Obligatory, 11.30.15; Mea Culpa with respect to Clean Coal

It looks like I overlooked something with respect to clean coal technology.  When coal is converted to coke, which is a valuable product of destructive distillation, not all that much hydrogen is produced.  Most of coal is carbon.  A significant proportion of the coal's energy comes from the conversion of carbon to carbon dioxide.

This is what I overlooked.  My idea was to not combust the carbon, but put it back into the ground.  This would in effect increase the cost of the coal by a significant amount, as much of its heat production potential comes from the combustion of the carbon, not the hydrogen.  The most valuable part of the coal then, would not be used.

A careful analysis may reveal that it would still be cheaper than other methods of energy production.  Just not nearly as cheap as before.  Without doing that careful analysis and just making a very quick guess, I'd say at least 3/4ths of the energy would be unavailable for use.  This would increase the cost by at least a factor of 3.  Or to put it another way, instead of being 20 times cheaper than oil, it would be about 7 times cheaper.  Of course, this rough ( and quick ) estimate is probably wrong as well.

Not only that, the practical consequence of putting a valuable product back in the ground would be to reject the idea.  There's no way that anybody is going to allow that.  It's like burying money, you might say.

So, I am going to walk back that rather brash statement that the destructive distillation of coal would yield a solution to the so-called AGW problem.  Perhaps it still could, but more extensive study would be required, and the industry would have to swallow hard and accept that a lot of their product could not be used anymore.

My fault here may not be absolute here.  It may still be possible to do what I proposed, but the probability of success isn't nearly as good as I thought.

Update:

The fault is absolute.  This is a bad idea.  You use up the fuel resource too fast and it doesn't produce enough energy.  Scrub this idea.

Update:

Not enough time for an entire post.  Reviewed energy ideas that I like.  Obviously, clean coal doesn't go on the list.  As for the contents of that list, it is still good.