I have heard senior coal industry employees comment that clean coal technology is an oxymoron. It isn't so much the money loss which is such a disasterous outcome from investigating this proposal it is the waste of the valuable time of researchers who could be more gainfully employed elsewhere.
It might be possible to use electric power to produce oxygen and dilute it with carbon dioxide to burn coal in a power station and if air inleakage is limited the carbon dioxide rich exhaust gas could then be used to produce further fuel through an algae process. Provided there was a significant net power output gain per tonne of coal burned the system would be a net gain to the environment.

Firstly a quibble in that I believe China is currently well down the list of export clients for Australian coal but that could change dramatically. The PM will then need to be reminded of his election promises.

I agree that CCS cannot possibly work on the required scale for reasons discussed at length elsewhere. I think there may be two reasons for its uncritical support at State and Federal level. Firstly it is a stalling tactic to protect the coal mining, export and power generation industries. The second reason is not to frighten the horses. The only quickly constructible technology with lower carbon that can supply baseload power is natural gas which is getting expensive. Italy is changing from gas back to coal. No doubt true believers will assure us solar, wind, geothermal etc can supply baseload but just ask why the output numbers are so small. Whether moderate carbon caps can radically change the economics is doubtful.

Then of course there is nuclear power which is helping France do quite nicely. Apparently the trendy set know all the reasons why Australia shouldn't adopt nuclear power despite owning about half the world's uranium. So here's my predictions for Australia in the next decade; we will dig up more coal for export and domestic use, electricity and gas prices will escalate dramatically, absent recession or creative carbon accounting we will fail our Kyoto targets and renewables will just crawl along as usual. A couple of miniscule CCS experiments will potter about with their testing nonetheless we will hold out CCS as the great white hope.

Why are people jumping up and condemning a possible solution to the climate change problem, in this case carbon sequestration, without waiting to see if the solution has technical and/or economic merit? Are they scared that it might work? Is their personal animosity against the coal industry so strong (for whatever reason) that they don't want to give it a chance? Are they emotionally or financially tied to the so-called greener alternatives such as geothermal energy (which is itself not yet proven to be commercially or technically viable as yet)?
The world's economic health is presently dependent upon coal as a cheap source of energy. The consequences of a sudden, poorly planned conversion away from coal are likely to include continuing poverty in many developing countries and severe economic costs to developed countries which lack alternatives. Just as it has taken 20 or more years to get wind energy sorted out, with solar energy needing another 10 years to become genuinely viable, so carbon sequestration which is in its infancy will require another 20 years.

The technological hurdles of clean coal and gas are huge. This is not the 90's where we removed small amounts of polutants that produce acid rain.

If we look at the chemistry of burning methane we find that 1 ton of methane burns with 4 tons of oxygen to produce 3 tonnes of carbon dioxide and 2 tons of water.

ie for every ton of gas we burn we get 3 tons of carbon dioxide. The chemistry for coal is similar.

The challenge to CCS scientists is not to remove a small amount of sulphur pollutants from the smokestack but to turn the smokestack upside down and pump everything back into the ground.

This is not a trivial problem. Seeing that the likely sites for CCS are not near power stations it will require massive pipelines to the CCS sites. Energy to drive the CO2 down the pipes and technology to keep the CO2 in the ground.

I am not at all convinced that this is economically viable. Yes it should be investigated but we should not put all our eggs (nor most of them) in this basket.

Thanks for the article TTS!

There's something I really don't get - You know, we're talking about C-O2. That's Carbon plus Oxygen plus Oxygen (forgive me, I didn't do Chemistry at High School).

Now, who on earth is keeping out of the public domain that "capturing" the CO2 should be done to get the "C" out of CO2, so we can have pellets of carbon that we can store, a LOT safer than a gas we have to bury underground?

I reckon we can sell those pellets to China. They may want to pour it into concrete and do some renovations on the Wall!

Declaration: I support the notion of Tim Flannery that the production and use of coal "has lost its social license". All those mines need to close.

Hi Project_SafeCom. You may be interested in this recent article from New scientist.

http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn11390-catalyst-could-help-turn-cosub2sub-into-fuel.html

Whilst it is possible to separate the C from the O2, my guess is that it would require more energy to do this than that obtained from burning the coal in the first place. In a word; uneconomic.

If I was a betting man, I would gamble the planet's future on Solar Thermal and forget coal.