Guest post by Viv Forbes
There is a persistent green myth that coal-fired power generation causes city smogs. It does not.
City air pollution is nothing new. King Edward I complained about London pollution in 1306, as did Queen Elizabeth I in 1578, long before the first steam engine operated.
Let’s look at the causes of some famous smogs – London/Pittsburgh, Los Angeles/Santiago, the Dust Bowls and the Asian Smogs.
The London smogs were caused by open-air combustion of newspapers, wood and cheap high-sulphur unwashed coal in domestic fires, stoves and boilers; by coal-burning blacksmiths, brewers and ironworkers in smoky forges, furnaces and coke plants; and by many smoky steam locomotives; all with inefficient combustion and no pollution controls. The smog was slowly eliminated by clean air regulations and by changing to “clean coal by pipe” (town gas) and “clean coal by wire” (electricity).
The Los Angeles smogs were caused mainly by backyard incinerators, vehicle exhausts and natural air inversions. They were reduced by using cleaner fuels, better engines and compulsory pollution-control equipment. Santiago has undergone a similar clean-up.
The Dust Bowl conditions of the Great Plains in USA were caused by drought and wind erosion of newly cultivated soils. Gobi Desert storms produced the Yellow River and the Yellow Sea and contribute to the Asian Brown Cloud today.
Today’s Asian smogs have many sources – forest fires in Indonesia; open air cremations in India; dust from volcanic eruptions and desert storms; soot, ash and other pollutants from millions of domestic rubbish fires, mosquito fires, cooking fires and heaters using anything combustible – cow dung, wood, paper, cardboard, plastic or cheap unwashed coal; and soot and unburnt hydro-carbons from millions of vehicles, many with engines needing maintenance and no pollution controls. Beijing today combines the 1950’s problems of both London and Los Angeles.
The Asian smog is NOT caused by producing electricity in modern power stations with closed boilers, pollution controls and using high-quality washed coal such as exported by Australia to Asia. The “power station pollution” pictured so eagerly in ABC and Green propaganda is actually steam from the cooling towers.
The main products released by modern coal-fired power stations are water vapour and carbon dioxide – both are essential life supporters. Neither one is dangerous. Both make our climate more liveable, but the contribution of carbon dioxide to climate is tiny. And the carbon dioxide produced by burning coal has done more to encourage the growth of plants and the greening of planet Earth than Greenpeace will ever do.
“Clean coal by wire” into every home is the one thing that could solve much of the Asian air pollution.
Viv Forbes,
Rosewood Qld Australia
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Viv Forbes – You need to provide links to supporting information, otherwise we have no simple way of checking your claims.
Agree with Mike.
Where are those clean coal stations?
How do their emissions stack up compared to other power stations with different fuels (Gas, Oil, etc.)?
Happy to agree with you Viv – if you need references I can supply a lot from my PhD written in 1993 on Urban Air pollution in London.
Oh dear…. Nature deniers are above.
It is accurate that if you burn coal without any pollution controls — as happened in London in 1952 for residential heating and is happening in China today for both residential and industrial uses, you get a nasty combination of pollutants, the most harmful of which are the partially combusted black carbon “soot” that contains many biologically active and harmful chemicals. There is no question than when an inversion settled over London in winter 1952, and there was no wind to clear away the pollution, several thousand people died before their time. It was simple to compare the “normal” daily death rate with the much elevated rates during the inversion. Make no mistake: partly burned solid or liquid hydrocarbons without pollution controls can be deadly, and is more deadly the greater the concentration.
It is also accurate that if you have almost complete combustion as well as modern pollution controls — which all coal fired power plants have today in the US and Europe — you get very little pollution and virtually no “soot.” About 99.7% of the particles emitted into the stack are captured by different methods within the stack — these particles are almost all “coal fly ash,” which is mostly aluminum oxides, some calcium, some silicates. The main non-CO2 emissions from power plants today are sulfur and nitrogen oxides. “Scrubbers” remove the great majority of sulfur oxides in the US, so that electric utility emissions of SO2 is currently about 1/5 of what such emissions were at their peak in the early 1970s, before scrubbers were introduced. Over half of nitrogen oxide emissions are also now controlled, a big change from 15 years ago.
Do yourself a favor and go look at what comes out of the stack of a coal fired power plant near where you live, if you live near one. If it isn’t a cold day, favorable to creating steam, you will see almost nothing emerging.
That is why any TV or newspaper article about pollution from coal plants in the US today has to have steam as the emission (they play it up by backlighting at dusk, so that the white color of steam becomes black). It isn’t “fautography” — that was the word used to describe Reuters publishing photoshopped pictures in Lebanon after Hezbollah launched missiles at Israel and Israel retaliated. But to use photographs chosen to misrepresent to your audience what emissions actually look like coming from power plants with modern pollution controls is pretty much the same thing as “fauxtography.”
