By all accounts, burning coal cleanly is now possible. The technology to do so is available. To make it effective in a coal-fired furnace like Mpumalanga province, new technology will also have to be installed in old coal-fired power stations. At last week’s Fossil Fuel workshop on air quality, former Department of Energy director-general Nelisiwe Magubane urged the deployment of cleaner coal technologies to avoid litigation risk. Magubane, who is currently a nonexecutive director of Eskom and chairperson of Matleng, a 70% women-owned company that provides energy solutions, warned that continued lowering of air quality by coal-fired plants could end up in the paying of billions of rands to litigants in the same way as the mining industry has had to compensate mineworkers suffering from silicosis contracted in air-polluted underground mining environments.