Cleaner Coal – from Guest Blogger Anil

The economy of the world is growing quickly – especially in highly populated developing nations majorly India and China. With the growth in these economies, the expansion of industries and manufacturing units would be an obvious course of action. It helps to understand that the energy needs will rise tremendously as compared to world’s current consumption of energy. As a result of growing needs, the new age era has begun the search of alternative sources of energy, such as solar, wind, hydro energy, in order to preserve the environment.

Although a lot of research and development is going on for the endeavor, there are still no absolute alternatives to the current sources of energy. Amid solution to energy sources problem, researchers are in favor of coal being used in a cleaner form. Coal has invariably proved to be the most common, easily available and somewhat efficient source of energy in the world. However, the global demand for coal has declined due to recession.

The clean coal technology has been a savior of the coal companies that were witnessing the stimulus funds and worthwhile investments going to the way of cleaner forms of energy. Recently, according to a release from Department of Energy, three projects of carbon capture and sequestration projects, valued at US$3.18 billion have been awarded a stimulus fund of US$979 million. The DOE’s Clean Coal Power Initiative (CCPI) gave the three projects a commercial scale. It will also require raising more than US$2.2 billion in private investment under the cost sharing rules. The projects will take around a decade to complete. The awards announced will support projects in West Virginia led by American Electric Power, in Texas led by Summit Texas Clean Energy and in Alabama led by Southern Company Services.

There are many companies working to achieve to make coal a cleaner source of energy. These companies do not only help in producing clean coal but also are benefitted directly with the emergence of the technology of clean coal which will also ensure a rise in the performance of these companies. It will help these companies do well in stock markets and can be considered as a good source of investment for those who are looking for a high performance return companies.

Some of them are mentioned below:

Peabody Energy

The company is world’s largest private sector coal company. The company operates mines across the US and Australia. Peabody catered to about one tenth electricity generation in the year 2008.The company has majority interest in about 30 coal mining operations in the US and Australia. Peabody’s performance remained not very strong in the first quarter of the current year due to low demand of coal globally. The company’s sales volumes and revenue dipped. Peabody had predicted in the beginning of the year that China will be a net importer of coal and focused on the market. The company has been strategically positioned in a way to take the benefit of the rising demand for energy in developing economies such as East and South Asian countries.