Clean coal company nabs $33 million

Last week, investors and executives were talking about the inevitability of the clean coal industry, and days later CoalTek, a notable start-up in the field, nabs $33 million in venture funding.

Investors in the latest round include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson Element (the energy fund associated with DFJ) and Warburg Pincus, according to VentureWire.

CoalTek has come up with a way to remove water out of coal prior to burning it. The process makes coal more energy-intensive, pound-for-pound, compared to regular coal. The changes that occur in the coal as a result of CoalTek's process also attenuate its polluting power, said CEO Chris Poirier at the Cleantech Venture Forum last week.

The pollution that coal processed via CoalTek's technology still puts out a lot more greenhouse gases than other clean technologies, "but it is a massive reduction compared to the total environmental impact today of coal," Poirier said. Fifty-two percent of all the electricity from U.S. plants comes from coal-fired plants, he added, and those plants are not going to be shut down tomorrow.

Clean Coal in some ways is touted as a necessary adaptation. Many people die and get injured in coal mining accidents and the environmental hazards are well known. Nonetheless, there's also a lot of it in the ground: the U.S. has 28 percent of the world's supply, according to Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell. Thus, rather than phase it out, clean coal advocates say we need to find ways to burn it cleaner.

"Coal is going to be an enduring fuel source for the next 50 years, or even the next 100 years," said Kevin Skillern, senior vice president of General Electric Energy Financial Services at the same conference.

Some companies are also looking at ways of turning coal into natural gas or liquid fuel. Large corporations, university professors and national laboratories are looking at ways to sequester carbon dioxide underground, which would make coal easier to burn at factories.

But there is hardly a consensus. Clean coal movement is viewed very skeptically by many scientists.