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Proof that good things don’t always come in nice packages can be found by taking the fast train from Beijing to Tianjin and then driving to the coast. Tianjin, China’s third-biggest city, originated as Beijing’s port on the Yellow Sea. But in recent years Tianjin has reclaimed so much of its muddy, unstable shoreline that the city has effectively moved inland and a new, crazily active port has sprung up at the water’s edge. In this hyper-industrialized zone, its highways choked with trucks, stand scores of factories and utility plants, each a mass of pipes, reactors, valves, vents, retorts, crackers, blowers, chimneys, and distillation towers—the sort of facility James Cameron might have lingered over, musing, on his way to film the climax of Terminator 2.

 

Among these edifices, just as big and almost as anonymous as its neighbors, is a structure called GreenGen, built by China Huaneng Group, a giant state-owned electric utility, in collaboration with half a dozen other firms, various branches of the Chinese government, and, importantly, Peabody Energy, a Missouri firm that is the world’s biggest private coal company.

 

By Western standards, GreenGen is a secretive place; weeks of repeated requests for interviews and a tour met with no reply. When I visited anyway, guards at the site not only refused admittance but wouldn’t even confirm its name. As I drove away from the entrance, a window blind cracked open; through the slats, an eye surveyed my departure. The silence, in my view, is foolish. GreenGen is a billion-dollar facility that extracts the carbon dioxide from a coal-fired power plant and, ultimately, will channel it into an underground storage area many miles away. Part of a coming wave of such carbon-eating facilities, it may be China’s—and possibly the planet’s—single most consequential effort to fight climate change.

 

Because most Americans rarely see coal, they tend to picture it as a relic of the 19th century, black stuff piled up in Victorian alleys. In fact, a lump of coal is a thoroughly ubiquitous 21st-century artifact, as much an emblem of our time as the iPhone. Today coal produces more than 40 percent of the world’s electricity, a foundation of modern life. And that percentage is going up: In the past decade, coal added more to the global energy supply than any other source.

 

Nowhere is the preeminence of coal more apparent than in the planet’s fastest-growing, most populous region: Asia, especially China. In the past few decades, China has lifted several hundred million people out of destitution—arguably history’s biggest, fastest rise in human well-being. That advance couldn’t have happened without industrialization, and that industrialization couldn’t have happened without coal. More than three-quarters of China’s electricity comes from coal, including the power for the giant electronic plants where iPhones are assembled. More coal goes to heating millions of homes, to smelting steel (China produces nearly half the world’s steel), and to baking limestone to make cement (China provides almost half the world’s cement). In its frantic quest to develop, China burns almost as much coal as the rest of the world put together—a fact that makes climatologists shudder.

 

China already emits one-quarter of the world’s greenhouse gases, more than any other country. The International Energy Agency (IEA), a Paris-based think tank sponsored by 28 developed nations, estimates that Beijing will double its ranks of coal-fired power plants by 2040. If that happens, China’s carbon dioxide figures could double or even triple. “Coal is too low-cost, too plentiful, and too available from reliable sources to be replaced,” says fuel analyst John Dean, president of the JD Energy consulting firm. “China is putting in solar and wind power at a tremendous pace, but it will have to use more and more coal just to keep up with rising demand.”

 

Dependence on coal is not just a Chinese problem, though. Countries around the world—even European nations that tout their environmental track records—have found themselves unable to wean themselves from coal. Germany, though often celebrated for its embrace of solar and wind energy, not only gets more than half its power from coal but opened more coal-fired power plants in 2013 than in any year in the past two decades. In neighboring Poland, 86 percent of the electricity is generated from coal. South Africa, Israel, Australia, Indonesia—all are ever more dependent on coal. (The US is a partial exception: Coal’s share of American electricity fell from 49 percent in 2007 to 39 percent in 2013, largely because fracking has cut the price of natural gas, a competing fuel. But critics note, accurately, that US coal exports have hit record highs; an ever-increasing share of European and Asian coal is red, white, and blue.) According to the World Resources Institute, an environmental research group, almost 1,200 big new coal facilities in 59 countries are proposed for construction. The soaring use of coal, a joint statement by climate scientists warned in November, is leading the world toward “an outcome that can only be described as catastrophic.”