More on the London Killer Fog:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=873954
Look at the graphics for the increase in daily mortality for the roughly four days of such high pollution.
Just as air quality Knoxville, Tn and other cities in the Tennessee River Valley were cleaned up dramatically once TVA built large coal power plants and vertually eliminated the use of coal stoves in individual homes…that’s an easy one to get data from the web…just google…
Indeed. Apparently, the first coal plant came online in 1150 BC during the Shang Dynasty.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_Dust
While some of the contributors are peppering in the Anthropogenic Pollution, the obvious source of the Gobi remains the real problem. I love it when they show a “fog day” photo and some nature denier shouts about the pollution.
Otter Andy
Certainly, Coal fired power plants will generally be dirtier than Gas or Oil Plants but they are cleaner than all the Neolithic era technology still in wide spread use world wide. Viv is in all probability absolutely correct in his summation.
Could it be better? yes
Was it worse in the past? often
Will it be worse in the future? Doesn’t have to be
Opps, that should be Other Andy.
My apologies.
This is an excellent article. Thanks, Viv. There was a recent article here on WUWT showing that smog is coming back to places where people have returned to burning wood and whatever else they can find because they can’t afford the hiked up electricity prices due to carbon taxes. People should be reminded that it is not modern society that causes problems, it’s current backward thinking of the greens aka watermelons (maybe we could call them “smogs”).
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/02/law-of-unintended-consequences-fuel-tax-designed-to-lower-air-pollution-actually-creates-more-air-pollution/
@Other_Andy
You just don’t get it. All coal stations are clean. That was the point.
We have done a great job cleaning up our coal power plant emissions, reducing nearly all heavy metals by 95-99% or better. Now the EPA wants MUCH better such that the emissions are to be cleaner than sea air. That’s prohibitive. They have the attitude that we HAVE to do better than nature.
China is building many coal-fired power plants and they are also not stupid. WHile building these plants they are then going back and working on the emissions equipment. Give them a few year and they will get it under control. They know what they need and are trying to play catchup for their people.
I was in Puerto Vallarta recently. Very nice place. However, in the morning from the hotel on the beach you could see thousands of pillars of smoke rising from the cooking fires in the homes. These rose in the air until they hit the inversion layer a few hundred feet above the city, and from there they spread horizontally into a reasonably thick smog that covered the entire town.
This shows what it would be like WITHOUT a power plant, when electricity is still not the most common source of fuel. All too often the assumption is that if we stop using power plants then there will be no pollution, but that is a wrong assumption. People will in general always take the EASIEST possible method to stay alive.
If you make coal expensive, they will burn the forests long before they will buy solar panels, because the energy in one small piece of wood far exceeds what a solar panel will produce, for a lot less cost. And where there all no trees, the people are already too poor to afford anything else. The only reason we have forests today is because coal was cheaper to burn than wood and is found almost everywhere.
You can never make solar panel and windmills work until they are cheaper than ALL alternatives – which includes dead trees in the forest. In BC we have millions of acres of dead pines. And every wood pile is full of dead pines. While BC pays the highest carbon taxes in the world, not one cent of this tax is paid on firewood. So, no one but no one in BC installs solar panels or windmills to heat their homes. Not even David Suzuki. Burn baby burn.
I am having a hard time understanding how all the pollution from burning coal in old London is proof that coal doesn’t cause pollution.
Just because you don’t SEE pollution doesn’t mean there isn’t any there. The trees dead on Mount Mitchell from acid rain say “hello”….
Matt, coal certainly did cause terrible pollution in London in 1952, when the inversion kept all the pollution in one place for several days. If you have no technology for removing the pollution by products, and if you burn it very inefficiently (as in residential heating, much less complete burning than in a power plant), then coal is a terrible polluter.
When coal is burned in highly efficient power plants, with pollution controls, pollution is far less. It isn’t zero, but it is not too far from negligible.
Yes, acid rain was a problem, it comes from conversion of SO2 to sulfate in the atmosphere. SO2 emissions from power plants are now about 1/5 of what they were in the early 1970s. As a result, acid rain in the US is pretty much a problem of the past at this point. Please see more complete post above (4:26 PM).
MattN,
I believe there are quite a few TVA plants still without scrubbers.
Reblogged this on By the Mighty Mumford and commented:
WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THESE CLAIMS?
The AGW nut cases who don’t like fossil fuels should consider what happens in African homes when the people living there burn biomass for fuel, as Obama so smarmily said they should.. If the biomass is shit (pardon my directness, but “dung” just doesn’t quite get the point across), the people are exposed to all manner of disease germs and parasites; if it’s what left of the local vegetation (assuming it hasn’t long since been stripped away to nothing), it may well emit poisons like polycyclic hydrocarbons or even cyanide.
