Many of our fossil fuel reserves, but especially coal, are going to play significant roles for years to come. On a worldwide basis, coal is, by far, the largest fossil energy resource available. About one-fourth of the world’s coal reserves reside in the United States. To put this in perspective, consider the fact that, at current rates of consumption, coal reserves could last for over 200 years.

Regardless of how much faith you put in future fossil energy projections, it is clear that coal will continue to play an important role in our energy future—especially given the relatively large amounts of coal that we control within our own borders. DOE’s Energy Information Administration estimates that electricity will become an increasingly large contributor to future U. S. energy demand. How will this new demand be met? Initially, low cost natural gas will grow in use. Inevitably, the demand for electricity will have to be met by coal. Coal will remain the mainstay of U. S. baseline electricity generation, accounting for half of electricity generation by the year 2010.

The long term demand for coal brings with it a demand for technologies that can mitigate the environmental problems associated with coal. While control technologies will be used to reduce air pollutants associated with acid rain, no technologies exist today which address the problem of greenhouse gas emissions. Coal is the most carbon-intensive of the fossil fuels. In other words, for every Btu of energy liberated by combustion, coal emits more CO2 than either petroleum or natural gas. As pressure to reduce carbon emissions grows, this will become an increasingly acute problem for the U. S.

One measure of how serious this problem could be is the absurdity of some of the proposals being developed for handling carbon emissions from power plants. The preferred option offered by researchers at MIT is ocean disposal, despite the expense and uncertainty of piping CO2 from power plants and injecting the CO2 in the ocean15.

Commonsense suggests that recycling of carbon would be more efficacious than deep ocean disposal. No one clearly understands the long-term effects of injecting large amounts of CO2 into our oceans. Beyond these environmental concerns, such large — scale disposal schemes represent an economic sinkhole. Huge amounts of capital and operating dollars would be spent simply to dispose of carbon. While such Draconian measures may ultimately be needed, it makes more sense to first re-use stationary sources of carbon as much as possible. Algae technology is unique in its ability to produce a useful, high-volume product from waste CO2.

Consumption of coal, an abundant domestic fuel source for electricity generation, will continue to grow over the coming decades, both in the U. S. and abroad. Algae technology can extend the useful energy we get from coal combustion and reduce carbon emissions by recycling waste CO2 from power plants into clean-burning biodiesel. When compared to the extreme measures proposed for disposing of power plant carbon emissions, algal recycling of carbon simply makes sense.