"Clean Coal" ?

I heard Brian Schweitzer speaking at the National Press Club (through CSPAN). The topic was the Energy Supply.

It was nice to hear someone with a plan besides going to war. He was pretty clear that Americans can either figure out how to be energy sufficient or we will be fighting for oil in the Middle East for years to come. The idea that any use of fossil fuels would ever be clean sounds like a pipe dream, though. Conservation and alternatives (outside of oil, gas, coal, and nuclear) seem like the way to go.

This article @ Plenty Magazine sums up some of his ideas:

Brian Schweitzer, governor of Montana, believes the U.S. can decrease its dependence on foreign oil, and reduce the amount of greenhouse gases pumped into the air, through conservation, bio-fuels, and clean coal. Montana has 35 percent of the nation’s coal—120 billion tons, which Schweitzer says could fuel America’s needs for 35 years—which will likely be in greater demand as oil prices refuse to drop. Therefore, Schweitzer is interested in using technologies that minimize CO2 emissions from coal combustion and building an infrastructure to safely sequester the gas underground.

Today, coal-fired power-plants produce more than half the country’s power and emit a third of our CO2. To combat the pollution, some new coal plants are being built as integrated gasification combined cycle power facilities, which allow coal to be converted into a gas to fuel electric turbines and produce a fraction of the smog, soot and mercury emissions of a traditional plant. A couple of these are planned for Montana, and one is being built in West Virginia, another big coal state represented at the meeting.

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It's a dang mess - what has been happening in West Virginia. What with tearing down mountains to get the coal. I suppose that that would be part of the plan - he didn't mention it.