The air quality inside these people’s huts could make London 1952 look positively pristine by
comparison. GREEN IS MASS MURDER!!!!
Yes, there are still several TVA plants without scrubbers. Despite that, coal burning utility emissions of SO2 are about 1/5 of what they were in the early 1970s. Partly that is because the plants that DO have scrubbers typically remove 95% or so of the SO2 produced, and it is partly because many plants that don’t have scrubbers burn lower sulfur coal than previously.
The pollution control scheme for controlling SO2 — in the US only, not internationally — is that each plant has to meet a certain reduction, but they can do so by purchasing reductions from other companies if they wish. This reduced costs of compliance and allowed more reduction for a given amount of money. A smaller plant where it might be difficult or costly to retrofit a scrubber might buy SO2 reductions from plants that put scrubbers on larger plants (where the scrubber is more economical).
EPA did an analysis two decades ago which found that the pattern of SO2 emissions and sulfate deposition didn’t change much between two options: all plants had to meet a certain reduction requirement, vs. the trading scheme just described, which is current law. EPA found that the patters were little different between the two options, mainly because the great majority of US coal plants are in about a dozen contiguous midwestern and southern states.
I lived through the London smogs. days of yellow tinged fog with visibility down to 10yards. You could smell the sulphur. No wonder so many died as a result. Smogs were cured by use of smokless solid fuel and sulphur scrubbers which, incidentally, put more CO2 into the atmosphere. Not a problem. We still had open fires at home.
The age of the coal is important when considering pollution output. The older the coal the more pyrites it contains and thus the more SO2 produced. Australian coal is Cretaceous/Jurassic in age as is that from the US west, Utah, Colorado and Alaska. These coals are less polluting. Carboniferous coals produce more SO2 due to their greater age.
Great article by Viv Forbes.
A very important point is made by both ferd berple; April 29, 2013 at 6:17 pm and John;
April 29, 2013 at 4:26 pm:
Whether or not coal fired power stations are a good thing (environment wise) really depends on what they are replacing. And in most situations they are replacing millions of cooking fires, hundreds of thousands of ancient coal fired boilers, and removing the need for tens of thousands of dirty, wet outdoor coal storages.
The energy demand is already there, and is being met. Just not efficiently.
The precipitous push to ‘green, expensive power’ is plainly harmful to the environment, because those who cannot afford it still require energy and will source it where they can.
Chris said:
“I believe there are quite a few TVA plants still without scrubbers.”
My point exactly. I live in eastern TN right now, few miles outside of Kingsport. I don’t SEE any pollution. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
This entry is not up to the usual high standards I am use to seeing on the world’s #1 science blog…
John says: April 29, 2013 at 9:27 pm
“…The pollution control scheme for controlling SO2 — in the US only, not internationally — is that each plant has to meet a certain reduction, but they can do so by purchasing reductions from other companies if they wish. This reduced costs of compliance and allowed more reduction for a given amount of money…”
I believe this was one of the first major successful examples of the idea of using ‘the market’ to control a pollutant (and I believe was first run in the UK(?)) ….
The issue was very simple – regulators wanted scrubbers used, and estimated that the cost was affordable, the power stations disagreed and came up with their own horrifically expensive cost estimates. Someone came up with the idea of issuing a set number of permits at a fee set somewhere in the middle of the estimates, and these were made trade-able between power producers.
It worked very, very well. Very soon most stations had scrubbers installed and the value of the permits plummeted, dictated by the real cost of installing scrubbers,
There was no need to get international bodies, financiers, trading banks, futures traders, the World Bank involved at all.
All such bodies expect to make a profit, some have absolutely no other motive or reason for being, and someone, somewhere has to provide (pay for) those profits.
MattN:
In your post at April 30, 2013 at 3:35 am you say
Oh dear!
Do you see any effects of pollution?
Scrubbers remove oxides of sulphur (SOx) by putting the flue gases through a spray of water. SOx is very water soluble.
The same solubility which enables scrubbers to work enables rain to wash SOx out of the air. So, the greatest deposition of the supposed “pollution” would be near the power station.
Do you see damaged and/or dead trees and other flora near the power station?
Do you see damaged buildings near the power station?
If you don’t then the “pollution” is not there.
All rain contains sulphur. If rain did not contain sulphur then all life on land would die.
The issue is not whether the power station emits SOx: it does.
The issue is whether the SOx emission from the power station is sufficient to harm or to overload the natural systems which process SOx.
Emissions are NOT pollution. Excessive emissions ARE pollution.
Consider cow dung.
Too little dung and the land would be damaged by lack of fertiliser.
Too much dung and the land is damaged by excess dung.
Whether the cow dung from farming is “pollution” depends on how much there is and where it is emitted.
The same is true for all emissions from all human activities. Merely because something is emitted does NOT mean it is “pollution”.
Richard