STUDY SAYS “CLEAN” COAL IS SHEER FOLLY

Carbon capture plan 'sheer folly'
Nathan VanderKlippe, September 24, 2009 (Toronto Globe and Mail)
and
Refitted to Bury Emissions, Plant Draws Attention
Matthew L. Wald, September 21, 2009 (NY Times)
and
Attn Matthew Wald at the NY Times: Does This Look Like “Environment-Friendly”Coal to You?!
Jesse Jenkins, April 17, 2009 (Huffington Post)

SUMMARY
The world’s seductive plan to make coal "clean" will take a hard hit from a new review of available information out of a distinguished Canadian university. A big breakthrough in the effort to get the truth told, the paper crystallizes and confirms doubts about the safety and affordability of “clean” coal.

BURYING CARBON DIOXIDE IN UNDERGROUND SALINE AQUIFERS: Political Folly or Climate Change Fix?, by Graham Thomson, for the Program on Water Issues of the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto, is a compilation of existing information.

It describes the concept of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) that is being tested at the Mountaineer Power Plant in West Virgina owned by mega-utility American Electric Power (AEP). Both Thomson’s paper and a piece in the NY Times by Matthew Wald describe the concept and its seductive promise and then the Thomson paper goes on to detail the many unanswered questions, questions the proponents of CCS at Mountaineer and other proposed projects should have better answers for before they move ahead with the technology.

Thomson’s comprehensive look at CCS leads him to the definitive conclusion that while research, development and demonstration is necessary, the technology is likely to prove “sheer folly.”

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COMMENTARY
There are some things that can seem immensely seductive on first glance yet become quite unattractive on closer examination. Anna Nicole Smith, Paris Hilton, some recent presidents and the nuclear energy facility at Chernobyl spring to mind.

CCS is another of those seductive ideas that, on closer examination, isn’t quite what it promises to be. It would be wonderful – if it weren’t prohibitively expensive and potentially dangerous.

No less distinguished a group of experts than the Nobel Prize-winning scientists of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) believe CCS is one of the most important technologies in the fight to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions (GhGs) and reverse the rising world average temperature. An IPCC 2007 report said 55% of world CO2 emissions can be safely sequestered in deep geologic formations in this century.

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Coal is the dominant source of electricity generation in the world and electricity consumption, growing at 2% per year, will double by 2035 and triple by 2055. About 48% of U.S. power is generated by burning coal and the U.S. has 33 coal plants under or near construction despite a heroic anti-coal movement that has stopped more than 100 projects in the last decade. A recent authoritative MIT report said China is building “the equivalent of two, 500-megawatt, coal-fired power plants per week” and adding the generation capacity of the entire UK power system yearly.

Scientists and engineers from China, India and around the world, where emerging economic growth depends on electricity generated by cheap coal, are studying Mountaineer and planning pilot projects of their own. (See A SCIENTIFIC LOOK AT "CLEAN" COAL)

Coal is abundant in the biggest industrial powerhouse nations and they belive they must keep consuming it to stay economically competitive so they believe it is essential to find a way to do so without despoiling the very earth on which that economic competition is at work. CCS, being necessary, must, obviously, be the answer.

Many combine the inevitability of coal and the dire straits of impending climate change and conclude CCS is the only way out.

The Thomson paper makes it clear that when any objective assessment is made of the numbers, they don’t add up. Few forms of electricity generation are likely to be more expensive than coal with emissions capture and sequestration.

Adding it all up, it gets expensive. (click to enlarge)

And even at its best, CCS can’t be shown to be better than theoretically unlikely to be dangerous in the short-term. Nobody can say anything definitive about the long-term safety of sequestration despite the fact that sequestration is only an answer if it is permanent.

AEP, the biggest U.S. electricity generator, will capture 1.5% of the CO2 emissions at Mountaineer for 2-to-5 years, compress it into liquid and pipe it a mile and a half underground into porous sandstone and dolomite.

It will require at least 15% of the plant’s power to do so and as much as 30%, adding significantly (some say prohibitively) to the cost of power generation.

It will take a lot of energy to compress CO2. (click to enlarge)

More importantly, nobody can be certain what will happen to what is sequestered but there are a LOT of questions about what COULD happen.

Going forward, AEP and Alstom, the makers of the chilled ammonia-based capture and sequestration coal plant retrofit technology, will share the cost and re-evaluate the performance. Going in, they predict they will be ready to retrofit coal plants to capture and sequester 90% of their emissions by the time Congress activates energy and climate legislation mandating GhG reductions in power generation.

