The debate over clean coal heats up

Source: Technology Digital

Date :5/31/2007 2:10:43 PM

Clean coal advocates and enrivonmentalists spar over the value of the industry.

By James Buchanan

The term may seem an oxymoron, but clean coal technology has been a focus of government action since the late 1980s.

The most recent of these programs is President George W. Bush’s Clean Coal Power Initiative (CCPI), which supports a broad range of research and large-scale projects to target the current most pressing environmental challenges.

While there are successes to report with this and past initiatives, there are still a number of concerns among environmental groups that these technologies are not nearly clean enough or their implementation is not a financially viable alternative.

However, as the debate continues the federal government is moving ahead with the second phase of the CCPI, and in April announced the approval of a clean coal burning plant near Orlando, Fla.

“The recent actions by the government under its Clean Coal Power Initiative are welcomed because it’s another step forward to increasing efficiency,” says Jason Hayes, communications director for the American Coal Council. “According to the federal Annual Energy Outlook for 2007, it is expected that coal usage will increase by 43 percent by 2030, from 25 quadrillion BTUs in 2005 to 40 quadrillion in 2030.”

Already coal accounts for nearly 50 percent of all electric generation in the country and 22 percent of all energy produced in the US. Further, according to Hayes the US has enough coal deposits to last another 230 years at current usage rates.

However, with those numbers coal is also responsible for 36 percent of overall releases of carbon dioxide (the main gas responsible for global warming), sulfur dioxide, mercury, and nitrogen oxides, according to the Sierra Club.

Therefore, the Bush administration and others are pinning their hopes on clean coal technologies as a means to power the nation while lessening its dependence on foreign oil.

To this end, according to the National Energy Technology Library, a division of the US Department of Energy dedicated to fossil energy research, there are 159 proposed and new coal fired power plants equaling 96,000 megawatts and $141 billion in new investment.

Of these plants, the above mentioned $569 million, 285-megawatt coal-fired power plant recently approved in Florida is expected to be one of the cleanest most efficient plants of its kind in the world. The plant will be co-owned by Southern Power Company, the Orlando Utilities Commission, and Kellogg, Brown & Root. The Department of Energy is providing 41 percent of the funding, $235 million, as part of the CCPI.

“The innovative technologies we are funding through President Bush’s Clean Coal Power Initiative hold the promise of generating clean, reliable, and affordable electricity in the United States,” says Samuel W. Bodman, Secretary of Energy, “utilizing our most abundant natural resource, coal.”

The Florida plant is one of three projects approved under the initiative. The initiative is a 10-year, $2 billion demonstration program that seeks to research and deliver innovative technologies to improve the environmental performance of new and existing coal-fired power plants.

According to the Department of Energy, the Florida plant will use a form of integrated gasification-combined cycle technology and state-of-the-art emission controls. The plant is expected to provide a cost effective and environmentally sound use of low-rank coals, and coals with high moisture and ash content. These types comprise half the proven US and world reserves.

Further, the Florida plant is part of the second of four planned phases for the CCPI, which provides government co-financing for these technologies to help utilities meet the President’s Clear Skies Initiative. The CSI is intended to cut sulfur, nitrogen and mercury pollutants from power plants by approximately 70 percent by 2018. According to the Department of Energy, some of the projects are also showing ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by boosting the efficiency of how coal is burned to produce electricity.

However, not everyone is an enthusiastic supporter of the CCPI.

“There is no such thing as ‘clean coal’ and there never will be,” says Dan Becker, director of the Sierra Club’s Global Warming and Energy Program. “It’s an oxymoron.”

Carl Pope, Sierra Club executive director, agrees and has said in the past that “Dressing these plants with sweet names like ‘clean coal’ does little to stop pollution from spewing out of the smokestacks.”

In an article published by the Sierra Club and written by Marilyn Berlin Snell in the January/February Sierra Club Magazine, Snell asserts that clean coal technologies will do little to alter issues related to strip mining and will not completely remove dangerous emissions.

In particular, Snell asserts that the same technology that will be used at the Florida plant, integrated gasification combined cycle, can reduce emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, mercury and particulates. However, this is accomplished at costs 15 to 20 percent higher than conventional coal plants, “and some utilities claim it is unreliable.”

One of the strategies she says should be considered is a carbon tax that takes into account the health and environmental impacts of fossil fuel burning generating plants. Such a tax would decrease incentives to continue burning fossil fuels such as coal while increasing the relative financial viability of cleaner energy sources.

For Bill Burtis, communications manager for Clean Air Cool Planet, a non-profit group that advises companies on how to reduce greenhouse emissions, coal is the fuel of the past. It may be possible to clean them up, but they are still essentially dirty sources of energy, he argues.

“We would much rather see investment going into new, truly renewable clean energy resources such as wind, solar, new hydro, geo-thermal, and cellulose-based initiatives such as ethanol than continue to rely on these older forms,” he says.

Burtis also discussed hydrogen, which he says probably won’t be used as a fuel source, but for energy storage. To investors, his advice is to look for “Who is going to really crack the nut on the effective use of hydrogen.”

Another worthy investment, Burtis says, is distributive generation, which entails breaking the electric grid down into smaller units with more local and limited in scope generating facilities.

At the end of the day, though, says Hayes of the American Coal Council, coal still is a plentiful resource and with new technologies could be used as a much cleaner fuel.

“Demand for electricity is increasing dramatically and coal already provides 50 percent of the electric generation in the country,” Hayes says. “As we continue to demand more electricity and demand that it be affordable, coal is the obvious choice. This is especially true when you know that the country has enough of a supply to last another 230 years while other resources such as oil and gas have reached or are about to reach their peak.”