This ain't reality, Al Gore

You remember him, the former Senator from Tennesee who believed it was he who invented the internet. The guy who swooped down in a jet, not to attend the negotiations, but simply to sign his name to the Kyoto Protocol, which later was soundly defeated in the U.S. Senate. He penned a book 20 years ago that basically espoused that people would no longer be able to procreate because of all the pollution that exists in the world.

Well, he seems to be the Rasputin of our time. You remember Rasputin? The Russian counselor to the Czars who survived many attempts to kill him. Al Gore seems to me to be the modern day Rasputin. Even losing the presidential election of 2000 hasn't quieted him. And now with an Obama administration and minions who actually believe the drivel espoused by A. Gore, we are set again for wrong-headed, knee-jerk policy making.

Like the phoenix, A.G. rose from the ashes to produce an erroneous documentary that won acclaim by like-minded Hollywood elitists. After winning an Oscar and a Nobel Peace prize, A. set his sites on something even grander -- brainwashing Americans into thinking that energy conservation plus renewables plus a smart grid would mean zero fossil fuels in the United States and plug-in electric cars within in a decade.

To do this, A. has created a hydra of environmental groups that are loaded with cash for buying TV ads. Before Christmas, one of his groups "This is Reality" unleashed an ad that said "clean coal" is as real as "Santa Claus." That was the message and it was said in a number of goofy ways, such as "coal is the dirtiest fuel" we can use to generate electricity.

Really? As compared to what - nuclear where the spent fuel has a half life of radiocativity for hundreds of thousands of years? It would be interesting to ask the good folks in Nevada if they would rather use fly ash from coal-based power plants to build interstate highways in their state or would they rather have the country's radioactive spent fuel in a national depository at Yucca Mountain. They might have a different view of what is really a dirty fuel.

But to A., the number one goal is to attack coal.

To further their efforts, the "This is Reality" group has purchased all the ad space in the D.C. metro stations during January so all the visitors to our nation's capital will have a chance to see graphically that the proverbial "canary in the coal mine" has died. (That actually is the symbol of the group).

What A. is trying to do is change people's perceptions -- not reality. Because the reality is a coal-based power plant built today would produce 90 percent less emissions than a plant built 30 years ago. And that carbon dioxide emissions, which so far aren't regulated, can also be captured and used for enhanced oil recovery or stored safely underground -- just as it is today in the oil fields of southern Saskatchewan or the North Sea off the coast of Norway.

The fallacy in A's thinking is that he doesn't believe that Americans can see, read and reason. America is the Saudi Arabia of coal. We have more than 25 percent of all the world's coal reserves. We also have the ability to use this fuel cleanly and wisely while benefiting our national economy and creating American jobs.

It might surprise you to know than in North Dakota, one in 12 jobs can be traced to our vast reserves of coal which are being mined and turned into either electricity or synthetic natural gas. The mined land is being reclaimed to a condition that is as good or better than it was before. We have mines that have been totally reclaimed -- like the Glenharold mine near Stanton and the Indian Head mine near Zap -- where the person passing by in a car would never, ever know that a coal mine once existed there.

I know this to be a fact, I took my brother-in-law Rich and my sister Susan for a drive through coal country. We came upon a ridge where Rich first saw Basin Electric's Leland Olds Station and Great River Energy's Stanton Station and he asked "Where the black smoke?" There wasn't any plume visible. This was August and the water vapor from the stack was non-existent. Smoke from power plants went out 20 years ago when electro-static precipitators and baghouses were built. Scrubbers remove the sulfur dioxide. Trace amounts of mercury are captured with activated char and carbon dioxide can be captured with ammonia. What's neat is the ammonia sulfate, such as what is produced at the Dakota Gasification Company, is sold commercially for fertilizer. Fly ash from the Coal Creek Station near Underwood is sold as a replacement for cement in concrete.

In the winter, you do see a plume. That's because coal in North Dakota is 30 percent water. Our coal is called lignite. While it has a lower Btu rating because of the moisture, it also is extremely reactive to the gasification process - hence, we have the nation's first and only commercial scale coal to natural gas gasification plant built in the 1980s. Another gasification plant using better technology is in the permitting process.

So wake up America....don't drink A's Kool-Aid. He's been shoveling crap for 20 years. Americans are still bequeathing Americans. And 50 percent of our electricity is coming from coal. And yet the air we breathe in North Dakota is among the cleanest in the world.

Don't let this man's perception ever become our reality.