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Clean coal technology? It's not an oxymoron and already helps co-ops

About 90 percent of your electricity is generated from burning coal. This has contributed greatly to keeping your electric rates affordable throughout the years. Coal is abundant and relatively inexpensive.

But coal-fired power plants can be sources of pollution. The world saw this fact illustrated during the Beijing Olympic Games last year. China has little or no pollution control on its coal-burning power plants and is constructing new fossil fuel generation units as quickly as it can. Its citizens were seen throughout the Olympics wearing masks to avoid breathing in pollutants from the hazy, smog-laden air.

Things are different in this part of the world. Our investment in environmental controls began in the 1970s, long before the current emphasis on climate change and global warming. Buckeye Power, the generation-and-transmission cooperative that provides wholesale electricity to the 25 distribution cooperatives serving Ohio, owns two units at the Cardinal Generating Station on the Ohio River. It began installing pollution control equipment back in the 1970s and continued these efforts as new technology became available. By 2012, the base load generation owned or controlled by Buckeye Power will have full emission control capability for removal and reduction of particulate matter, nitrogen oxide (NOx), sulfur dioxide (SO2) and mercury.

Ohio electric cooperatives are helping clean up the air we breathe. That's a good thing, even if we pay higher wholesale rates for our electricity than we did in the 1970s and '80s. Today, about 15 percent of your electric bill is related to environmental investments. Here is what we've accomplished:

Precipitators — About 14 percent of the coal that is burned to make electricity is not consumed and remains as particles of clay, rock and minerals known as ash, similar to the ash left when you've built a campfire.

About 80 percent of this nonburnable material is light enough to float out of the boiler along with hot gases. It's called fly ash. Electrostatic precipitators at the Cardinal plant prevent fly ash from being discharged into the atmosphere. These precipitators remove more than 99.5 percent of the fly ash produced by burning coal. The other 20 percent of the ash produced, which falls to the bottom of the boilers, is called bottom ash. It's stored in ponds and sold as an ingredient in road construction material, cinder blocks, or for snow and ice control on highways.

SCRs — Late in 2001, Buckeye began to install selective catalytic reduction (SCR) technology at Cardinal units 2 and 3 in order to reduce emissions of NOx. The SCRs reduce NOx in flue gas by 90 percent when they are in operation.

FGDs — The most recent environmental project at Cardinal is the addition of a flue gas desulfurization (FGD) system. The FGD scrubs approximately 98 percent of SO2 produced during the generation process. By utilizing FGD and SCR systems in series at Cardinal, mercury also is effectively removed from the flue gas.

Almost 30 years of environmental investment by Buckeye Power and Ohio's electric cooperatives proves that through reduced emissions “clean coal” power plant operation can be achieved. It requires vision, commitment, technology and willingness to pay a little more for electricity today to make a better world tomorrow. Coal is too important a fuel resource for us to abandon.