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Tag: coal

  • Boardman, Oregon Coal Plant Mulls Biomass

    - by George Plaven, April 6, 2015, EO Media Group As a poten­tial source of renew­able ener­gy, giant cane could be the answer to sav­ing Port­land Gen­er­al Electric’s coal-fired pow­er plant in Board­man long after the facil­i­ty quits using coal by 2020. On the oth­er hand, as an inva­sive species, giant cane could spread wild across the Colum­bia…

  • Company to Burn Biomass in Escanaba, Michigan Coal-Fired Plant

    - by Jen­ny Lan­cour, April 3, 2015, Escan­a­ba Dai­ly Press Any­one want­i­ng to express com­ments on a com­pa­ny’s recent pro­pos­al to buy Escan­aba’s pow­er plant can attend a pub­lic hear­ing next week at city hall, accord­ing to city officials. A pub­lic hear­ing on a pur­chase pro­pos­al sub­mit­ted by Ster­ling Ener­gy Group, Inc. will be held dur­ing the…

  • Hawaii’s Only Coal-fired Power Plant May Switch to Biomass

    - by Duane Shim­gawa, August  28, 2014,  Pacif­ic Busi­ness News The only coal-fired pow­er plant in Hawaii, which is the sin­gle largest gen­er­at­ing plant on Oahu, is under finan­cial stress because there is no finan­cial reserve, accord­ing to the Hawai­ian Elec­tric Co.‘s new ener­gy plan released this week. Hawai­ian Elec­tric is also ask­ing AES Hawai­ito con­vert some of the ener­gy…

  • Why Solidarity is Needed More than Ever between Coal, Gas and Incinerator Fighters

    - by Mike Ewall, Ener­gy Jus­tice Network Most progress in stop­ping pol­lut­ing ener­gy and waste indus­tries is accom­plished by grass­roots activism, stop­ping one project at a time. Many assume that grass­roots groups are “NIMBY” types just push­ing pol­luters from one com­mu­ni­ty to anoth­er. How­ev­er, 50% to 95% of each wave of indus­tri­al devel­op­ment in recent decades has…

  • Trash Incineration More Polluting than Coal

    To make the same amount of ener­gy as a coal pow­er plant, trash incin­er­a­tors in 2018 released 65% more car­bon diox­ide (CO2), as much car­bon monox­ide, three times as much nitro­gen oxides (NOx), five times as much mer­cury, near­ly six times as much lead and 27 times more hydrochlo­ric acid (HCl). Trash incin­er­a­tors are the…

  • Methane’s Global Warming Potential makes Gas worse than Coal for Climate

    We just updat­ed our page on nat­ur­al gas with links to the lat­est stud­ies show­ing that methane is far more potent for glob­al warm­ing than EPA con­sid­ers it. Next time you’re hear­ing how much nat­ur­al gas is a tran­si­tion fuel or that it’s bet­ter than coal — or that land­fill gas should be burned for ener­gy (which releas­es more methane than…

  • hina’s Coal Problem

    Christi­na Nunez Nation­al Geographic Pub­lished Octo­ber 22, 2013 Choked with smog that shut down roads, schools, and its main air­port, the city of Harbin (map) this week offered a strik­ing reminder that Chi­na has a long way to go in address­ing the haz­ards caused by its depen­dence on coal. Vis­i­bil­i­ty in the north­east­ern city of more than 10…

  • Trash and Biomass Incineration Worse for the Climate than Coal

    After bring­ing togeth­er the nation’s grass­roots “No New Coal Plants” net­work in 2006, help­ing stop over 100 coal plant pro­pos­als, we’ve focused back on bio­mass and trash incin­er­a­tors, which are far more pol­lut­ing, expen­sive and worse for the cli­mate. On cli­mate pol­lu­tion, here’s where they fall: Please note that, espe­cial­ly with the prac­tice of frack­ing, nat­ur­al gas is actu­al­ly worse…

  • Report: Biomass Dirtier Than Coal

    Friends of the Earth (Eng­land, Wales, and North­ern Ire­land), Green­peace, and the UK’s Roy­al Soci­ety for the Pro­tec­tion of Birds denounce burn­ing trees for elec­tric­i­ty as a greater threat to the cli­mate over the com­ing decades than burn­ing coal, the dirt­i­est fos­sil fuel, in a report released in November.  The report, Dirt­i­er Than Coal: Why Gov­ern­ment plans to sub­sidise…

  • Mercury in Waste Coal

    Mercury in Waste Coal

    Above chart from “Mer­cury and Util­i­ties: Cur­rent Con­trol Tech­nolo­gies” (7/31/2001 EPA pre­sen­ta­tion, page 6), based on EPA’s 1999 Infor­ma­tion Col­lec­tion Request (ICR) (down­load raw data or view their sum­ma­ry data in Excel. More con­cise sum­ma­ry data com­par­ing BTU, mer­cury and sul­fur con­tent of coals by region avail­able from the U.S. Depart­ment of Ener­gy’s Ener­gy Infor­ma­tion…