Visitors to Allen Wright’s office are presented with an edible parting gift: A bag of black candy shaped like little chunks of coal, courtesy of a stakeholders’ group called the Coal Association of Canada (CAC).

Blurbs on the package remind Wright’s guests that coal is “affordable and increasingly clean,” as well as a “real sweet deal for consumers.”

Image-wise, coal has to try harder than other fossil fuels. Public relations hasn’t really been its strong suit.

“We’ve made significant strides over the last 30 years,” agreed Wright, CAC’s affable executive director and chief communicator.

Dave Olecko, Business Edge
Allen Wright, executive director of the Coal Association of Canada, poses with a chunk of the fuel that makes up 87 per cent of North American hydrocarbons.

“But we also realize that to deserve a social licence to continue using coal, (producers) have to find technologies to mitigate further the emissions that come from coal-fired power plants.”

Nevertheless, after spending years in the public doghouse, vilified as an unrepentant poisoner of pristine eco-systems, King Coal is starting to hold its head high again.

One reason is a buzz phrase that’s frequently batted around but not always well understood: Clean coal.

One thing to get straight about clean coal is that it won’t come into play as a significant source of energy for at least another decade.

That explains why the Ontario Liberals seem determined to follow through on election promises to close five existing coal-fired power plants – representing 25 per cent of the province’s peak power supply – no later than 2007.

In coal’s defence, Wright points out that the industry has made significant efforts to neutralize byproducts such as mercury, nitrogen and carbon dioxide since environmental protection lobbyists started applying pressure toward the end of the 1960s.

A recent TV ad campaign mounted by an advocacy group called Americans for Balanced Energy Control claims that by 2015, emissions from U.S. coal-based power plants will have dropped 75 per cent from levels recorded in 1970.

Be that as it may, even the most sophisticated coal-combustion technologies now in use don’t do a very good job of converting the intrinsic heat value of coal into electricity. Most of today’s coal-fired power generation plants operate at about 35- per-cent efficiency. Even Genesee 3, a new-age project coming onstream for joint owners Epcor and TransAlta, won’t do better than 40 per cent.

But the least that can be said for proven clean-coal technologies – particularly the process known as gasification – is that they hold out hope for the eventual safe use of the problematical amorphous carbon that represents 87 per cent of North America’s hydrocarbon reserves.

Gasification works, as amply demonstrated by North Dakota’s Great Plains Synfuels Plant. Opened in 1984 as part of the U.S. response to the so-called “energy crisis” of the 1970s, the Dakota plant now converts neighbouring coal deposits into 54 billion standard cubic feet of synthetic and hydrogen-rich natural gas every year.

“This has all been done before. It’s just that in Alberta the price of natural gas has been so cheap and the supply so abundant, there’s been no need to look around for alternatives,” said mining engineer Paul Clark, director of fuel supply for TransAlta Utilities Corp.

A technical adviser to the Canadian Clean Power Coalition, Clark is a zealous supporter of coalition chair Jim Dinning’s push to build a clean-coal facility in Alberta, presumably based on the North Dakota model. (Dinning discussed the project with Business Edge in early September.)

“Alberta hosts a multitude of industries dependent on natural gas that could just as well subsist on synthetic gas: Fertilizer plants, petrochemical plants, electrical power plants, refineries,” said Clark.

But the by-products of the gasification process are every bit as tantalizing. They include a pure grade of carbon dioxide that is too commercially valuable to be discarded as waste.

Engineers can inject the CO2 beneath the earth’s surface, use it to displace coalbed methane (CBM) from coal seams and drive it to the surface. Meanwhile, the CO2 remains underground.

“Theoretical experiments have indicated that you can put twice as much CO2 back into the ground as you’ve extracted in the form of CBM,” added Clark.

That same pure grade of CO2 can also be dissolved in selected heavy oil deposits and enhance currently modest recovery rates of 25 to 30 per cent.

“You actually dissolve the CO2 within certain pools of heavy oil. It lightens the oil, bringing it to the surface. And much of the carbon dioxide remains behind in the ground, where it came from,” Clark explained.

It may take a little time but clean coal is coming. And the sooner, the better.

(Tom Keyser can be reached at tomk@businessedge.ca)