FORT LONESOME, Fla. — Towering 15 stories above the swamp it shares with a colony of alligators, Polk Power Station may be the best available test of the Bush administration's claim that one of America's most abundant energy sources can clean up its act.
When a task force headed by Vice President Dick Cheney unveils a comprehensive national energy policy later this month, "clean coal" power plants like Polk are expected to play a key role in meeting future demands for electricity.
Experts say the nation's generating capacity needs to grow 45% by 2020. Coal-fired plants already produce half of the nation's electricity. Although coal's share is expected to decline over time, its advocates say other energy sources will never be plentiful enough to eliminate coal from the mix entirely.
But environmentalists predict the country will pay a significant price--in the form of more smog, acid rain and global warming--if it rushes to embrace a fuel that will always be dirtier than just about any alternative energy source.
To some extent, both sides are right.
An hour's drive southeast of Tampa, Polk Power Station is one of only two working examples in the U.S. of electricity produced by a process called combined-cycle integrated gasification. It is the most advanced technology to emerge from the Energy Department's 16-year-old "clean coal" program.
Instead of burning raw coal like most power plants, the Polk plant pressure-cooks it, creating a gas that fires the turbines of Polk's big electrical generator.
Tampa Electric Co. and the federal government have sunk 12 years and $650 million into the venture, or about three times the cost of an equivalent natural gas plant.
The results, when compared with a typical coal-fired plant equipped with modern pollution control devices, are significant: 85% less nitrogen oxide, the key component of smog, and 32% less sulfur dioxide, the source of acid rain, according to the utility.
Pollution Is Still a Problem
Yet Polk still sends more of these pollutants into the air than the natural gas-fired plant next to it; nitrogen oxide emissions are 20 times higher, and, because natural gas-fired plants emit virtually no sulfur, its sulfur emissions are more than 100 times higher.
