The greening of coal, the fuel of the future

The largest power company in Italy, with a significant global presence (95,000 megawatts of generating capacity), Enel SpA operates in 23 countries on four continents and serves more than 60 million customers. Once a state-owned monopoly, it is now a publicly traded company (though Italy’s Finance Ministry still owns 20 per cent of the shares and Italy’s central bank owns 10 per cent). Enel is a big fan of coal as a fuel of the future and has aggressively embraced the most dramatic advances in clean-coal technology – probably the best hope of breaking the malevolent grip of various oil-exporting dictators and thugs around the world.

Enel’s strategic objective is zero-emission power generation from coal and it thinks it can get there with the kind of advanced technology first proved – theoretically – at the federal government’s Canmet (Canadian Centre for Mineral and Energy Technology) research labs in suburban Ottawa between 2001 and 2006.

With further research work under way in its own labs, Enel has announced that it will now proceed with the construction in Brindisi, Italy, of a demonstration plant for what it calls the most comprehensive package of green coal-fired technology in the world.

Advanced clean-coal technology strips coal of virtually 100 per cent of its pollutants – sulphur oxides, nitrogen oxides, mercury, particulate matter – and preps these poisons, alchemist-like, for commercial use. At the end of the combustion cycle, nothing remains except ash, a product used to make concrete. It is a closed-loop system, operating without a chimney, and therefore emits nothing into the atmosphere. The theoretical model tested at Canmet captures the coal’s carbon dioxide as a compressed liquid, ready either for sale to the oil industry or for underground storage.

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