Once upon a time, coal was king. It heated our homes and energized our factories, and the mines provided employment for thousands of people. It literally powered our lives.

Then we became more aware of what we were doing to our environment. We discovered the dangers of emitting CO2, depleting the ozone layer and increasing global warming. As we strove to clean up our world, coal became the bad guy.

Why has the concept of clean coal sparked such debate?

Once upon a time, coal was king. It heated our homes and energized our factories, and the mines provided employment for thousands of people. It literally powered our lives.

Then we became more aware of what we were doing to our environment. We discovered the dangers of emitting CO2, depleting the ozone layer and increasing global warming. As we strove to clean up our world, coal became the bad guy.

Now things are swinging around again. Desperate to reduce our dependency on foreign oil and make use of our still abundant reserves, the Obama administration is once more looking to coal for answers.

As part of his election platform, President Obama pledged to deploy clean coal technology. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who had been less than positive about coal before his nomination, was forced to backtrack, and now agrees that clean coal is worth pursuing.

On the other side of the debate, environmental groups claim that the big coal-burning utility companies are using the concept of clean coal as a smokescreen to hide their own inaction on environmental issues; that they are engaging in a high-level – and expensive – PR campaign, with a lack of investment in research to back up their words.

It’s easy to see why companies whose income depends on burning coal would feel threatened by its potential disappearance. But there is definitely money going into clean coal research – at the DoE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory, researchers are busy chasing the goal of creating 90 percent CO2 capture with 99 percent permanence.

And in June, the federal government announced it was reviving FutureGen, the $1.6 billion initiative to create a coal-based power plant that will use new technology to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The project had been mothballed by the Bush administration, ostensibly due to cost overruns.

So will clean coal be our salvation or our downfall? As with most contentious issues, the truth falls somewhere in the middle. No, we should not single-mindedly pursue clean coal at the expense of other renewable energy sources. But neither can we afford to ignore it completely. As our environmental situation worsens, we must investigate every option available to us.

What do you think? Please feel free to add your voice to the great clean coal debate.