Is coal desulphurisation worthwhile? Evidence from the market

The paper develops a forward-looking way to estimate the economic benefits of research and development on coal desulphurisation. The methodology makes use of survey-based techniques pioneered in environmental economics. The empirical results illustrate the difficulty of configuring desulphurised coal to meet the requirements of existing electricity generating plants. In addition to estimating the returns to investment in coal desulphurisation, the contributions of the paper are in extending survey-based valuation to meet the needs of R&D investors for intelligence about the prospective value of their investments and using robust estimation techniques to reduce the influence of outliers.