The Carbon Question

Carbon sequestration and the concept of clean coal are not new ideas. So why are they suddenly arousing such polarized opinions, from vindication to vilification? Marie Shields investigates.

On the face of it, clean coal seems like an ideal answer to our energy woes. Since a large part of our energy production still comes from coal and is likely to continue to do so for the foreseeable future, why not investigate ways of making it less harmful to the environment, and more efficient into the bargain? That way, we can lessen our dependence on foreign oil, help protect the planet, and save money at the same time.

The clean coal concept does have friends in high places. As part of his election platform, President Barack Obama pledged to deploy clean coal technology, saying that, “Carbon capture and storage technologies hold enormous potential to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions as we power our economy with domestically produced and secure energy.”

Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who had been quoted several times in the run-up to his nomination as saying, “Coal is my worst nightmare,” was forced to backtrack during his confirmation hearing to calling coal merely, “A pretty bad dream.” He also went from being “not very optimistic” about the feasibility of clean coal, to seeing it as a “significant challenge.” When asked in a subsequent interview if clean coal was feasible, his answer was, “Yes.”

During the hearing, Chu also said, “There are . . . some people in the United States who feel perhaps we should turn off coal. But even if we do it, China and India will not. And so we are in a position to develop these technologies so that the world can capture carbon.”

Investment
In addition to giving the idea lip service, the government also taken action. One example of this is FutureGen, a $950 million initiative launched in 2003. In its original incarnation, FutureGen was to create a coal-based power plant in the small Illinois town of Mattoon, which would have used new technology to reduced greenhouse gas emissions. But costs for the project spiraled, and it was mothballed by the Bush administration last year.

When the new government took over, it said that the project would be restructured. In March, Secretary Chu said that he intended to go forward with FutureGen “in some modified way.” Then in June, the government announced it was reviving the project, at the same time upping the price tag to $1.6 billion, with $600 million of that coming from a coalition of 20 big companies, and the remaining $1 billion from the $3.4 billion of stimulus package money conveniently allocated to clean coal technologies.

At the DoE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory, considerable effort is also going into investigating new coal technologies. The carbon sequestration program began here in 1997 with $100 million in funding appropriated by Congress. R&D funding for the program in the current fiscal year is $150 million. As Tom Sarkus, NETL’s Senior Manager and Technical Analyst, explains, this funding is spread across several areas. “There’s a newer program that focuses specifically on carbon capture from the existing power plants, which includes a piece that looks, for example, at water issues related to that.

“There’s another program called the Clean Coal Power Initiative that funds large commercial-scale demonstration projects, which is being managed for the DoE by NETL. We’re currently evaluating applications for the third round of that program, which is focused exclusively on carbon capture and storage. Funding for that is appropriately $600 million.”

Opposition
There’s obviously a lot of money being put into carbon capture and storage research, by the government at least. And yet clean coal’s opponents would claim this is no better than pouring money down the drain. According to environmental groups and left-leaning think tanks, clean coal is nothing more than an elaborate smokescreen – a neat way of making consumers believe the big utility companies are doing something to combat climate change. This leaves the companies free to continue burning coal, which in its traditional form is universally acknowledged to be both dirty, and most politically incorrect of all, non-renewable.

According to an investigation by’60 minutes,’ as quoted on the website of the liberal political policy think tank Center for American Progress, big coal companies talk a lot about investing in clean coal research, but don’t put their money where their mouths are. The CAP article accuses the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), which it calls a front group for big utility companies, of spending large amounts of money on advertising the idea of clean coal, but very little on developing the technology to support it. It says ACCCE is determined to convince Americans that clean coal is the solution to global warming, at the expense of other, renewable alternatives.

CAP representatives did not respond to P&E’s request for an interview. Michael Morris, CEO of American Electric Power, an ACCCE member, in a recent interview with P&E’s sister media channel, MeettheBoss TV, was more forthcoming. When confronted with the idea that coal companies are engaged in very high level PR around clean coal and that the investment is not there to back up the words, he responded: “That may be true of a lot [of companies], but it surely isn’t true of American Electric Power. This project at Mountaineer has got a price tag of around $100 million, and we’re deeply invested in that. The ultimate expansion now to the first commercial scale will be on the order of $400 million, so we’re working with our checkbook rather than with our mouths.

