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)

By Dennis Posadas

THE Philippines may be one of the world’s top supporters of Earth Hour and Earth Day. We may have a new Renewable Energy Act. But if all this does not translate into greenhouse gas emission reduction, then all that is for naught. After all, don’t you think it is time to move beyond token political statements on clean energy, and actually implement these clean energy projects?

In order for GHG reduction to take effect, the Philippines to seriously take advantage of the new Renewable Energy Act, by having a companion ecosystem for innovation, financing, and deployment of renewable energy projects.

That is why I am so pleased to find out that opportunities to finance clean energy projects were showcased in the Philippines Clean Energy Investor Forum last June 15 at the Edsa Shangri-La hotel. The forum showcased projects that evolved from a competition, sponsored by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Private Finance Advisory Network (PFAN).

PFAN is a multi-lateral public-private partnership which is managed in Asia by USAID’s ECO-ASIA Clean Development and Climate program and initiated by the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) Climate Technology Initiative.

The PFAN Philippines Clean Energy Investor Forum served as a platform for Philippine energy entrepreneurs to showcase their ideas to investors.

Six finalists were chosen by PFAN for the Philippines Business Plan competition. Each of the companies received mentoring and one-on-one coaching before they formally made their investment pitches in the forum. The event was basically a dog and pony show of those seeking investments, before a group of investors who also want to invest in renewable/clean energy.

The total value of investments of those who made it to the finals was potentially more than $500 million, comprising both debt and equity finance.

In addition to offering promising investments, these projects have the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by more than 1.5 million metric tons of CO2 per year, according to USAID.

During the June 15 presentations, the panel of judges selected two Clean Energy Financing Award winners for the Philippines. The winner, Asea One, is proposing to setup 16 clean energy powerplants in Negros Oriental and the Western Visayas, while the other finalist, SURE is proposing to build, own and operate clean energy plants that run on feedstocks like rice husks and wood chips.

“By bringing together clean energy entrepreneurs and investors, the PFAN Philippines Clean Energy Investor Forum is addressing the barriers that clean energy businesses face in seeking financing,” said Jon Lindborg, Mission Director for USAID Philippines.

“These barriers make it difficult for investors to identify and screen viable clean energy projects.” USAID believes that by identifying and nurturing the best ideas, they can help facilitate financing for the projects.

The Agency is also working to expand regional clean energy finance initiatives on a regional basis by developing a network of businesses and investors interested in promoting sustainable clean energy technologies and businesses.

The next stop of the PFAN Investor Forum is Indonesia on June 25, and then Hong Kong, where the PFAN China Investor Forum will be held 27-28 September.

It is great that we have the Renewable Energy Act in place, a product of all the years that groups like Greenpeace and WWF lobbied our Congress to implement.

We can send all the representatives that we want to send to Copenhagen this year and have all the laws and policies in place, but if back home we do not build the ecosystem that will encourage actual clean energy entrepreneurs and ventures, we will simply be talking about greenhouse gas emission reduction, and not really doing anything about it.

Dennis Posadas is the author of Jump Start: A Technopreneurship Fable (Singapore: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2009)

By Dennis Posadas

Recently, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency declared officially that six greenhouse gases namely carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride, are a threat to public health and welfare.

Based on scientific evidence, particularly that summarized in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report of 2007, these greenhouse gases produce global warming which is responsible for stronger storms, changes in weather patterns, higher sea levels that inundate formerly habitable coastal areas, and other effects.

This declaration by the EPA will hopefully be a precursor to how the United States will act in the Copenhagen summit this year. Copenhagen is where the world’s leaders will gather this year to find a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol which the Bush administration refused to ratify.

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By Marlowe Hood
Agence France-Presse

PARIS–Manmade climate change is set to hasten the disintegration of a massive ice sheet in Antarctica by 100,000 years, boosting sea levels some five metres (16 feet), according to a pair of studies published Thursday.

The research, which matches new ice core data with a simulation of past and future changes in the West Antarctica Ice Sheet (WAIS), reveals for the first time regular cycles of “catastrophic collapse” and reformation reaching back five million years.

Cycles lasted 40,000 years during the first three-fifths of this period, but have since more than doubled in length, explained David Pollard, a scientist at Pennsylvania State University and lead author of one of the studies.

“But with global warming we are cutting short a natural cycle,” he told AFP by phone.

“The two studies combined show it is really likely that the WAIS will collapse in the next few thousand years. In the absence of human influence, it would probably happen only 100,000 years from now,” he said.

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Agence France-Presse

SYDNEY — A sharp slowdown in coral growth on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef since 1990 is a warning sign that precipitous changes in the world’s oceans may be imminent, scientists said Friday.

Strong evidence points to the cause being a combination of warmer seas and higher acidity from increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, Australian Institute of Marine Science researchers reported.

“The data suggest that this severe and sudden decline in calcification is unprecedented in at least 400 years,” said Glenn De’ath, principal author of a paper published Friday in the international journal Science.

The research shows that corals on the reef have slowed their growth by more than 14 percent since the “tipping point” year of 1990 and on current trends the corals would stop growing altogether by 2050.

“It is cause for extreme concern that such changes are already evident, with the relatively modest climate changes observed to date, in the world’s best protected and managed coral reef ecosystem,” said co-author Janice Lough.

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