9 ‘Clean Coal’ Projects Getting U.S. Funds

The Energy Department said it will award government money to nine “clean coal” projects, including one sponsored by an Irvine company, judged to be the most promising methods of reducing harmful air pollutants released by burning coal.

The department said the projects, picked from 51 proposals submitted in April, were chosen because they were considered most likely to successfully demonstrate technologies that could be widely used in power plants and industrial boilers.

Most of the projects will be located in industrial heartland states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and Illinois, where coal-burning power plants have been identified as major emitters of pollutants.

One of the projects is sponsored by Energy and Environmental Research Corp. of Irvine. The company will demonstrate a combination of gas re-burning and sorbent injection at three sites in Illinois that have different types of boilers.

Sorbent injection is a method of injecting powdered limestone into the combustion chambers of a boiler. The limestone converts sulfer dioxide--a gas--to calcium sulfate, a solid that can be trapped before it escapes into the atmosphere to cause acid rain.

Four of the projects will be located entirely or partly in Ohio and two in Pennsylvania. Projects also will be located in New York, West Virginia and Wyoming.

The projects will receive roughly $360 million in government assistance under the Clean Coal Technology program established by Congress in December, 1985.

Private companies will contribute $600 million toward the demonstration projects--far more than the 50-50 minimum cost-sharing required by Congress.

The Energy Department said that if negotiations with private companies are concluded quickly, the first projects could go into operation within months. It said larger projects would not be ready for testing until the early 1990s.

If negotiations with any of the nine companies fail, the department has identified 14 backup proposals that might receive funding.

Clean coal technologies are widely viewed as the best way to reduce sulfur and nitrogen emissions, believed to cause acid rain and other air pollution problems that have been linked to sterile “dead” lakes and streams, and stunted forests, primarily in the Northeast and Canada.

The Reagan Administration in March endorsed a U.S.-Canadian report that called for a five-year, $5-billion effort to demonstrate and commercialize clean coal technologies.

Congress passed its clean coal program largely in response to assertions by utilities that private industry alone could not afford to pay all the costs of an accelerated effort to demonstrate new technologies.