These are already cheaper and cleaner than burning coal, oil and gas with all their pollutants, especially CO2.
Burning coal is the single greatest cause of mercury contamination in the environment.
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The background level of tropospheric ozone is inexorably rising as volatile organic compounds are released from burning coal and oil.
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But there's no denying that burning natural gas (methane, that is) produces less carbon dioxide per unit of energy than burning coal.
The volt is not solving the problem, your just burning coal instead of gas, and compared to that gas is pretty clean.
About 90% of Poland's electricity is generated from burning coal, a fuel blamed for increased levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere.
Restaurants and caterers will be banned from burning coal -- a measure that will threaten Beijing's beloved lamb kebabs, known as yangrou chuan.
Almost half of people in the world cook their food and heat their homes by burning coal and biomass in open fires or basic stoves.
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In fact, it is now positioned as a solution to global climate change as a replacement for fossil fuel based energy (burning coal or natural gas).
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At Cornell, for example, researchers have reached opposite conclusions on whether natural gas from fracking would be better or worse for climate change than burning coal.
That means industry is going to have to find ways to reduce energy use, because most greenhouse gases come from burning coal, oil and other fossil fuels.
Meanwhile, other completely different approaches involve burning coal in pure oxygen (oxyfuel), or turning it into a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, which is then burned.
Scientists say it's apparent that human activity -- namely burning coal, oil and natural gas -- has been driving a rapid rise of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.
"This is the first official commitment they are making to stop burning coal at these units, " said Nachy Kanfer, a deputy director for the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal Campaign.
Right now, when you fly into a typical American city, you see miles of black roofs (mostly tarpaper shingles, made with a byproduct from burning coal), flanked by green lawns.
U.S. companies have developed technologies that can capture carbon dioxide produced by burning coal, but those technologies remain too expensive, too cumbersome, and too energy intensive to feasibly attach to coal-fired power plants.
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Not only is there no clean coal now, there is no practical technology on the horizon that will produce electricity by burning coal in a manner than is cost competitive and eliminates emissions.
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Mr. Srivastava told reporters on the sidelines of an industry conference that India's power generation capacity is expected to touch 700 gigawatts in 2030-31, of which 365 gigawatts would be generated by burning coal.
Burning coal to supply most of its electricity makes Australia's emissions per person among the world's highest: ten times bigger than Indonesia's, five times bigger than China's and almost three times those of France.
This huge abundance of natural gas is a blessing for Texas in the power generation sector, as electric providers look for alternatives as increasingly strict EPA air quality regulations make it more and more difficult to generate electricity by burning coal.
The World Coal Association (WCA), a trade body for the industry, said that burning coal account for about 24% of global mercury emissions and the use of "adequate technologies" could reduce emissions of the metal from coal-fired power stations by up to 90%.
Kinder says he's looking for other pipeline partnerships to buy, and Kinder Morgan is expanding into terminals that handle coal and other dry bulk materials, hoping to capitalize on long-term trends such as the shift by electric utilities away from Appalachian coal toward cleaner- burning western coal.
Clean coal is a trade term to describe methods and technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of coal to generate electric power.
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Instead, every effort should be made to make the burning of coal clean and efficient.
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Or to extract germanium from the fly ash from the burning of coal.
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China produces over 15% of the world's total energy, and much of that comes from the burning of coal.
One university scientist even wrote a paper alleging that greenhouse emissions from shale gas production are worse than the burning of coal.
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Further, says Peabody, world steel production is up 8% this year, requiring an added 75 million tons of extra hard and hot-burning metallurgical coal.
Importing fossil fuel is one solution, but the environmentally minded Swedes are unhappy about the greenhouse-gas implications of burning more coal, oil and natural gas.
The idea is to capture the carbon dioxide emissions from burning the coal for power, then piping the CO2 around to be injected into old oil fields to coax out more stubborn crude.
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