Mounting Costs Slow the Push for Clean Coal

I see by this New York Times article that our politicians and press are starting to catch a glimpse of the realities of the state of “Carbon Capture and Storage” technology. Now if we could just educate them on the realities of Carbon Dioxide we’d be about there. In the meantime I see that the Times continues to chose inflammatory words like “spew” when they talk about carbon dioxide.

May 30, 2008
The Energy Challenge
Mounting Costs Slow the Push for Clean Coal
By MATTHEW L. WALD
WASHINGTON — For years, scientists have had a straightforward idea for taming global warming. They want to take the carbon dioxide that spews from coal-burning power plants and pump it back into the ground.
President Bush is for it, and indeed has spent years talking up the virtues of “clean coal.” All three candidates to succeed him favor the approach. So do many other members of Congress. Coal companies are for it. Many environmentalists favor it. Utility executives are practically begging for the technology.
But it has become clear in recent months that the nation’s effort to develop the technique is lagging badly.
In January, the government canceled its support for what was supposed to be a showcase project, a plant at a carefully chosen site in Illinois where there was coal, access to the power grid, and soil underfoot that backers said could hold the carbon dioxide for eons.
Perhaps worse, in the last few months, utility projects in Florida, West Virginia, Ohio, Minnesota and Washington State that would have made it easier to capture carbon dioxide have all been canceled or thrown into regulatory limbo.
Coal is abundant and cheap, assuring that it will continue to be used. But the failure to start building, testing, tweaking and perfecting carbon capture and storage means that developing the technology may come too late to make coal compatible with limiting global warming.
“It’s a total mess,” said Daniel M. Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.
“Coal’s had a tough year,” said John Lavelle, head of a business at General Electric that makes equipment for processing coal into a form from which carbon can be captured. Many of these projects were derailed by the short-term pressure of rising construction costs. But scientists say the result, unless the situation can be turned around, will be a long-term disaster.
Plans to combat global warming generally assume that continued use of coal for power plants is unavoidable for at least several decades. Therefore, starting as early as 2020, forecasters assume that carbon dioxide emitted by new power plants will have to be captured and stored underground, to cut down on the amount of global-warming gases in the atmosphere.
Yet, simple as the idea may sound, considerable research is still needed to be certain the technique would be safe, effective and affordable.
Scientists need to figure out which kinds of rock and soil formations are best at holding carbon dioxide. They need to be sure the gas will not bubble back to the surface. They need to find optimal designs for new power plants so as to cut costs. And some complex legal questions need to be resolved, such as who would be liable if such a project polluted the groundwater or caused other damage far from the power plant.
Major corporations sense the possibility of a profitable new business, and G.E. signed a partnership on Wednesday with Schlumberger, the oil field services company, to advance the technology of carbon capture and sequestration.
But only a handful of small projects survive, and the recent cancellations mean that most of this work has come to a halt, raising doubts that the technique can be ready any time in the next few decades. And without it, “we’re not going to have much of a chance for stabilizing the climate,” said John Thompson, who oversees work on the issue for the Clean Air Task Force, an environmental group.
The fear is that utilities, lacking proven chemical techniques for capturing carbon dioxide and proven methods for storing it underground by the billions of tons per year, will build the next generation of coal plants using existing technology. That would ensure that vast amounts of global warming gases would be pumped into the atmosphere for decades.
The highest-profile failure involved a project known as FutureGen, which President Bush himself announced in 2003: a utility consortium, with subsidies from the government, was going to build a plant in Mattoon, Ill., testing the most advanced techniques for converting coal to a gas, capturing pollutants, and burning the gas for power.
The carbon dioxide would have been compressed and pumped underground into deep soil layers. Monitoring devices would have tested whether any was escaping to the atmosphere.
About $50 million has been spent on FutureGen, about $40 million in federal money and $10 million in private money, to draw up preliminary designs, find a site that had coal, electric transmission and suitable geology, and complete an Environmental Impact Statement, among other steps.
But in January, the government pulled out after projected costs nearly doubled, to $1.8 billion. The government feared the costs would go even higher. A bipartisan effort is afoot on Capitol Hill to save FutureGen, but the project is on life support.
The government had to change its approach, said Clarence Albright Jr., the undersecretary of the Energy Department, to “limit taxpayer exposure to the escalating cost.”
Trying to recover, the Energy Department is trying to cut a deal with a utility that is already planning a new power plant. The government would offer subsidies to add a segment to the plant dedicated to capturing and injecting carbon dioxide, as long as the utility bore much of the risk of cost overruns.
It is unclear whether any utility will agree to such a deal. The power companies, in fact, have been busy pulling back from coal-burning power plants of all types, amid rising costs and political pressure. Utility executives say they do not know of a plant that would qualify for an Energy Department grant as the project is now structured.
Most worrisome to experts on global warming, the utilities have recently been canceling their commitments to a type of plant long seen as a helpful intermediate step toward cleaner coal.
In plants of this type, coal would be gasified and pollutants like mercury, sulfur and soot removed before burning. The plants would be highly efficient, and would therefore emit less carbon dioxide for a given volume of electricity produced, but they would not inject the carbon dioxide into the ground.
But the situation is not hopeless. One new gasification proposal survives in the United States, by Duke Energy for a plant in Edwardsport, Ind.
In Wisconsin, engineers are testing a method that may allow them to bolt machinery for capturing carbon dioxide onto the back of old-style power plants; Sweden, Australia and Denmark are planning similar tests. And German engineers are exploring another approach, one that involves burning coal in pure oxygen, which would produce a clean stream of exhaust gases that could be injected into the ground.
But no project is very far along, and it remains an open question whether techniques for capturing and storing carbon dioxide will be available by the time they are critically needed.
The Electric Power Research Institute, a utility consortium, estimated that it would take as long as 15 years to go from starting a pilot plant to proving the technology will work. The institute has set a goal of having large-scale tests completed by 2020.
“A year ago, that was an aggressive target,” said Steven R. Specker, the president of the institute. “A year has gone by, and now it’s a very aggressive target.”

