Ohio-based American Electric Power, the largest consumer of coal in the U.S., is trying to build the country's first super-efficient commercial-scale coal gasification plant.
And some additional, much less happy news from Australia, as Unesco and environmentalists warn that climate change and large-scale coal mining may lead to the wholesale destruction of the Great Barrier Reef.
But although a number of other firms will soon join the race with pilot projects, no full-scale CCS coal plant has yet been commissioned.
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The government would grant clean energy credits to operators of non-coal power plants on a scale according to the cleanliness of their generation.
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While TXU will scale back its coal facilities, coal will still be a major part of the state's energy future, at least for the next several years.
So today I'm announcing a Carbon Capture and Storage Task Force that will be charged with the goal of figuring out how we can deploy affordable clean coal technology on a widespread scale within 10 years.
Considering the opportunities to treat gas that would otherwise be flared, to unlock otherwise uneconomic shale and conventional gas fields, and increasing opportunities for biomass, waste and coal conversion, small-scale GTL may well have a significant niche to fill in our emerging energy picture.
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Another is to allow local people to be able to choose low-carbon local energy sources, rather than being obliged to rely on large-scale electricity grids run on polluting coal.
Renewable energy remains too expensive, too land-hungry, too unreliable and too small-scale to take up much slack, so cheap coal and newly abundant natural gas will do the job.
These could be among the first full-scale power plants in the nation to turn powdered coal into a synthetic natural gas that is burned in a gas turbine whose exhaust gas powers a steam turbine.
From the Bush White House, they're talking about large-scale technology: oil and gas, nuclear power plants and clean coal research, which will cost billions of dollars and will take years.
Part of the rationale for big government-sponsored rebates on what is an otherwise uneconomic source of power is the strategic benefit of distributing small-scale power generation across the landscape rather than focusing it in a hulking coal or nuclear plant.
The Department of Energy and Climate Change said the development of CCS technology, if developed at scale, could allow the safe removal and storage of harmful carbon emissions from coal and gas plants.
Add to that our coal and comparable amounts of cheap natural gas, and America is sitting on a hydrocarbon gusher that is unprecedented in scale since the dawn of the oil age.
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