Category Archives: Power plants

CCS doesn’t make coal ‘clean’

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Reporting on SaskPower’s proposed $1.24 billion project to capture and store carbon dioxide from the Boundary Dam coal power station in Saskatchewan, many news sources have described the technology as ‘clean coal’.

There is no such thing.

Even if a power plant could be built that separates 100% of the carbon dioxide from its emissions and then buries them forever, there will still be lots about coal that is far from clean. There is coal mining, which kills thousands of people a year and contaminates land and water supplies. There are the particulate emissions from coal plants, which cause many human deaths. There are other toxic emissions from coal plants, including mercury, radioactive materials, and nitrogen and sulphur oxides (which cause acid rain and other problems). There is toxic coal ash that is left over after combustion, and which many countries store in sub-standard ways.

Even if climate change were not a problem, we would want the world to be moving away from toxic, dangerous, dirty coal. That said, given that countries like China and the United States have large coal reserves and that there is strong political pressure to keep burning the stuff, it does seem sensible to allow coal power companies to develop and deploy CCS technology, provided that it can be shown to be safe and effective. It is the companies and the people buying power who should pay for the deployment of such technology, however, since they are the ones who are harming everyone else with toxic and greenhouse gas pollution.

Killer coal

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Fossil fuels have a negative human impact that goes over and above the climate change they cause:

“One million people a year die prematurely in China from air pollution from energy and industrial sectors,” said Stefan Hirschberg, head of safety analysis at the Paul Scherrer Institute, an engineering research center in Switzerland. More than 10,000 Americans a year die prematurely from the health effects of breathing emissions from coal-burning power plants, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Those deaths are another element that can be set against the higher cost per kilowatt-hour of electricity from sources like wind and solar.

A similar estimate on the number of deaths caused by coal in the United States was posted on this site in September 2010.

Costly carbon capture

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Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is sometimes touted as a way to burn fossil fuels without adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. While it is not entirely without promise, it certainly has issues, and it is not plausible that it could single-handedly address the problem of climate change.

One big problem with CCS is money – it costs a lot to separate CO2 from exhaust gases, compress or liquify the CO2, and then inject it underground. Cost issues recently scuppered a proposed CCS project involving Saskatchewan and Montana:

A proposed Saskatchewan-Montana carbon capture and storage project that Premier Brad Wall said nearly two years ago would “turn some heads internationally” quietly expired last fall.

The $270 million project was launched with great fanfare in a May 2009 legislature signing ceremony with Wall and Montana governor Brian Schweitzer, with the Saskatchewan Party government pledging up to $50 million and looking for investment from the Canadian and United States governments.

But, Rob Norris, minister responsible for SaskPower, said Wednesday “those talks have been discontinued” because Ottawa turned down the province’s request for $100 million last year.

The federal decision was made after the United States government made clear it would not put in the $100 million US for the project requested by Montana governor Brian Schweitzer, said Norris.

That isn’t to say that CCS will never be an affordable option for climate change mitigation. Rather, it suggests that the idea that CCS will be able to automatically deal with the problem of greenhouse gas pollution is overly optimistic.

It is also worth noting that companies that want government subsidies to fund their CCS operations are basically saying that the general public should pay the cost of dealing with their pollution. It is probably sensible for the government to support basic research and development, but it seems unjust to finance the commercial operation of CCS-equipped facilities, should any ever be built.

CCS has other significant limitations as well. It isn’t guaranteed that the gases will stay underground, they could migrate up into aquifers or back into the atmosphere. CCS also cannot be applied to mobile sources of emissions (like vehicles) or diffuse sources of emissions (like in situ oil sands extraction). CCS also leaves us with the other non-climate problems associated with fossil fuels, like the toxins produced when they are burned or the awkward geopolitical situations they put countries into.

The world’s ferocious demand for coal

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This is very worrisome:

The IEA estimates that China, which generates more than 70% of its electricity with coal, will build 600 gigawatts (GW) of coal-fired power capacity in the next quarter-century—as much as is currently generated with coal in America, Japan and the European Union put together. Nomura, a Japanese bank, thinks that may be an underestimate. It reckons China will add some 500GW of coal-fired power by as early as 2015, and will more than double its current generating capacity by 2020. It expects Indian coal-fired power generation to grow too—though more slowly.

Even developing countries with vast quantities of coal under home soil will find themselves unable to dig it out quickly enough to meet demand. China, the world’s biggest coal producer by some distance, has turned to foreign suppliers over the past couple of years and is likely to rely on them even more in future. Its voracious appetite for energy and steel means it will need at least 5-7% more coal each year. Citigroup reckons China will import 233m tonnes in 2011. As Daniel Brebner of Deutsche Bank points out, that is considerably more than the annual capacity of Richards Bay in South Africa or Newcastle in Australia, the world’s biggest coal ports.

If there is to be any hope that rapidly developing states like India and China will switch to a low-carbon development path, it seems essential that rich states like Canada and the United States lead the way – demonstrating that de-carbonization can be achieved at an acceptable cost.

Unfortunately, that seems to be the last thing on the minds of our politicians at the moment. Indeed, developed states remain happy to export coal to places like China, then import some of the products it helps to produce:

As environmentalists point out, rich countries that spurn coal-fired power while exporting the rocks to countries with less ambitious emissions targets are merely shifting the problem around the globe.

