Analysis of Some Potential Social Effects of Four Coal Technologies

摘要

This is an analysis of the potential social impacts of four coal technologies: conventional combustion, fluidized-bed combustion, liquifaction, and gasification. Because of their flexibility, and the abundance and relatively low costs of coal, the potential benefits of these technologies would seem to outweigh their potential social costs, both in the intermediate and long term. Nevertheless, the social costs of a coal industry are far more obscure and hard to quantify than the benefits. In general, however, it maybe expected that those technologies that can be deployed most quickly, that provide fuels that can substitute most easily for oil and natural gas, that are the cheapest, and that are the most thermally efficient will minimize social costs most in the intermediate term, while technologies that can guide energy infrastructure changes to become the most compatable with the fuels that will be most easily derived from inexhaustible sources (electricity and hydrogen) will minimize social costs most in the long run. An industry structured to favor eastern over western coal and plant sites in moderate sized communities, which could easily adapt to inexhaustible energy technologies (nuclear or solar) in the future, would be favored in either time period. (ERA citation 05:038728)