed under Automation. Both comments and pings are currently closed.