Coal news and updates

The mix of energy sources used to produce electricity is changing—slowly. Coal is still king and is expected to retain that title for decades, giving ground only gradually to renewable fuels, natural gas and nuclear power.

 

Coal will account for 39% of global net electricity generation next year and 36% in 2040, according to projections by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

 

Many people would like to see that number drop more dramatically. With concerns mounting about the effect of greenhouse gases on the global climate, pressure is growing for utilities to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions in their power production.The power industry has responded in part by increasing its use of renewable energy sources. But it also continues to pursue another idea to help address environmental concerns: clean up coal-fired power plants. Technology that achieves that by capturing most of the carbon dioxide in a plant’s emissions and then liquefying it for underground storage or for commercial use is just starting to be implemented.

 

Proponents of renewable fuels want utilities to focus instead on investing much more heavily in wind and solar power. The many billions of dollars it would take to implement clean-coal technology on a global scale won’t do enough to lessen coal’s environmental impact, they argue. That money, they say, should be going toward speeding the arrival of renewable energy as the new king of power generation.

 

Howard J. Herzog, senior research engineer at the MIT Energy Initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says clean coal has an important role to play in the future of power generation. Richard Heinberg, a senior fellow-in-residence at the Post Carbon Institute, argues that investment should be directed instead to renewable energy sources.

 

Yes: Innovative Technology Will Rise to the Challenge

By Howard J. Herzog

 

People have questioned the idea of clean coal for decades. It started with doubts about cleaning up particulate matter in power-plant emissions, then sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, and it continues with skepticism about eliminating heavy metals like mercury.Despite the naysayers, technology and innovation have risen to the challenge by providing effective and affordable solutions. Now, the challenge is to reduce coal’s carbon-dioxide emissions. If history is any guide, innovative technology will once again provide the solutions.

 

The key technology needed to drastically reduce CO2 emissions from coal-fired power plants is carbon capture and storage, or CCS. All of the components of this system are in commercial operation today, At this point, they are employed mostly to enhance oil recovery. There are about 4,000 miles of pipeline in the U.S. transporting tens of millions of tons of compressed CO2 annually, mostly from natural wells, for injection into geologic formations to help extract oil. Numerous demonstration projects have shown that captured CO2 also can be safely and effectively stored in deep geologic formations, as most of it will be.

 

Last month brought an important milestone: SaskPower’s Boundary Dam power plant in Canada officially opened as the world’s first commercial-scale coal power plant with CCS. About 90% of the plant’s CO2 is captured and piped about 40 miles for injection into oil fields. Next year, the Mississippi Power unit of Southern Co. will start operating a new clean-coal plant, and construction has just started on a clean-coal power plant in Texas. Other projects are being planned, most prominently in the U.S., U.K. and China.

 

Clean coal will become more common because climate policy will demand cleaner power. For instance, an emissions restriction on coal-fired power plants in Canada was a major driver for the Boundary Dam project. There will be added costs to power providers. But clean coal won’t be so expensive that it can’t compete with renewable or nuclear resources. All three will find significant markets. Yes, clean coal will require massive infrastructure investments on a global scale—but so will a major expansion of renewable-energy projects. For the electricity price of the Cape Wind project in Massachusetts, we could easily build a clean-coal plant with CCS.

 

A recently released assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change showed that clean-coal projects are projected to be competitive in a low-carbon world, and that excluding CCS from a mitigation-technology portfolio would more than double the cost of achieving climate-stabilization goals through 2100.

 

Selling captured carbon for enhanced oil recovery can help reduce the cost of CCS. And new technologies under development could allow carbon to be captured with dramatically lower expenditure of energy.

 

As for coal being a finite resource, that isn’t a factor in the near term. We have centuries of coal supply. It is true that coal production in the U.S. has dipped recently, but this is due to competition from low-price natural gas. It has nothing to do with depletion.

 

Meanwhile, CCS isn’t the only road to clean coal. State-of-the-art coal-fired power plants are being built with much higher efficiencies that result in a 20% reduction in CO2 emissions per kilowatt-hour of electricity produced. And other technologies and regulations are mitigating the impacts of coal mining.

 

If you want to understand the energy industry, you must understand the power of innovation and technology. Instead of the oil shortages that some predicted, we have an oil glut thanks to technology. Many experts thought you couldn’t profitably produce oil and gas from shale; technology proved otherwise. And it is because of technology that I’m optimistic about the future of clean coal.

 

 

Source: http://online.wsj.com/