The U.S. strives to become like Haiti

Our future looks darker every day as our presidential candidates promise us a future in which we will reduce our Green House Gas (GHG - primarily CO2) emissions by 80% by the year 2050. Ouch! Let's put that into perspective, shall we? The U.S. currently emits around 6 billion tons of CO2. An 80% reduction would take us down to around 1 billion tons. Let's see - when were we last at 1 billion tons of CO2 emissions as a country? In 1910 - the end of the horse and buggy era. BUT - in 1910 we only had 92 million people. In 2050 we're projected to have 420 million people. That means, whereas we emit 19.5MT of CO2 per capita today, in 2050 we'd only have an allowance of 2.5MT per capita. We last saw that level of CO2 emission in the year 1875! Currently, the nations that have emissions that low are Haiti, Somalia, and Botswana. Now there's a goal for U.S. Even France and Switzerland, the developed countries with the lowest per capita CO2 emissions, are presently at 6.5MT - and that's because they generate their electricity with nuclear power plants and have very small, compact countries. For comparison, one Toyota Prius, driven the national average of 10,000 miles per year, would emit 1.8MT of CO2 - nearly all of a person's annual allowance! Further, the EPA estimates that to reach this level of per capita emissions, our economy would have to shrink by 6% per year, which would put us out of business by 2030. That is some worthwhile goal. Think about it.

For further enlightenment, see the following: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seGyLIrH1-4.

Technically...

Following is my submission for the next company newsletter to go out this next month. I titled the piece “Technically…” since that seems to be how I always preface a technical correction to a common misconception.

Recently there has been an increase in interest among some of the cooperative’s membership in installing alternative energy generation systems on their homes. The greatest level of interest has been in photovoltaic (solar) panel and windmill generators. In discussing this topic with these interested members, it’s clear that the sudden interest in alternative energy stems from a recent spike in media coverage of global warming fears and misinformation on how to mitigate the effects of the alleged global warming.

