It would make it more expensive to burn coal, and very little of California's power comes from coal.
"The economics are telling us to burn coal rather than gas, " says Andrew Horstead, risk analyst at Utilyx, an energy consultancy.
This would lessen the need to burn coal and oil, and lead to reduced emissions of carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide.
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What emerged was a wish list from customers that included cleaner ways to burn coal and more efficient wastewater treatment systems, as well as nuclear power and hydrogen fuel cells.
Testament to that, I ended up being in a whole bunch of advertisements that you guys saw all the time about investing in ways for us to burn coal more cleanly.
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And unless we can come up with some energy alternatives that allow us to franchise that technology so that they are equipped to burn that coal cleanly, we're going to have problems no matter what we do in this country when it comes to the environment.
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Next year's talks are being hosted by Poland, which has weakened EU ambition on emissions cuts and wreaked concessions to be allowed to burn more coal.
In China, many waste-to-energy plants may create more waste than they save because they use coal to burn trash.
Also, Foster Wheeler builds power plant boilers that can be used to burn biomass as well as coal.
The EU has been held back by Poland, which insists on its right to burn its huge reserves of coal.
ScottishPower wants to convert the plant to burn gas, rather than coal.
Utilities are forecast to burn 808 million tons of coal this year, a 13 percent decline from last year and the fewest tons since 1992, according to Energy Department data.
And while the amount of coal consumed by American power generators is down about 15% from the 1 billion tons per year average of the 2000s, the EIA expects the domestic coal burn to inch up to 859 million tons in 2013 and 870 million in 2014.
Putting a price on carbon dioxide, as the cap-and-trade bill that passed the House in June would do, would make coal more expensive to burn and gas relatively cheaper.
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Until then, coal can be made to burn cleaner, but it will still be a leading contributor to global warming.
Power giant Drax plans to burn huge amounts of wood instead of coal at its North Yorkshire plant over the next few years.
The directive limits the number of hours they can operate before shutting down, and many coal plants are choosing to burn through their remaining permitted hours by April when the UK government introduces a carbon floor price.
That means that power plants have to burn two-times the wood as they do with coal.
Some power plants have seen their coal piles shrink to just 15 days of burn, one-third normal levels.
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So, it's okay to burn two units of natural gas in Qatar to make one appear in Texas, or to put 5 BTUs of coal into a power plant and have only 2 BTUs of electricity come out the other end.
Recently, for example, Corning has been meeting with academics, government officials and business executives to learn about the challenge of making coal-fired electrical plants burn cleaner.
Meanwhile, the life of old coal-fired power stations is being extended by subsidising them to burn wood pellets.
For a start, there is so much cheap coal, distributed all over the world, that poor countries are bound to burn it.
This year, the world is expected to burn through some thirty-one billion barrels of oil, over 3.5 billion tons of coal, and one hundred trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
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