Researchers have discovered a stunning new process that takes the energy from coal without burning it -- and removes virtually all of the pollution.
The clean coal technique was developed by scientists at The Ohio State University, with just $5 million in funding from the federal government, and took 15 years to achieve.
“We’ve been working on this for more than a decade,” Liang-Shih Fan, a chemical engineer and director of OSU’s Clean Coal Research Laboratory, told FoxNews.com, calling it a new energy conversion process. “We found a way to release the heat from coal without burning.”
The process removes 99 percent of the pollution from coal, which some scientists link to global warming. Coal-burning power plants produced about one-third of the nation’s carbon dioxide total in 2010, or about 2.3 billion metric tons, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
'We found a way to release the heat from coal without burning.' - Liang-Shih Fan, a chemical engineer and director of OSU’s Clean Coal Research Laboratory
Retrofitting them with the new process would be costly, but it would cut billions of tons of pollution.
“In the simplest sense, conventional combustion is a chemical reaction that consumes oxygen and produces heat,” Fan fold FoxNews.com. “Unfortunately, it also produces carbon dioxide, which is difficult to capture and bad for the environment.”
I'm particularly excited about this. This would be a great way to make our own energy without polluting the environment.