Over half the electric power used in the United States is generated by coal-fired power plants, consuming about a billion metric tons of coal a year, which emit about a 1/3rd of the SO2 gas from all sources. As such, the roughly 1,500 coal-burning power plants are the single biggest polluters of this acid-rain causing gas. Conversion from coal to biomass is a growing trend but, the problem of emission of green-house and acid-rain gases such as CO2, SO2 and mercury from power generation or from other industrial coal-burning applications, are an ever-present and growing danger to our way of life.