Think about this for a moment: Coal power plants can be more properly thought of as carbon reactors. On average, in Australia, the carbon content of the coal we use in them is about 60%. So for every kilo of coal, we're feeding about 600g of carbon in. 1/9 #auspol - ThreadSky

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dancerv.bsky.social • 18 days ago

Think about this for a moment: Coal power plants can be more properly thought of as carbon reactors. On average, in Australia, the carbon content of the coal we use in them is about 60%. So for every kilo of coal, we're feeding about 600g of carbon in. 1/9 #auspol

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dancerv.bsky.social•18 days ago

Now, remember what you learned in high-school. How much of that carbon is destroyed when you burn it? Zero. 600g of carbon in, 600g of carbon out. It's a mix of carbon products from ash to carbon mono/dioxides, but it all has to go somewhere. 2/9 #auspol

dancerv.bsky.social•18 days ago

From memory, the Yallourn power station mines 18 million tonnes of coal per year. It's brown coal at ~35% carbon. So that's somewhere north of 10,500 tonnes of carbon output per day, every gram of which has to go somewhere. 3/9 #auspol

dancerv.bsky.social•18 days ago

About 99% of that carbon output is carbon dioxide. While you can think of it as a byproduct, you could also say that the generated electricity is a byproduct of efficiently turning carbon into carbon-dioxide. 4/9 #auspol

dancerv.bsky.social•18 days ago

Because, you can bet your arse that they're not shipping thousands of tonnes of carbon back out to be stored somewhere hygienic every day, right? 5/9 #auspol

dancerv.bsky.social•18 days ago

Oh, and if you're thinking about 'clean coal'? That's the name given to things like anthracite, which is coal with the highest percentage of carbon in it, by weight. It's expensive and rarely used for power plants. 6/9 #auspol

dancerv.bsky.social•18 days ago

Honestly, the most efficient and effective form of carbon-capture-and-storage for coal is to simply leave it in the ground, or secondarily to use it in the manufacture of more energy-efficient things. 7/9 #auspol

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