No More New Coal-Fired Power Plants?

Amidst last Thursday’s EPA announcement, that it would not grant any new construction permits for coal-fired power plants until it could make sense of what is necessary to limit CO₂ emissions, what does this mean for the future of coal?

In 2007, fossil sources accounted for 80% of US energy demand: Coal (25%), natural gas (21%), petroleum (34%), nuclear (6.5%), hydro (2.2%), and biomass and waste (11%). Only 0.4% of global energy demand is met by geothermal, solar and wind.

americaspower.org? (Yes, it is…or was?)

Every year, Americans consume over a billion tons of coal; 52% of all electricity in US comes from coal; there are 600 coal-fired power plants in the country; coal shipments make over half of all rail traffic in the country; in a typical 500kW sized coal-fired plant, 1 trainload of coal is burnt in 12 hours, and an annual global warming emission equivalent of 600,000 automobiles is produced; coal-fired electricity created 83% of CO₂ emissions (2004); it takes 1 pound of coal to power your TV for 4.5 hours; the average US household consumes 9.5 tons of coal/year; 1.83 kg CO₂ is produced for every 1 kg of coal burned, therefore almost 2 billion tons of CO₂ is produced in the US per year burning coal;

…and, as we all know, electricity consumption is rising…

CCS: Carbon Capture and Sequestration theory viability? – no one knows

Tampa Electric Polk-1 coal-fired station, has a GE Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) to syngas system with no CCS, but as it stands CCS is just a theory with no proven tests. One reason is that a potential major CO₂ leak release could indemnify party testing by being catastrophically toxic in any population. Another reason is that no current accepted measurement validation protocol exists.

AEP Mountaineer plant in West Virginia has planned a test late late in 2009, not using IGCC, but using a CO₂ scrubber – reason being that existing coal-fired plants have 20-30 years of useful life, and if you can get it out using these scrubber-type retrofits, “… but at what price?” (as one of their employees mentions in the Frontline documentary: HEAT). Other technologies may be more viable.

The 2007 MIT The Future of Coal study did not exactly describe carbon capture and storage as “ready to run.” It states that, “.. no CO₂ storage project that is currently operating (Sleipner, Norway; Weyburn, Canada; InSalah, Algeria) has the necessary modeling, monitoring, and verification (MMV) capability to resolve outstanding technical issues, at scale.The “Future” study was unenthusiastic about the carbon-storage record of the U.S. Department of Energy:

To date, the DOE CCS program has not been pursued with an urgency to establish the key enabling science and technology needed for increased coal use in a carbon-constrained world. Establishing sequestration as a practical large-scale activity requires work across the board, including science, technology, infrastructure design, regulation and international standards. None of the key technical and public acceptance issues have been addressed with sufficient intensity.

If provable testing shows the CCS theory viable, then to play a major role in reducing CO₂ emissions, an enormous new infrastructure must be constructed to capture, process, and transport large quantities of CO₂. If coal fired power plants emit 2B tons of CO₂ every year, and all of this CO₂ is transported for sequestration, the quantity is equivalent to three times the weight and, under typical operating conditions, one-third of the annual volume of natural gas transported by the U.S. gas pipeline system. If 60% of the CO₂ produced from U.S. coal-based power generation were to be captured and compressed to a liquid for geologic sequestration, its volume would about equal the total U.S. oil consumption of 20 million barrels per day.

The Future of Coal – MIT summary report (PDF 21 pgs)

Coal Liquification/Gasification

The coal industry is planning to develop new markets for coal in the form of liquid and gas fuels for transportation and other purposes. “Liquid coal” would increase net CO₂ emissions even if the conversion process employed CCS technology, and would greatly increase CO₂ emissions without it. Coal-to-gas technology could either increase CO₂ emissions or decrease them depending on whether it displaces other uses of coal.

A Base-load Fallacy?

