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OPINIONS
Editorial: Mason County carbon capture project an important step in future energy
For years, we have been hearing about "clean coal," sparking an often polarized debate about whether the idea is practical or even possible.
Now a new project at American Electric Power's Mountaineer Plant in Mason County is on the front lines of exploring whether one highly-touted clean coal technology will really work.
For West Virginia, where future of the coal industry is critical to the state economy, the stakes are clearly very high. But the project is equally important for the nation, as we struggle with how to improve air quality without crippling our energy supply or productivity.
The $70 million "demonstration" project is a joint effort of AEP and a French company, Alstom, which developed this carbon capture and sequestration technology. In a nutshell, the process will remove carbon dioxide from the coal-fired power plant's emissions, process it and pump it deep into the earth for storage.
The initial phase of the project will handle only a small part of the plant's emissions, underscoring one of the concerns that the whole idea will be too expensive for commercial use. The other big concern is whether storing all that carbon dioxide underground is really safe.
But expense, capacity and environmental impact are the challenges for all the proposed alternative energy sources, from nuclear to solar to wind.
Success with cleaner coal could be a big win for the United States because coal-to-electric has the capacity to meet the nation's tremendous power demands. Coal-fired plants currently account for about 50 percent of the nation's electricity.
Wind, for example, produces only about 1 percent of the nation's power, and ramping that up to 20 percent by 2030 will require a huge expansion of wind farms that have environmental concerns of their own. The Altamont Pass wind complex in California has killed thousands of birds flying into its 5,400 turbines, USA Today has reported, leading some avian experts to worry that adding more and more turbines could eliminate entire species of birds.
So, while some environmental groups will say "clean coal" is an oxymoron, and some coal operators will say global warming is a hoax and power plants are fine the way they are, we applaud the effort in Mason County to test the effectiveness of this new technology.
Good luck with carbon capture in New Haven, W.Va.
