Clean Coal?

by Dennis Posadas

Coal is cheap and plentiful. Unlike oil, majority of which is controlled by OPEC states, coal can be found in many areas of the world, including the Philippines. As such, it has formed a significant portion of electric power generated worldwide, despite recent inroads by nuclear and renewable energy.

Majority of those coal plants belch CO2 into the atmosphere, which is why NASA chief climate scientist Jim Hansen and many other experts say publicly that there should be a moratorium on the building of coal plants worldwide.

Last April, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) declared that six greenhouse gases were a threat to human health and welfare. Chief among the six greenhouse gases was carbon dioxide (CO2). One of the largest emitters of carbon dioxide in the world is the electric power industry, particularly those that operate coal plants. The US alone emits around a billion-and-a-half tons of CO2 annually from electric power generation through coal.

Try telling that to fast growing China and India, or the US. Or even to developing economies around the world like the Philippines. This needs to be discussed widely, because frankly, while clean energy is a great topic for discussion, there are still technical and economic issues in getting from where we are now to the point where we can replace coal totally.

Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy, one of the largest electric utilities in the US, said in an interview in an episode of 60 Minutes (a popular U.S. television show) earlier this year, that Hansen’s proposal to stop the building of new coal plants cannot be done. While Rogers was one of the first electric utility CEOs who used coal plants to acknowledge the problem of global warming from coal, he says that the industry will arrive at a solution, but not at the pace that Hansen is recommending. When asked if his company had already made the investments towards so called clean coal technology, he said that they are in the process of studying the alternatives.

In reality, clean coal technology is really a way to capture the CO2 and store it underground. The technical term for the technology is called Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS).

One way to implement CCS is to pass the CO2 emission through a group of compounds called amines. This mixture is then pumped about one kilometer deep underground, into rock formations which have a lot of cracks that can absorb the mixture. The intense pressure underground causes the CO2 to liquefy, where it is hoped that the CO2 will stay underground forever. The solid form of CO2 is dry ice, which most of us have seen.

But the long-term effectiveness of CCS is still unknown. If despite the expense to implement, it will still leak CO2 into the atmosphere, then the exercise will be a gargantuan waste of resources. There are a limited number of sites around the world that have built CCS facilities but a study on the long term effectiveness of CCS has yet to be conducted. A coal expert who I spoke to, but declined to be identified surmised that one possible scenario is a leak caused by an earthquake in the vicinity, although he said that it was a hypothesis.

Aside from this, the scale of CCS is mindboggling. Unlike the nuclear power industry which can take nuclear wastes and store it in distant centralized repositories like Yucca Mountain in the US, each coal plant will need to have access to a CCS facility nearby.

The US alone emits more than a billion- and-a-half tons of CO2 a year, not counting China and India, which gives an idea of the undertaking. In the end, it could all boil down to costs. In 2004, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) released a study called “The Future of Coal” which discussed the outlook for CCS technology. It estimated that to make CCS competitive, carbon emissions will have to be charged at around $30/ton. Recently, the US House of Representatives, through the Democrat sponsored Waxman-Markey bill, looks like it has arrived at a compromise, but will this be enough to justify CCS in new coal plants? Even if the US signs a treaty in Copenhagen later this year, it will be very hard to get private industry to support CCS if the economics doesn’t make sense.

At this point theoretically CCS looks like a way to make coal a potentially non-environmentally threatening energy source. However, unless the technology and economics is brought up to speed and more research is done, it will remain simply a public relations tool brought up by the coal industry to fend off attacks against it for the moment.

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Dennis Posadas is the Editor of Cleantech Asia Online, a newly launched site devoted to opinions and insights about the Asia cleantech economy. He is also the author of Jump Start: A Technopreneurship Fable (Singapore: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2009)

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