What about the base-load power generation coal provides? As you may know, Australia is another top coal consumer, being right up there with the US and China. According to Christine Milne, who was elected to represent Tasmania in the Australian Senate in 2004, is a United Nations Global 500 Laureate and a Vice-President of the IUCN (World Conservation Union):

Baseload power simply means a strong and steady source of energy that can provide the base of our energy supply. Traditionally in Australia, this has been supplied by coal, but, elsewhere in the world, renewables have been providing baseload for decades. Coal and nuclear power advocates, in government and industry, keep saying that renewables can’t provide baseload because they are intermittent. This is completely untrue.

Renewable energy sources are many and varied. Some, like wind or rooftop solar, are intermittent at an individual level, but steadier when linked together in a grid, and highly predictable in their peaks and troughs. Others, like solar thermal, geothermal and water power are completely steady. Bioenergy and some hydroenergy are even better in that they are able to be ramped up on demand. Importantly, electricity grids are designed to deal with large and sudden variations in both supply and demand of electricity, so the grid can already safely accommodate an input of about 30% wind energy, for example.

Individual burners in coal fired power stations are far from completely reliable. There are thousands of scheduled and unscheduled outages at coal fired power stations every year. The baseload supply isn’t guaranteed by each burner, though – it is guaranteed by the fact that there are so many of them operating at the same time. The same goes for renewables.

Experience around the world shows that there is no question that we can build a safe, reliable and steady energy grid with a broad range of renewable energy technologies spread across a broad geographical area.

Mark Diesendorf of energyscience.org.au, an independent non-governmental organization established as a collaboration of concerned scientists, engineers and policy experts, comes to a similar conclusion in his paper The Base-Load Fallacy.

We haven’t even cleaned up coal in our own back yards!

The George W. Bush administration has long attempted to avoid issuing new standards to regulate mercury emissions by coal-fired power plants based on Maximum Achievable Control Technology (MACT), as required by the Clean Air Act. Mercury is a neurotoxin that can cause brain damage and harm reproduction in women and wildlife; coal-fired power plants are the nation’s largest source of mercury air emissions, emitting about 48 tons annually (2003).

In 2005, the EPA pledged to cut mercury emissions 69 percent below 1999 levels by 2018. The regulation relies on an approach that allows dirtier power plants to avoid emission cuts by buying credits from cleaner power plants. The Bush administration said it was the best way to reduce mercury pollution without placing limits on individual plants, which the utility industry says would be too expensive and require unproven technologies. The rules that the EPA finally proposed for regulating power plants’ mercury emissions were discovered to have no fewer than 12 paragraphs lifted, sometimes verbatim, from a legal document prepared by industry lawyers. When challenged, EPA officials contended that the language crept into their proposed rules “through the interagency process.” If you will remember, the EPA’s own inspector general reported that agency scientists had been pressured to change their scientific findings in order to justify the Administration’s industry-friendly rules.

And even with the proposed impending limits, the Union for Concerned Scientists USA, says that mercury limits are still too high.

The Way to A Cleaner, Safer Future

Given the critical importance of combating climate change, all coal-related investments and policies should be judged by the ultimate standard of whether they will reduce global warming pollution at the pace and on the scale needed to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. Other considerations should include the environmental, human health and safety, and socioeconomic impacts of such investments and policies.

With these standards in mind, the United States should:

• Increase research and development (R&D) for CCS

• Stop building new coal-fired power plants without CCS.

• Stop investing in new coal-to-liquid plants and reject policies that support such investments.

• Ensure that any coal-to-gas plants employ CCS and that the resulting fuel is used to offset coal use rather than natural gas use.

• Significantly increase both deployment of and R&D for energy efficiency and renewable energy.

• Adopt statutes and stronger regulations that will reduce the environmental and societal costs of coal use throughout the fuel cycle.

• Put a price on CO₂ emissions by adopting a strong economy-wide cap-and-trade program that, in concert with other policies, will drive emissions reductions from existing coal plants and help ensure that the price of coal reflects its true costs.

• Ensure the transfer of low-carbon technologies to other countries—especially developing countries such as China and India—to reduce the serious threat posed by the world’s expanding use of coal without CCS.

All I’m saying is, “If all this expense is necessary for a cleaner coal, why not increase production toward various sustainable energy sources?”

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