Promises like that, in the absence of proof-of-concept, can’t help but bring to mind hucksters.

Such promises also bring to mind promises the coal industry has made in the past that turned out to be husterism. Energy policy analyst Jesse Jenkins recently pointed out that cleaning up coal goes far beyond its CO2 spew. Coal needs to (1) stop the devastation of mountaintop removal mining, (2) stop building new plants that don’t have the actual capacity to capture emissions and (3) deal with the disposal of coal ash and slurry in an environmentally acceptable and safe manner. (See the October 4 60 Minutes segment on coal for more on its filthy and dangerous byproducts.)

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Some scientists, and even policy analyst Jenkins, are wishful for what CCS could do if it could work and stress the urgency of doing something to interrupt the spew of GhGs in the Mountaineer plant’s Ohio-West Virginia region where there are so many huge coal-burning facilities it is called Megawatt Alley.

Locals like Elisa Young, knowing how many times in the past the coal industry has promised to clean up its act and how many times it has been caught lying and failing, simply want an end to the use of coal everywhere. They foresee the promises of the hucksters turning into groundwater ruined by carbonic acid or other toxic byproducts leaching out of so-called permanent storage or a seismic event leading to an even worse catastrophe.

Yet another price that nobody is volunteering to pay. And insuring sequestered CO2 against long-term leakage is so far seen as bad business by the insurance industry. (click to enlarge)

As locals and anti-coal activists insist, fossil fools are frittering away precious time and resources on seductive, unaffordable, unsafe impracticalities in the fight against global climate change while the New Energies are ready, affordable and safe and lack only the commitment of time and resources to supply the electricity both developed and emerging economies urgently need to go on growing.

Why are they so certain CCS is frittering? Thomson’s paper details the answer to that question.

(1) Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) proves nothing: Small scale injection of CO2 into old oil wells has enhanced the wells’ output and proven relatively safe but this does not constitute valid evidence of cost-effectiveness or safety. 2/3 of the CO2 comes back up, meaning it does not stay sequesterd ong-term or solve GhG problems. EOR projects are inadequately studied and far too small a scale to prove anything.
(2) Canada’s oil sands prove nothing: Some have suggested the fact that oil sands and shale formations can trap hydrocarbons proves geologic sequestration is viable. Not the same geology. And transforming captured CO2 and reusing it as oil from sands and shale eliminates no GhGs.
(3) CCS economics are like nuclear economics: Both technologies are too expensive to build. Both are complex, capital intensive and have many scientific uncertainties. Both have big knowledge gaps, like what to do with the waste. Both propose the cat’s answer – bury it in a hole in the ground. When it comes time to pay for the infrastructure and insurance, it will turn prohibitively expensive technology into intolerably expensive technology.
(4) Scale: One estimate puts a U.S. CCS infrastructure big enough to hold GhGs to 2005 levels at 300,000 injection wells, and a $3 trillion cost by 2030. Acutally cutting emissions below 2005 levels would obviously cost considerably more. University of Manitoba mathematician and energy expert Vaclav Smil calculated that CCS for 25% of world emissions would require a CO2 infrastructure 2 times the existing oil and gas infrastructure. Yet no utility scale pilot project has proven the technology. New Energy could easily grow as fast with a similar federal commitment and it is proven. An represents no long-term danger being passed on to future generations.

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(5) Contamination of groundwater and other leakage: The potentail for leakage is a known unknown and yet proponentd promise CO2 sequestration will be permanent. That just doesn’t happen on and in this earth. The planet is a living, evolving environment. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab studies show the management of groundwater where CO2 is sequestered must be, at best, an “intensive task.” (Meaning costly and uncertain.) Groundwater can become acidified, heavy metals including arsenic, lead and other metals could be absorbed and drinking water could be contaminated.
(6) Regulation Deficit: Enormous regulatory attention will be needed, adding to the expense and uncertainty.
(7) Water use: The increased need for energy production by CCS retrofits will make coal-generated electricity as water-intensive as nuclear-generated electricity. Both levels of water consumption are prohibitive in a drought-troubled world with diminishing water resources and a rising population.
(8) Knowledge Gap: Much is not known about CCS. Tha it is another known unknown that puts the viability of future generations at risk if present generations choose the easy seduction of CCS over the hard but substantial choice of building a New Energy economy.

