[Absolutely - so naturally your company are no longer using coal that leaves tailings?

Keith]

Your notion of shutting down a source of energy that provides half of our electricity is both naive and shortsighted.

Why don’t you try telling the estimated 60 million households who make less than $50000 a year that are spending nearly a quarter of all their income on energy costs that we will take away the last affordable energy resource that keeps the lights on and render them homeless???????

Stupidity at its finest….

Great work.

[Yes, Matt, it's really stupid trying to give humanity a future -- guess I'll have to stop that then. Those poor souls on $50000 a year : that means they spend $12500 on energy! Jesus wept: what are they doing, heating a ballroom? My combined gas and electricity costs are about £600 ($1200 a year) and we are a family of four. In the next 12 months I'll get that down to below $1000. How very un-American of me.

Keith]

The ultimate solution for the problem facing the coal-based electricity sector is to shut down coal-fired power stations that don’t use CCS. I don’t support CCS because it scares the c*** out of me that tonnes of CO2 will be pumped underground to emerge, who knows where; but I’m prepared to make an exception for this case. Here’s the deal: shut down all coal-fired power stations without CCS now, and you can do whatever else you like. Sure, Americans would have to use less energy for a while but, hey, that’s part of the solution too. Ok?

Keith

The calculations are based on five pollutants: carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and particulate matter.

Data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency calculates environmental performance per unit of energy produced. That is, the relationship of emissions per billion kilowatt-hours.

From 1970 to 2000, the value for that ratio fell from 30,510 short tons per billion kilowatt-hours to just 8,040 short tons per billion kilowatt-hours — a reduction of 73.66%.

As for carbon dioxide… coal will remain the backbone of the U.S. electricity system for decades if not centuries, and incorporating carbon capture and sequestration is essential to our future.

The issue of global warming is probably the single biggest challenge facing America’s energy sector.

But the fact remains… there has never been an environmental challenge facing the coal-based electricity sector for which technology didn’t provide the ultimate solution – and those who are familiar with the advancements in carbon capture technology recognize that meeting the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the electricity sector is not likely to be the exception to that rule.