Clean Coal – An Oxymoron?

A truly apt summation! And Mr. Charlie Spears, inaugural head of Clean Coal Victoria admits as much (The Age Mon. 27/4 Business Day p3).

It is truly extraordinary how far the dream of the impossible, can persist beyond hope, when vested interests are involved, even when there are hard facts which simply deny all hope.
Paddy Manning’s G—BIZ article (p8), quotes some of those facts from Graham Brown, long time NSW coal miner, e.g.:
1. ‘Every tonne of coal burnt (creates) 2.5 to 2.7 tonnes of carbon ‘(CO2) - burying oxygen!
2. It would need to be compressed 500 times to be trucked to Cooper Basin in South Australia
3. ‘Buried one kilometre, temperature could be 65 C’ (with much increased pressure) and risk (or certainty) of leakage,
4. With regard to jobs, Brown says ‘statistics in Europe and a study by Greenpeace on the central coast of NSW show that there’s six times more jobs in the transition away from coal than there is in it.’