This month, National Geographic has an article called "The High Price of Cheap Coal" (you need to actually get the print magazine to read it, unfortunately). If you do a search for "coal gasification" on TOD, you'll see a lot of instances where it came up in the comments, but unless I skimmed by it, there's been no post on coal gasification itself. Just yesterday, Engineer Poet said that coal gasification is well-understood—so is it just cost that makes it fairly uncommon for power plants?

We have had a number of posts about the Fischer-Tropsch process here on TOD (e.g., here), and it should be pointed out that coal gasification is basically the first step on the way toward coal liquefaction. However, what I'm interested in here is the use of gasified coal in its own right, as a way of generating electricity.

As the MSM often does (if National Geographic can be called MSM), it takes a "better" technology and makes it sound like the end-all-and-be-all of our energy-related environmental problems. The relevant point here, as we all know, is that the US has tons of coal (we're the "Saudi Arabia of coal", of course), but traditional coal-burning power plants spit out all of that CO2 that's causing global warning (more than the all of the cars, trucks, and airplanes in the US combined, according to this article).