During the same interview, Morris also pointed out that, “The carbon capture and storage project that we’re doing in West Virginia in our Mountaineer Station is essential to the ongoing debate of whether there is or isn’t such a thing as clean coal. We believe there is. We believe the technology’s there. We believe that it’s scalable, and that’s exactly what we intend to do. Internally we are focused on these are very important issues. We need to continue to fund them as we go. And again, at the end of the day it will serve our customers, the communities where we do business and our shareholders as well.”

The project Morris is referring to is AEP’s Mountaineer Carbon Capture and Storage Project, which comes online later this year, with the aim of removing 100,000 and 300,000 tons of CO2.

Partnership
Back at NETL, Tom Sarkus is more concerned with ensuring the long-term safety aspects of carbon sequestration than he is with the political storm surrounding it. One of his team’s objectives is to create 90 percent CO2 capture with 99 percent permanence. “We’ve defined that as meaning that there would be less than one percent leakage after 100 years,” he says. “And all to be achieved with no more than approximately a 10 percent increase in the cost of electricity when you compare it to a non-sequestered system.

“We want to develop these technologies and mitigate concerns over climate change. But the last objective tells us we have to do this in a way that is at least cost competitive.”

In addition to its own internal research, NETL operates within seven government industry partnerships that span different geologic regions of the United States and Canada in order to characterize and develop carbon sequestration opportunities. Taken together, theses seven partnerships consist of more than 350 different organizations, including state-level government agencies, universities and private industry.

The member organizations include 40 states, three American Indian nations and four Canadian provinces. There are also nine foreign governments, not counting the United States and Canada, that are participating in the projects in these regional partnerships. Sarkus explains that international governments are involved because, “There’s a saying that all politics is local, and the geologists tell me that all geology is really local. While there is an aspect of that that’s true, there are also some things you can learn from observing and participating in projects in other regions or even in other countries.”

Despite NETL’s obvious commitment to making carbon sequestration work, there are still those who oppose clean coal on every front. The strongest opposition has come from environmental groups, particularly those belonging to the Beyond Coal Campaign, spearheaded by the Sierra Club. According to the Sierra Club’s website, the Beyond Coal Campaign is working to: “Stop the construction of dirty, new coal plants by educating investors and decision-makers about the economic and environmental risks of investing in new coal; retire old plants that are the worst contributors to health-harming soot and smog pollution and replace them with clean energy solutions; and work with communities to protect our mountains, lands and waters by keeping our vast coal reserves in the ground.”

Debate
P&E arranged to interview Bruce Nilles, Director of the Beyond Coal Campaign, but he could not be reached at the appointed time and did not respond to subsequent attempts to contact him. However, the Campaign’s stance on clean coal is plainly stated in the Sierra Club fact sheet, ‘The Dirty Truth About Coal: Why Yesterday’s Technology Should Not Be Part of Tomorrow’s Energy Future.’ “The coal industry knows it must change or it will be out of business – that is why it is pushing ‘clean’ coal,” it says. “But, coal as it exists today is anything but clean.

“The supposedly ‘clean coal’ technologies that have attracted the most attention in recent years are carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) and integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC). As of now, CCS remains an unproven technology, and experts disagree as to how long it will take for this technology to be available for commercial and wide-scale use. IGCC unfortunately emits just as much global warming pollution as other coal plants.”

NETL’s Tom Sarkus becomes quite animated at the suggestion that we shouldn’t be spending money on investigating new ways of using coal instead of putting it into funding renewable energy sources.

“It’s missing the point,” he responds. “Long term we all recognize that we have to go toward other sources of energy such as renewables or even nuclear energy. But that’s very long term and may not happen for 50 or 100 years or more.