Since the fear mongers base their justification in an alleged “consensus” among “scientists”, it’s important to note that a consensus among scientists on any theory is neither true nor, even if it were, scientific. Science isn’t based on consensus. Science is defined, and constantly re-defined, by applying “the scientific method,” which means: observation, formulation of a hypothesis, skeptical analysis, documentation, and repeat. Any discussion that brands honest skepticism as heresy and requires blind acceptance is, by definition, not scientific. While science is never based on consensus, politics is. And since the group that is leading the cheer of man-made global warming is the United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control – a governmental panel, made up of politicians, and not scientists – it is not surprising that they would naturally seek a “consensus” rather than follow the scientific method.

The reality is that non-government-affiliated scientists disagree whether the Earth is due for a slight warming period or for a slight cooling – weather forecasting, especially in the long-term, is notoriously imprecise. The only two things that can be stated categorically with regard to the weather are that it’s variable and unpredictable. But whether we warm or cool over the next 100 years, it’s not going to matter to mankind, since either average temperature change is projected to be so small (+/-1°F) that it will not affect our environment in any significant way. Nevertheless, in reaction to the panic induced by the UN, our government is proposing legislation that will significantly affect our economy and the ability of each of the cooperative’s members to make a living. But since that topic has already been covered in our General Manger’s column, I’ll focus this discussion on the reality of installing alternative energy generating sources on the cooperative's distribution system.

First, some members have expressed the perception that it’s frequently windy in the cooperative's service territory. And while that may be true to some extent, the amount of wind found in our area is insufficient to generate electricity. A quick reference of the wind resource maps created by the National Renewable Energy Labs (NREL) informs us that there is no location in Southern Utah or Northern Arizona with sufficient wind speed and force to generate electricity. Further, where there is reported to be sufficient wind, such as around Milford, Utah, the availability is at best 20-25% (contrasted with coal or natural gas-fired generation with an availability of 95%.)

Lastly, one natural resource that we have in abundance in the cooperative's area is sunshine, and sunshine can be converted into electricity, but not in great quantities and not cheaply. For example, the average residential customer on the cooperative's system uses 1420 kWh per month. To approach that level of energy consumption, a member would need to install 9,000 watts of solar panels, which would generate about 1225 kWh per month, during the sunny days. Those solar panels would occupy 910 square feet on the roof and yard of the home to which they were attached and would cost at least $90,000 to purchase. If the member received $2000 tax rebates from both the Federal and the State Governments, then they would only need to finance $86,000 to pay for the solar panels. If the member could procure a 30-year loan at a 5% interest rate, the monthly payment on the solar panels would be $462, which would be to offset $46 per month from their power bills (leaving a balance of $36/month), for a net loss of $416 per month for 30 years. Certainly not a financially sound investment.

But, in accordance with State Law, the cooperative offers a Net Metering tariff for any member that still chooses to generate a portion of their electrical needs with an approved alternative energy source. And while the staff of your cooperative has done their best to make this tariff revenue neutral for the rest of the membership, State Law does mandate a certain level of subsidization in this rate. If you have any question on the tariff or interconnection requirements, please don’t hesitate to contact us in the engineering department.

It's getting dark and stupid in here

The founder of "Utah Moms for Clean Air" who wrote the May 3 article in the Salt Lake Tribune claiming that there is "no such thing as clean coal" rattled off a lot of scary sounding statistics, all of which are exaggerated, erroneous, or misleading. BUT, on top of all that, I know from personal experience that without coal-fired electricity we’ll go dark as a country and especially in Utah. Having spent ten years working on rural electrification in developing countries around the world I can confirm that having the clean coal power that we have in Utah is infinitely preferable to the premature deaths associated with a lack of vaccines (due to no refrigeration), respiratory diseases (due to cook fires in the home), house fires (due to open flames on candles and kerosene lamps), lack of security (due to lack of street lighting), lack of literacy (due lack of adequate lighting at night in the home), lack of information (due to lack of radio or TV news), food insecurity (due to lack of power for irrigation and grain milling), unrestrained population growth (due to lack of entertainment – TV and movies), deforestation (as populations centers forage for firewood as a primary source of energy), and lack of industry and other employment opportunities (due to a lack of power machinery.) Believe it or not, all of the preceding points are documented justifications for funding affordable and sustainable rural electrification in developing nations. And here in the US we’re trying to go backwards. It makes me really sad.