GREEN IS GOOD
by Margaret Smith
The story of the small town of Centralia, PA is one of those tall tales that's even scarier when you learn that it happened in real life. A real-world ghost town, today Centralia has a total population of nine people. It wasn't always this way, though. At its peak in the 1800s, this prominent coal-mining town had some 1,000 inhabitants, largely due to the coal industry. In 1962, though, disaster struck, and it slowly desecrated the entire town. The culprit? The very coal that put Centralia on the map. 
As the story goes, five volunteer firefighters were burning leftover trash in a dump to clean a landfill -- a standard procedure at the time. When they were done, however, the firefighters did not properly extinguish the fire like they thought they had. It soon spread through a hole in the rock wall to a nearby underground abandoned coal mine, where it continued to incinerate for years.
Time and time again firefighters visited the site, spending hours dousing out the flames and then leaving it alone to die out, but to no avail. According to a recent report published in the Bismark Tribune, 47 years later and the fire still rages on. Scientists say that so far the fire has spread over a whopping 500 acres since it started. The worst-case scenario estimates that in the future, the Centralia coal fire could spread over 3,700 acres, including into nearby Ashland, PA, and burn for up to 100 years.
A horrible accident? Of course. And for climate change activists advocating for clean coal technology that proposes to store the billions of tons of carbon dioxide created during coal production underground, it may be a a good warning.
As countries around the world work toward bringing down the level of greenhouse gases emitted into the environment, coal has been a key target. Alone it accounts for 40 percent of global carbon emissions today, especially from lead carbon-emitting nations such as the United States, China and India. Many technologies have been developed in recent years to battle carbon emissions, though, including clean coal technology.
Recently, clean coal technology has gained more and more credibility as a leader in green technology. Just this year American Electric Power (AEP), one of the country's largest generators of electricity, began production on a large-scale test project that will trap coal emissions and inject the carbon underground at its Mountaineer power plant in West Virginia. A pioneer in clean-coal technology, AEP's project is the first of its kind in that it attempts to bring all the components of trapping, transporting and storing carbon together in an existing coal plant. Today the project is priced at $73 million, but the company hopes this turns into the first commercial-scale carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) project. If so, it will take $670 million to complete.
The federal government has also just approved $979 million in federal stimulus funding to clean coal projects in West Virginia, Texas and Alabama. The money will go toward retrofitting existing coal-fired power plants to capture and store carbon dioxide, specifically those owned by AEP, Southern Co. and Summit Texas Clean Energy. The Energy Department, which is backing the project, hopes to make all of this technology commercially available in eight to ten years.
As a 47-year-old coal fire still burns under Pennsylvania soil, though, skepticism of how logical and safe these clean coal projects are continue to filter through the environmental debate. In order to make a serious dent in carbon emissions, clean coal technology would have to store billions of tons of carbon dioxide underground.
While advocates say that the methods are entirely safe, critics question how leaks will be controlled. In high concentrations, carbon dioxide has also been found to cause asphyxiation, a condition in which a decrease in oxygen and an increase in carbon dioxide can create loss of consciousness or even death. Most scientists say asphyxiation is highly unlikely, though.
According to Graham Thomson, author of a peer-reviewed study on the subject for the University of Toronto, clean coal technology isn't even set in stone yet. "Right now we have politicians making promises about the technology of carbon capture and sequestration that scientists don't know that they can meet," he said in an interview with Reuters.
Some scientists say the concerns of others can be diminished if the carbon dioxide gas is only stored in areas that are geologically suited to hold and absorb the gas. As Centralia continues to burn and clean coal technology is still being developed, the debate rages on.
"We're putting a lot of our eggs in one basket, when in fact it may not work at a commercial status," Thomson told Reuters.
GREEN IS GOOD
Steam rising up from the cracks caused by the Centralia coal fire. Photo courtesy of daysofthundr46 photostream on flickr.
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