Clean coal: more people, living better, living longer

摘要

And clean coal technologies work. Over the past several decades, the US electric power industry has invested almost $100 billion to control emissions with stunning success. Criteria emissions such as sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxides have declined an average of 84 percent since 1970, despite an increase of 187 percent in coal-based generation. Clean coal technologies have solved other emission challenges, and now the creative gaze of the scientific and engineering community has turned to the management of CO2. In terms of efficiency, for example, new coal power plants in Japan and China have demonstrated how supercritical and ultra-supercritical coal-based generating units use less coal per kilowatt hour and avoid the production of CO2, SO2, dust and other pollutants. The new Shanghai Waigaiqiao #3 Plant, for instance, has a peak efficiency rate of 46.3 percent - the highest in the world.