Coal Is Cleaner Than Ever And Might Keep Getting Cleaner

See Energy Fact of the Week: Sulfur Dioxide Emissions from Coal Have Declined 54 Percent By Steven F. Hayward of AEI. It has a great graph. Here is that post:

"Since it’s Earth Day this Friday, it’s worth having a look at one especially instructive energy-pollution linkage—in this case, the trend in the amount of coal used to generate electricity and in other industrial processes, and sulfur dioxide emissions from that use of coal.

As the figure below shows, the amount of coal used in the United States has more than tripled since 1970 (up 225 percent); as mentioned here previously, we moved heavily to coal starting in the late 1970s as a means to discontinue using imported oil to generate electricity. But over this same time period, sulfur dioxide emissions from coal have declined by 54 percent. Moreover, the Environmental Protection Agency projects a further 50 percent decline in SO2 emissions from current levels over the next 25 years, as shown in the second figure below.

This is one of the best examples (I’ll show others next week) of how fossil fuel consumption can increase while pollution can fall at the same time. The chief causes of this decline are technology—cost-effective “scrubbers” to remove sulfur dioxide from the waste stream—and resource substitution: we started using much more low-sulfur coal from the western United States. (Deregulation of railroads in the 1980s also plays a part in this story."