Out of sight?

Friday, Feb. 29, 2008 | 2:06 a.m.

Despite the Bush administration’s abandonment of its “clean coal” FutureGen plant, a Wisconsin coal-fired plant is moving forward with a test project in which it will capture part of the carbon dioxide the plant emits.

Carbon dioxide is one of the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. About 40 percent of U.S. carbon emissions come from power plants, the majority of which are coal-fired.

USA Today reports that the technology to be employed by Wisconsin’s We Energies is being provided by Alstom, a company that plans to launch several carbon-capture pilot programs across the United States over the next 10 years.

In the Wisconsin project, the carbon dioxide will be captured and processed under high pressure to extract about 90 percent of the carbon. The result will be a gas, which Alstom says will be mainly nitrogen, oxygen and low levels of carbon, that is then released into the air.

In other Alstom pilot projects, the captured carbon dioxide emissions will be stored in geologic formations underground or pumped into existing oil fields to help boost output, USA Today reports.

Still, this is not “clean coal.” There is no such thing.

Although these processes are designed to prevent carbon dioxide from spewing into the air, they do not stop the production of carbon dioxide from coal-fired plants. Only alternative energy can do that. And extracting coal from the ground in the first place is still an environmentally destructive and dangerous process.

Certainly, our global situation is dire enough that the energy industry should seek ways to clean up its act. But we should not settle for such research in the absence of aggressive and properly funded efforts to develop other energy generation methods that can replace coal plants and that do not emit noxious substances.

The idea is to move away from using coal to power our lives, rather than simply devise new ways to hide the pollution it creates.