I attended Alcoa Warrick Operations' annual environmental open house today. It was an opportunity for members of the public to go to Alcoa to listen to a presentation on their environmental efforts and to ask questions/give feedback to Alcoa management. It was informative and there was a ton of information presented in the form on charts, graphs, etc. However, I was surprised to be bothered by something that was not even discussed, in terms of energy usage. Alcoa is currently spending $439 million for power plant pollution controls, such as scrubbers, a measure which should be commended. Certain substances, like sulfur dioxide emissions, will be reduced by over 95%. I guess for some reason I assumed that if they are spending almost $500 million on new technology, this would somehow make Alcoa's power plant more efficient--i.e. that it would need less coal to generate the power to run the aluminum smelting operations. I knew that aluminum production is highly energy intensive and that Alcoa has a coal-fired power plant as its main power source for the smelting portion of the operations. Yet, I was taken aback that the power plant will actually burn more coal after the upgrades are completed, which is almost hard to fathom when the power plant burns something like 19 truckloads of coal per hour now. When I asked Alcoa's environmental manager why this is so, he said that the pollution control technology will use a lot of energy and therefore, more coal will need to be burned. It didn't seem like many other people were struck by the irony--more coal needs to be burned to operate the pollution control technology to clean the pollutants out of the coal being burned. I asked whether some alternative energy source had been investigated to power the pollution control technology. I was told that nothing was found to be as effective as coal. I sort of translated this into the fact that coal is cheaper and accessible, although I'm not sure what else had been considered.

It got me to thinking about how complicated this concept really is; in essence, we are creating more pollution by mining coal and burning coal (as well as disposing of the coal residue) to operate technology that is designed to make coal-fired power plants less polluting. Do we want the dinosaur plants without this technology that burn less coal or do we want cleaner air while burning more coal and causing other forms of ground pollution in the process? None of these issues are really black and white, which I have to remind myself. It does make me think even more so, however, that really the only true answer in the future is to move more in the direction of alternative energy. The concept of making coal into a clean energy source always seems to have a major catch, like burning more of it just to clean its own pollution before it reaches the atmosphere. Of course, critics could say that even alternative energy methods have some pollution factor--e.g. using steel made at a steel mill to construct a wind turbine or a solar tower. Yet, the difference I see is that wind and solar sources have more of a one-time pollution effect, which is the initial construction of the turbine or tower. After that, the energy is clean and can hopefully offset the emissions that occurred in the original production stage. Meanwhile, with coal, there always seems to be recurring pollution, no matter how clean you want to make it sound.