How much Carbon Dioxide does the average Coal Burning Power Plant release into the atmosphere in a year?
I’ll be using numbers for the report linked below as a source. This report is from 2000, and concerns data collected in 1998 and 1999, but since the chemical composition of coal has not changed in the last several years, nor has the result of burning the stuff, I think the data remain relevant. You are correct in your suspicion that electric generation, coal plants in particular, are major factors in anthropogenic CO2 emissions (something like 45-50% of CO2 is from coal-fired plants). You’re looking for the average amount of CO2 released per year per coal plant, but the first number I want to draw attention to is the amount of CO2 released in the generation of 1 kilowatt-hour of electricity by a coal plant: just over 2 pounds. In 1998, coal was burned to produce 1.8 billion megawatt-hours of electricity in the US and resulted in total emissions of 1.8 billion metric tons. This number has increased to 2 billion megawatt-hours of coal-fired generation in 2005 [
I’ll be using numbers for the report linked below as a source. This report is from 2000, and concerns data collected in 1998 and 1999, but since the chemical composition of coal has not changed in the last several years, nor has the result of burning the stuff, I think the data remain relevant. You are correct in your suspicion that electric generation, coal plants in particular, are major factors in anthropogenic CO2 emissions (something like 45-50% of CO2 is from coal-fired plants). You’re looking for the average amount of CO2 released per year per coal plant, but the first number I want to draw attention to is the amount of CO2 released in the generation of 1 kilowatt-hour of electricity by a coal plant: just over 2 pounds. In 1998, coal was burned to produce 1.8 billion megawatt-hours of electricity in the US and resulted in total emissions of 1.8 billion metric tons. This number has increased to 2 billion megawatt-hours of coal-fired generation in 2005 [
Related Questions
- How much does it cost to capture carbon dioxide from a coal or natural gas fired power plant and store it underground?
- Do coal burning power stations release more radioactive materials into the enviroment than nuclear power?
- How much Carbon Dioxide does the average Coal Burning Power Plant release into the atmosphere in a year?
