Briefing: New life for old coal

Abstract

Coal-fired power plants still have a sizeable ‘carbon footprint’, despite advances in technology that have made them ‘greener’. On the other hand, many of the world’s coal reserves are also lying unused because the seams are simply too deep to dig out. Researchers at the University of Leeds, together with leading Institutions from Bulgaria, Germany, Greece and Portugal, hope to solve these problems by exploring a greener, safer and cheaper way of using coal from deep underground seams as an energy source in a €3 million project funded by the Research Fund for Coal and Steel of the European Commission. Under the proposed underground coal gasification scheme, coal would be gasified underground to generate combustible gases, offering a new lease of life to coal seams that are too expensive to mine. The depth is sufficient for underground coal gasification to be combined with carbon dioxide capture and geological storage in the dense phase to fulfil the objectives of ‘low-carbon’ energy supply and energy security envisaged in the 2007 UK Energy white paper, Meeting the Energy Challenge.