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(9) Other uncertainties: There are many unknown unknowns. Geologists agree there are many “fundamental things that we don’t understand” about what goes on deep underground, like, for instance, what changes during and after seismic events. Not just earthquakes but largely unnoticed subsurface shifting as well.
(9) Public skepticism: The more people find out about CO2 being buried in their backyards, the more they will stop that from happening. When people think about their grandchildren, they develop grave doubts that the sequestered CO2 will stay down. That is one of the things that has stopped nuclear power plant development and it is likely to impede CCS development. Yet the world cannot wait for an answer to emissions. It must pick a way forward that is viable. Public enthusiasm for New Energy is widespread and largely unwavering.
(10) Alternatives: New Energy and Energy Efficiency, even at their most controversial, do not represent the kind of economic and safety challenges that come with CCS (and new nuclear). Energy Efficiency is the cheapest, easiest way to cut emissions and New Energy is ready to go to work. All they require is supportive policy and a public commitment.
(11) Thompson’s Bottom Line: “In sum, the marriage of a brave new technology with a political fix for an immediate climate problem could have negative long-term consequences for Canadian taxpayers and water drinkers without stabilizing the climate. To move forward on the sequestration of billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide in underground saline aquifers without strong regulations, clear liability, effective oversight, sound science and a transparent decision-making process would be sheer folly.”

Premier research authority says it is at least 2 decades away and the world really can't wait that long. (click to enlarge)

QUOTES
- Howard Herzog, senior research engineer, MIT (quoted by Thomson): "The amount of oil we consume in one day might be similar to the amount of CO2 we'll have to handle daily.”
- David G. Hawkins, Natural Resources Defense Council, testifying at a Senate hearing (quoted by Thomson): “If that makes a power plant ‘capture-ready’ Mr. Chairman, then my driveway is ‘Ferrari-ready.’ We should not be investing today in coal plants at more than a billion dollars apiece with nothing more than a hope that some kind of capture system will turn up. We would not get on a plane to a destination if the pilot told us there was no landing site but options were being researched…”
- David Suzuki, Canadian scientist (quoted by Thomson): “You’d think we would have learned from the past that we shouldn’t rush to apply new technologies before we know what the long-term effects will be. Carbon capture and storage may be worth studying, but the technology’s potential should not be used as an excuse for the oil and coal industries to avoid reducing their emissions and investing in renewable energy. After all, we know that energy conservation and renewable energy will yield immediate effects of a cleaner environment. We don’t know what carbon capture and storage will cost, when it will be commercially viable, or what it will do, other than perhaps to give us a way to keep relying on finite and polluting sources of energy.”

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- Jesse Jenkins, energy policy analyst, Huffington Post: “Coal is currently dirty from beginning to end, and we have to clean up each stage of the dingy fuel's lifecycle to even approximate clean… I do not oppose research and demonstration of CCS technology. Given the scale of our global energy and climate challenge, I don't think we can afford to take the technology off the table before we even figure out if it'll work or if it'll open up a cost competitive option to accelerate the reduction of global greenhouse gas emissions. As long as CCS RD&D money doesn't come at the expense of full-scale investments in truly clean renewable energy technologies, I'm fine with a modest taxpayer investment in this technology…What I am VERY opposed to is journalists, politicians and industry PR hacks touting "clean coal" without getting serious about what that would entail!”
- David H. Holtz, executive director of Progress Michigan: “Coal is the drug of choice of a major industry with a lot of political power…There’s no evidence that burying carbon dioxide in the earth is a better strategy than aggressively pursuing other alternatives that clearly are better for the environment and will in the long run be less costly…”
- Michael Morris, Chairman/President, AEP: “I really believe, in my heart of hearts, that coal is going to be burned around the world for years to come…Retrofitting is going to be essential.”
- Dina Kruger, director of the climate change division. EPA: “With proper site selection and good management, we should be able to implement this safely…”
- Elisa Young, anti-coal activist and resident of the Mountaineer plant region: “It doesn’t matter to me if a scientist says it may or may not leak…That’s not going to stop it from leaking when push comes to shove.”

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- Thomson: “The technology holds the promise of massive reductions in emissions but any success may ultimately be limited to a relatively few projects due to cost, liability, technology, scale and public skepticism. CCS may turn out to be another costly Faustian bargain and classic technical fix…The very promise of CCS, whether delivered or not, will extend the life of coal and other hydrocarbons, thus making more economies dependent on fossil fuels. Instead of buying us time to find alternate sources of clean energy, CCS is buying politicians’ time to avoid making tough, unpopular decisions. The allure of CCS threatens to divert resources from energy efficiency and delay more durable reforms. As one former nuclear expert put it: ‘CS may be, politically, an easy way out of having to make more difficult and sustainable choices.’”