Jun 24 2009

The Case for Cleaning Coal

Posted by: Jonathan Marshall

No one ever thought it possible, but an issue has finally emerged to unite the oddest of bedfellows: Senator Tom Coburn, the conservative Republican from Oklahoma who called global warming "just a lot of crap," and Greenpeace, one of the most zealous of environmental activist groups.

That issue is federal support for research on technology to capture carbon dioxide emissions, primarily from coal-fired power plants, and store them underground (even under the ocean floor) where they can't contribute to greenhouse warming of the earth.

Both right and left are slamming a decision this month by the Department of Energy to resurrect a Bush-era proposal to fund FutureGen, an R&D project to demonstrate carbon capture and storage (CCS) at a new coal-fired power plant in Mattoon, Ill. Tens of billions of dollars more could be made available for CCS projects through the Waxman-Markey bill on global warming.

The controversy has all the ingredients that make national action on global warming so difficult: the specter of huge federal expenditures, major scientific and engineering uncertainty, and the clash of powerful political lobbies (especially coal-related interests) against partisan and ideological opponents (Coburn and Greenpeace).

Sen. Coburn this month put FutureGen--slated to receive $1 billion in stimulus funds--at second place on his list of 100 federal projects that he denounced as "wasteful spending."  

Meanwhile Michael Crocker, media director at Greenpeace USA, said, "The billions for CCS make a new fleet of helicopters for the president or Alaska's infamous 'Bridge to Nowhere' look like a rummage sale bargain. At least we know helicopters and bridges actually work."

Ouch.

Skepticism about CCS isn't confined to the two extremes. The Economist magazine charged in March that "For the moment, at least, CCS is mostly hot air":

[T]here is not a single big power plant using CCS anywhere in the world. Utilities refuse to build any, since the technology is expensive and unproven. Advocates insist that the price will come down with time and experience, but it is hard to say by how much, or who should bear the extra cost in the meantime. Green pressure groups worry that captured carbon will eventually leak. In short, the world's leaders are counting on a fix for climate change that is at best uncertain and at worst unworkable. 

But the Department of Energy can make a good case for its subsidies. For one thing, several promising technologies already exist for grabbing CO2 out of the air (or, in this case, out of flue gases). And for years, oil companies have pumped compressed CO2 underground to displace and extract more crude. The challenge is to find cheaper ways to extract CO2 and safe underground storage caverns that won't leak for hundreds of years.

Hard, yes, but not impossible. Studies at MIT and elsewhere suggest it can be done for $50-$70 per ton of CO2, more expensive than many energy efficiency investments, natural gas-fired generation and some forms of renewable energy, but less than the cost of some policies now being adopted to fight global warming.

Many energy experts advocate funding a reasonable number of demonstration projects to help narrow the cost uncertainties and advance the technology before deciding the fate of coal and CCS. They are joined by mainstream national environmental organizations such as the Natural Resources Defense Council and Environmental Defense Fund.

Interestingly, Royal Dutch Shell has redirected its "clean energy" investments from solar and wind to place its bets instead on CCS demonstration projects. "We think carbon capture and storage is one of the few technologies which has the potential to become very big," said CEO Jeroen van der Veer in May. "And if it becomes very big, then you start to do something about greenhouse gases."

If nothing else, political realities suggest that with half of U.S. electric power coming from coal--and millions of jobs tied to it--coal will have to be part of the solution.

As Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said sagely, "Even if the United States turns its back on coal, China and India will not. Given the state of affairs, I would prefer to say let's try to develop technologies that can get large fractions of the carbon dioxide out of coal."

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