The Oil Drum

This morning's NY Times Business section features a very interesting Q & A with AES (a major, worldwide power company) CEO Paul Hanrahan about the future of power generation. He talks about a wide variety of subjects, from renewable energy sources like wind, to building new LNG plants on the East Coast to different ideas on carbon sequestration. One of the most amazing facts was that to offset the emissions from a new power plant, AES planted 50 million trees in Guatemala. At the end of the interview, there was a question about coal:

Q. In July, AES announced the installation of clean coal technology at your power plant in Dresden, N.Y. With future oil supplies so problematical, what do you see as coal’s future?

A. For countries with coal as an indigenous resource, coal has a lot of potential because you can do a lot to reduce the particulate emissions and the sulfur nitrogen emissions which cause acid rain. You can reduce the carbon emissions from a power plant very cheaply, so we think there is a lot of potential to produce electricity in an environmentally responsible way.

Sounds great...clean cheap coal. It almost makes you almost think that everything is very doable, just leave the private sector alone and let them innovate...But it would be a mistake to not regulate this area.