Lehigh University Energy Research Center Is Working To Cut Mercury Emissions From Coal Plants & Other Sources

In partnership with Blaschak Coal Corp., the ERC team has worked on creating a high mercury-capturing capacity sorbent that is made from anthracite via a multi-stage activation process. Blaschak wants to find non-energy use of anthracite, and the research team has identified a key source of it from Blaschak’s manufacturing process.

Using synthesized activated carbon, the researchers have found that their experiments in the lab with mercury resulted in competitive adsorption capacities — with and without halogenation. Over the course of several weeks, a slipstream test campaign was carried out at Covanta’s Lancaster waste-to-energy facility. Here, anthracite-based sorbents as well as several commercial sorbents were tested under real flue gas conditions. This reportedly achieved excellent results.

Editor’s note: This is a sort of tricky topic to cover. On the one hand, there are coal plants operating that are emitting deadly levels of mercury emissions, and cleaning those up would be a good, small step forward. On the other hand, this kind of development, or highlighting it, can make people think it’s not so urgent to shut down coal power plants — it is so urgent. It’s good to clean up some of the pollution, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t cut all of the pollution ASAP.