For the world as a whole to succeed in reducing greenhouse gas pollution, there are going to need to be restrictions on digging up fossil fuels, as well as importing and exporting them.

2009 energy production figures

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Statistics Canada has just released some information on energy trends in 2009.

Production for all forms of energy was down: refined petroleum products (like gasoline), natural gas, electricity, and coal:

Coal production was down 8.7% in 2009, primarily as a result of lower demand by electric utilities, as well as in the manufacturing sector.

Consumption of coal by the manufacturing sector decreased 20.7% in 2009 from 2008, as a result of decreased demand for energy in the manufacturing sector overall.

Exports of Canadian coal fell 12.8% in 2009 following three years of increases. About half (51%) of all coal produced in Canada in 2009 was exported.

The principal cause of all of this is almost certainly ongoing economic weakness, in both Canada and the United States. If economic growth picks up sharply, energy demand will probably rise with it.

Coal and China

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Cutting global coal use is the single most important thing to do, if we want to prevent the effects of climate change from becoming catastrophic. As such, the use of coal in China is a critical issue for the entire world. In 2009, China consumed 49% of the world’s coal, much of that to produce exports that went to other countries, from steel girders to iPods.

Much of the coal China uses is produced and shipped domestically (sometimes causing carbon tariffs). The fact that China’s leadership is less clueless about science than those in Canada and the U.S. may help. That said, it will take an enormous effort to decarbonize the global economy before catastrophic climate change has been locked in. Curbing coal burning in China will be one of the key battles in that overall effort.

Beyond climate change, air pollution from coal also causes enormous death and suffering in China – further reason to push aggressively toward better energy options.

The Ultimate Roller Coaster Ride: An Abbreviated History of Fossil Fuels

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This video is rather quick, and might be overwhelming to those not already somewhat familiar with the history being described. Still, it does a remarkable job of relating the history of fossil fuels in five minutes:

Readers may not agree with all of the arguments – some are certainly debatable – but it seems like a good way of pressing people to think about some of the ways fossil fuels have influenced history, and about some of the interconnected issues of today.

The video was produced by the post carbon institute. The organization has written material that expands on the video: The Post Carbon Reader – Managing the 21st Century’s Sustainability Crises. They have some pretty high-profile fellows: Bill McKibben and William Rees among them.

Keepin’ Carbon Underground

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For the last 10,000 years during which human civilization has emerged, the planet has had a relatively stable climate. Carbon embedded in coal, oil and gas has been a major establishing feature of the climate around the world.

Since the Industrial Revolution, humanity has been burning those fuels at ever-increasing rates – rapidly returning that carbon to the atmosphere. As a result, we’re on track to heat up the planet by more than 5°C by 2100. That is far beyond the 2°C threshold of warming that scientists and policy-makers have widely accepted as ‘dangerous‘.

The solution to human-induced climate change is to leave most of the world’s remaining fossil fuels underground. That way, the carbon they contain will be kept in a place where it doesn’t affect the climate. To accomplish that, we are going to need to find alternative sources of energy. Nuclear fission is one of the temporary bridging options. However it has its own issues: it has non-renewable fuel and waste and proliferation problems. Ultimately, though, if humanity wants to power itself in a way that can be perpetuated forever and which does not threaten the climate, we’re going to need to draw the energy we need from renewable sources: hydroelectricity, solar power, wind, tidal, geothermal, and so on.

Given how much it would transform our world – and how many human lives that would harm – we need to keep most of the carbon still locked in fossil fuels underground.

Coal and US air pollution deaths

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While climate change is the most worrisome problem associated with coal-fired power plants, they also produce large amounts of air pollution that affects human health. A new report from the non-profit Clean Air Task Force estimates that “pollution from coal-fired power plants will result in the premature death of more than 13,000 people [in the United States] this year.

That is definitely something to consider when people argue that we must keep using coal because it is the cheapest source of electricity available. It may be cheap per kilowatt-hour, but it is very costly in other ways.

The timeline for fusion

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When it comes to the problem of powering the global economy without fossil fuels, people sometimes point to completely new energy generation techniques as solutions. For example, space-based solar power and nuclear fusion.

While it is possible such technologies will play an important role in the long term, it is important to be realistic about both costs and timeframes for development and deployment. Excavation has just begun for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), in France. This machine, when completed, will be a prototype for a prototype for a commercial nuclear fusion power station. It is hoped that this device will teach scientists enough about controlled fusion to make a machine that could actually produce energy, rather than just consuming it by heating up fusion components and keeping them close together with powerful electromagnets. Achieving that will require a number of substantial technical advancements.

Contrast that with the kind of global emission pathway that is necessary to avoid 2°C of temperature increase, and thus ‘dangerous’ climate change. Given that little is happening in the United States, hoping for global emissions to peak by 2011 seems excessively optimistic. If they peak in 2020 – which would be a major achievement, requiring cooperation from developing states – the world would need to cut emissions to zero by 2040. It really doesn’t seem plausible that fusion could help with that, though it could play a role later on.

That said, there is some chance that somebody will find a way to achieve success with fusion more rapidly. It certainly makes sense to devote some fraction of our total research resources toward technologies that may be very promising in the long term. At the same time, we shouldn’t bet on breakthrough technologies solving our climate problem. We need to be ready to do it by improving and deploying existing technologies, while remaining open to the possibility that novel developments will end up making the process easier.

Physics buzz has more information on the current status of ITER.