Since its formation last December, the Consortium for Clean Coal Utilization at Washington University has been working on several projects aimed at mitigating the environmental impacts of coal usage, which generates half of the electricity in the United States.

“The way I would think of it is the use of coal in a way that has the minimal environmental impacts,” said Daniel Giammar, associate professor in the department of energy, environmental and chemical engineering. “Carbon is clearly the big player right now.”

The consortium, comprised of University faculty from several different curricula, also researches methods to control other pollutants such as sulfur dioxide, which plays a role in acid rain, and metals like mercury.

While several areas of research make up the focus of the consortium, Giammar is involved with geological sequestration of carbon dioxide and looking at the overall fate of metals in coal use resulting from the 5 to 10 percent of unburnable material making up most coal in the United States. According to Giammar, management of coal ash is a sizeable issue. Coal ash can contain high levels of toxic metals; metals that become mobile in the environment pose a high risk.

But one even more fundamental issue at hand, for some, goes back to the phrase “clean coal” itself.

Junior Peter Murrey, president of Green Action, calls the term a misnomer.

“It’s like healthy tobacco,” he said.

Murrey points to the process of obtaining coal as a major problem in addition to the products of burning it, arguing that it disrupts ecology and cultures and creates a wide range of additional health problems.

Giammar said that while clean coal research may not be a perfect solution, coal makes up an integral part of the country’s energy infrastructure.

“Overall, I think a goal of [environment engineering] is to use science and technology to protect human health and the environment—to design technologies, to design strategies to do that. Clean coal fits with that perfectly,” Giammar said.

Giammar believes no other material at the moment can generate electricity to match the capacity of coal.

“[Renewables] are growing rapidly. But even if they continue their growth rates, they’re not going to be able to supplant the huge amounts that we generate from coal, natural gas, nuclear and hydro,” he said.

Giammar said it will take time for renewable energy sources to build up the infrastructure necessary to become a major contributor to the energy supply.

“Coal is going to be a bridging strategy,” he said. “In order to get there and continue sustaining our economy, we’re going to continue using a lot of energy.”

Murrey, however, argues that clean coal—while it may be possible to reduce its environmental impact—is not sustainable because the supply of coal is finite.

“Something can definitely be clean and not sustainable. Sustainability is traditionally defined as meeting the needs of the present without infringing upon the needs of the future,” Murrey said. “Eventually, we’re going to have to jump ship. We need to acknowledge that coal will play a role in the immediate future. But as more and more time passes, it’s going to be shrinking and shrinking.”

As clean coal is still in the theoretical stages, Murrey said he would prefer a focus on sources such as solar and biofuels.

According to Giammar, as more research is conducted on improving coal, there may be some point where it is more cost-effective to invest elsewhere.

“You’re going to reach a point of diminishing returns where you could invest more money into better technologies, but they’re not going to give you the same overall impacts,” he said. “If you had a billion dollars to spend on minimizing the impacts of clean coal, would you go for the perfect power plant or would you go for making a lot of power plants better and making sure they all have state of the art technologies? There are different approaches to doing that.”

Overall, Giammar said any improvement in coal would have a major impact.

“We can be a lot cleaner than we are. If you can make marginal improvements on this vast infrastructure, you can have a huge environmental impact,” he said.