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> To add insult to injury, the coal that is extracted here is brown coal, also known as lignite, which emits particularly high levels of carbon dioxide.

This surprised me, because surely you get one molecule of CO2 per atom of carbon in the coal, regardless of the kind of coal. But it seems there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my stoichiometry - lignite has a higher moisture content than other coals, so more of the energy liberated goes into boiling that water, so there is less energy produced per unit of carbon, which means more CO2 per unit of energy:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978008100...




I had a power company as a client once, years ago. They had a plant that burned lignite. I was new to the industry and asked what that was.

The response they gave me was “it’s like burning dirt.” Man, lignite is nasty stuff.

Burning freaking dirt. Can’t wait for this stuff to be outlawed.


Lignite is more accurately described as "slightly more flammable dirt". It is an absolute outrage that we still burn it for energy.


Huh I would have guesses that the difference was in hydrocarbons themselves - the opposite of how Methane is peak hydrocarbon efficency by having four hydrogen bonds per carbon - if it has less energy/carbon dense configurations resulting in more CO2 than even other coals because it was made up of more wasteful structures like "rings" of carbons.




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