"Clean coal" is a relatively new phrase. "Dirty coal" is a much more familiar utterance, and more in keeping with coal's bad reputation. The fossil fuel, which is removed from deep underground using various mining methods, has an ugly history and is associated with negative things like pollution and global warming, the coal miner's disease "black lung," workers trapped in tunnels miles underground, or dangerous abandoned surface mines left where a beautiful track of land once lay.
Like other fossil fuels, coal is ugly, kind of scary, and not very popular. But people in the coal mining and electric power industries are trying to change coal's image, and they're trying hard.
Recently, Mississippi Power escorted the Meridian Star on a tour of a surface coal mine in Ackerman, hoping to show off the reclamation efforts of the coal mining company and explaining, along the way, the new "clean coal" technology that Mississippi Power plans to implement in Kemper County, via a new power plant, over the next several years.
Pending approval from the state of Mississippi, Mississippi Power will build it's plant, which will generate electricity using coal in a complicated process called Transport Reactor Integrated Gasifier (TRIG) technology, in the small Kemper County community of Liberty, near DeKalb. A coal mine similar to Ackerman's Red Hills mine will also be built in Liberty, and will be owned by the same company, North American Coal (NAC).
In Ackerman, the mine itself looks like you might expect a coal mine to look: a gigantic, ugly, dirty gash, an ashy wound in the earth.
Riding into the gash inside of a gi-normous pick-up truck is an odd, but interesting, sensation.
Several hundred feet deep, and bearing numerous "seams" (layers) of a low-grade, high-moisture coal known as lignite, the mine is large enough to make trucks two or three stories high look like plastic tyco models. Until you get close to them, of course.
It isn't the kind of coal mine you see in the movies. It is an open to the air surface mine, which looks rather like a dirty, gray canyon; no tunnels to cave in, no guys with pick-axes and lighted helmets. The lignite is removed from between layers of dirt by huge machines - giant dump trucks with wheels the size of houses, huge digging machines called draglines with booms longer than a football field and shovels as large as a garage, electric shoveling machines that can transport tons of dirt or lignite at a time. Most of these machines are joystick operated, and the workers inside enjoy a climate-controlled environment. A far cry from the soot-covered, shovel-wielding coal miners portrayed on television, this is mining in comparative luxury.
The mine is navigated by ash roads, made from lignite burned at the neighboring power plant. These roads are extremely bumpy and dusty, but they get the job done. Most of the vehicles using the roads are too large to notice the bumps, anyway. The roads twist deep into the earth, and though it doesn't seem that far while riding in a truck, the surrounding earth has, until now, been buried for up to 60 million years.
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