Coal briquettes make for green ($) cleanup of contaminated mine

I cannot vouch for its accuracy, but it is worth reading if you like the way-out, i.e., the rugged little by-ways of mining.  Here is a summary to whet your attention to the complete article:

Ed recently bought a piece of land. It’s “contaminated” land, in that it used to be a coal mine, so it’s covered with mine tailings.   So Ed now owns this huge mound of coal dust, and the technology now exists to make it useful. In simple terms, you crush it up and make it into little briquettes. 

On January 1, a new law came into effect in the United States.  Under that law, the US Government gives Ed a subsidy for making the coal dust into briquettes. The power stations love the briquettes because they’re about a third of the price of regular coal and their uniform size means they’re about 20% more efficient.  The bureaucrats decided that if Ed adds 20% biowaste to the briquette, it stops being “coal”, and turns magically into a “green, zero emission bio fuel”. In this case, Ed’s “biowaste” will be a type of flour, though he could use wood chips or even human poo if he wanted to.

It’s still coal, of course, with all of the same emmission profile that it had before, except that now, by the stroke of a pen, it isn’t, and is deemed to have zero emissions that won’t count towards America’s carbon emissions score.   And “green” fuel attracts an additional subsidy from the US Government. Governments and entrepreneurs all over the world are rushing into this loophole. Ed will make a fortune.

Everyone makes or saves money. The company that owns the land can now clean it up for profit, the energy producer pays about 70% less to generate the same amount of electricity, the flour producer gets to save money on disposing of its inedible flour, and the US Government gets to save on carbon emission fines by turning coal into something it isn’t