By Steve Blankinship, Associate Editor

Those of us who ply our trade as power industry journalists, and those of you who read the fruit of our labors, see all too well the uncertainty being created by highly contentious public policy on energy.

Combine that with reduced demand due to economic stagnation, financial market turmoil, changes in how system planning occurs due to renewable portfolio mandates and the volatile price of natural gas and it becomes unlikely that a rack of Cray supercomputers stacked from here to the moon would be able to crunch all the variables sufficiently to give us a roadmap to where we’re headed.

Since no one knows what the future holds for the coal-fired sector, we have tried to cover all the bases at COAL-GEN 2009, August 19-21 in Charlotte, N.C. by providing the people, topics, sessions, briefings, workshops and other events to address all possibilities.

Numerous technical sessions and other forums will address carbon capture. This year, there will be a special effort to talk more than we have in the past about the other side of the carbon control equation: sequestration. A megassession on Friday, August 21 will be devoted exclusively to carbon sequestration projects underway in the U.S.

We will also offer two editors’ briefings conducted from the exhibit floor, a format that allows all delegates and all exhibitors to listen in and participate. Both briefings—one on carbon legislation coming from both federal and state levels and the other on what the Obama stimulus package offers the coal-fired sector—are scheduled to be webcast to a national audience.

And for the first time this year, there will be a separate, co-located track devoted exclusively to circulating fluidized bed technology (CFB), a means by which either new or existing plants can burn or co-fire a variety of fuels, including waste coal. Among other advantages, CFB allows generating power using materials that might otherwise pose environmental liabilities, eliminating them from the environment.

Also this year for the first time, COAL-GEN offers two power plant technical tours. One will be of Duke Energy’s Cliffside station, where a modernization project includes a wet FGD on the existing 565 MW Unit 5 and a new supercritical 800 MW Unit 6 scheduled for operation in 2012. A second tour will be of Duke’s Allen plant, a five-unit coal fired facility that is completing a major emissions upgrade.

Uncertainty makes us focus on what we do know. Here’s one thing: Despite decades of efforts to close or limit the coal option, chunks of carbon, crushed and ground to the consistency of face powder, continue to supply 50 percent of our nation’s power. We also know that coal supplies most of the power used in most of the world’s industrialized and rapidly developing nations. And the trend in those nations is to use more coal not less.

We also know that even the most skilled politicians can’t repeal the laws of physics. Those laws are immutable and the second law of thermodynamics—which, perhaps more than any other physical law of science governs what can and can’t be done with energy—will not be retracted or even slightly modified, regardless of how many protesters insist otherwise. The laws of economics are arguably a bit less immutable, and it is there that politicians and political activists stand perhaps a better chance of tweaking them. After all, it has been said by some that economics is more art than science. We’ll see.

We also know that, despite the “conventional wisdom” as distributed routinely by mass media, public officials and other energy pundits, clean coal encompasses far more than coal burned without releasing carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Today, coal is burned while capturing 98 to 99 percent of sulfur and nitrous emissions. Mercury capture technology can remove Hg to levels measured in a few parts per billion. And supercritical and ultra supercritical boilers can—and are—replacing old coal-fired units. That means greater amounts of power produced from coal while yielding net reductions in carbon emitted.

As a result, we’re seeing new supercritical units replacing old coal units across China and in Europe, the first part of the world to fully embrace carbon reduction goals. Coal-fired technology can also be adapted to burn renewable biomass fuels, both on a dedicated or co-fired basis. We also know that natural gas prices will almost certainly remain highly volatile for the long term, far more so than coal.

And finally, we know that pushback is growing to unbridled reliance on renewables such as wind due to transmission, cost, reliability and NIMBY concerns.

That’s why another COAL-GEN megasession—“Calling Hollywood: Coal Stays in the Picture”—will be an apt title for COAL-GEN’s closing day this year. Because it will.