“In the meantime the issue is not either this or that, it’s not an either/or issue. All of the energy experts that I talk to generally come to a consensus that we need all of those forms of energy. We don’t have the luxury of not using one fuel source in favor of another.

“All of the credible analyses that I have seen say that in order to achieve any level of stabilization of CO2 in the atmosphere you need to pursue three approaches roughly in equal measure. The first is to start shifting towards less carbon intensive energy sources, not just renewables, but also sources such as nuclear energy.

“The second pathway is to become more aggressive in pursuing energy efficiency and energy conservation. And the third category is carbon capture and storage, in order to preserve fossil fuels as a viable option. The studies that I have seen generally agree that you cannot achieve climate stabilization with any one or any two of those approaches. You need to use all three, in roughly equal measure.”

Options
Sarkus does have a point. Just because CCS is an ‘unproven’ technology is no reason not to pursue it. About IGCC, which the Sierra Club fact sheet describes as “as polluting as traditional coal plants,” Sarkus says, “Many people feel that IGCC, because it has a combined cycle power plant, is capable of achieving higher levels of thermal efficiency, and it also produces a gas stream that is more amenable and economical for CO2 capture and storage.”

The environmentalists’ biggest beef seems to be with the coal-burning utilities it accuses of mudding the waters by apparently promoting the concept of clean coal as if it exists today, and as if it will solve all of our environmental problems on its own, when it’s obvious that it won’t. It’s not surprising that companies whose main revenue comes from coal production and consumption should feel threatened by the idea that this income source could disappear. But this does not mean that we should refuse to investigate methods of burning coal in a cleaner, more efficient fashion.

It can be easy to let the debate obscure the real issues. The United States still has large, untapped coal reserves. We produce about 20 percent, or 1.1 billion tons, of the world's coal supply – second only to China – and coal generates about half of the electricity we use. It would be naïve in the extreme to suggest we can stop burning coal overnight. At the same time, our environmental situation is becoming increasingly desperate.

Perhaps clean coal, in its perfect form, does not yet exist, but neither does the technology to use renewable sources such as solar, wind and hydro to supply enough power to meet our growing energy needs. We need to pursue every avenue, and this includes developing ways to burn cleaner coal in the short term, especially if it buys us more time to develop renewable options.

The final word goes to Deputy Laboratory Director David Hill of the Idaho National Laboratory. “If we can solve the carbon sequestration problem,” he says, “particularly in the US where 50 percent of the electricity comes from coal and there are enormous coal reserves, that would be very, very important. I don’t believe we should ever strike an energy source from the list of potential options on political or other grounds. We don’t have that option left any more.”

Types of carbon sequestration
Tom Sarkus outlines the carbon sequestration efforts currently under way at NETL
Terrestrial sequestration refers to capturing CO2 with plants and with microorganisms that are generally present in soils. There’s definitely a place for that. If we can increase the carbon uptake of terrestrial sinks by just one percent over the next 50 years our estimate is that that could store an additional 12 billion tons of CO2.

Geologic sequestration is a larger portion of what we’re doing at NETL – injecting the CO2 into underground rock formations. It’s something that is happening now in other industries but you can draw some inferences by analogy. One of the options for geologic sequestration is enhanced oil recovery. Enhanced oil recovery using CO2 flooding is currently being used in the US, in some places on a fairly large scale.

Another kind of formation that we’re researching is saline formation because often the sedimentary rock formations that we want to target contain a brine formation far more commonly than they might contain petroleum, oil or natural gas.

How to get electricity from coal
There are three technology platforms used to generate electricity from coal. The first is a traditional boiler, coupled up to a steam turbine and a generator. The second is fluidized bed combustion, which has a much higher level of fuel tolerance. It can utilize grades of fuel that would otherwise have to be sent to landfill or dispose of.

The third is integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC). There are currently about 30 IGCC plants worldwide. Fifteen of those operate on petroleum liquid and gaseous fuels. Of the remaining 15, nine of them operate on petroleum coke and six of them are designed to operate on coal: three in Europe, two in the United States and one in Japan.