 

Which brings me, in a way, back to the unwelcoming facility in Tianjin. GreenGen is one of the world’s most advanced attempts to develop a technology known as carbon capture and storage. Conceptually speaking, CCS is simple: Industries burn just as much coal as before but remove all the pollutants. In addition to scrubbing out ash and soot, now standard practice at many big plants, they separate out the carbon dioxide and pump it underground, where it can be stored for thousands of years.

 

Many energy and climate researchers believe that CCS is vital to avoiding a climate catastrophe. Because it could allow the globe to keep burning its most abundant fuel source while drastically reducing carbon dioxide and soot, it may be more important—though much less publicized—than any renewable-energy technology for decades to come. No less than Steven Chu, the Nobel-winning physicist who was US secretary of energy until last year, has declared CCS essential. “I don’t see how we go forward without it,” he says.

 

BURN RATE 

Our dependence on coal isn’t ending anytime soon. Although renewable energy is expected to boom over the next decade, coal will remain by far the world’s top power source. —Victoria Tang

Unfortunately, taking that step will be incredibly difficult. Even though most of the basic concepts are well understood, developing reliable, large-scale CCS facilities will be time-consuming, unglamorous, and breathtakingly costly. Engineers will need to lavish time and money on painstaking calculations, minor adjustments, and cautious experiments. At the end, the world will have several thousand giant edifices that everyone regards as eyesores. Meanwhile, environmentalists have lobbied hard against the technology, convinced that it represents a sop to the coal industry at the expense of cleaner alternatives like solar and wind.

 

As a consequence, CCS is widely regarded as both critical to the future and a quagmire. At a 2008 meeting of the Group of Eight (a forum for powerful Western nations, Russia, and Japan), the assembled energy ministers lauded the critical role of carbon capture and storage and “strongly” backed an IEA recommendation to launch “20 large-scale CCS demonstration projects” by 2010. But the number of such projects around the world is actually falling—except in China, which has a dozen big CCS efforts in planning or production.

 

It is perhaps appropriate that China should take the lead: It has the world’s worst coal pollution problem. In addition, its energy companies are partly state-owned; they can’t readily sue the government to stop its CCS program. At the same time, they won’t be penalized, either by the government or shareholder advocates, if developing this costly, experimental technology cuts into their profits. In any case, outsiders should be grateful that China is weighing in, says Fatih Birol, chief economist for the IEA. Somebody needs to figure out how to capture and store carbon dioxide on a massive scale before it’s too late.

 

“I don’t know of any other technology which is so critical for the health of the planet and at the same time for which we have almost no appetite,” Birol says. “The only place it seems to be increasing is China.”

 

COAL CAN’T BE IGNORED

Coal is MEGO—until you live near it. MEGO is old journalistic slang for “my eyes glaze over”—a worthy story that is too dull to read. In America, where coal is mostly burned far out of sight, readers tend to react to the word coal by hitting Close Tab.

But people in Hebei don’t think coal is MEGO, at least in my experience. Hebei is the province that surrounds Beijing. When the capital city set up for the 2008 Olympics, the government pushed out the coal-powered utilities and factories that were polluting its air. Mostly, these facilities moved to Hebei. The province ended up with many new jobs. But it also ended up with China’s dirtiest air.

 

Because I was curious, I hired a taxi to drive in and around the Hebei city of Tangshan, southeast of Beijing. Visibility was about a quarter mile—a good day, the driver told me. Haze gave buildings the washed-out look of an old photographic print. Not long ago, Tangshan had been a relatively poor place. Now the edge of town held a murderer’s row of luxury-car dealerships: BMW, Jaguar, Mercedes, Lexus, Porsche. Most of the vehicles were displayed indoors. Those outside were covered with gray crud.

 

Coal was everywhere, people said. One truck driver told me with a kind of mocking pride that we were breathing the world’s worst air. A university graduate in striped Hello Kitty socks remarked that every time she wiped her face the cloth had “black dirty stuff” on it. The stuff, she said, was PM2.5—technical jargon for particles that are 2.5 micrometers in diameter and therefore most likely to lodge in the lungs. Respiratory problems were common, she said. “Everybody is sick, but the government would never report it.” We gave a ride to a steelworker who told me that Tangshan had plans to clean itself up in 30 to 35 years. “We are a city of industry, a city of coal,” he said.

 

Dirty air is not solely a problem of obscure locations in flyover China. Face masks to help filter pollution are increasingly common in great cities like Shanghai and Guangzhou. One company, Vogmask, sells masks on which corporations can print their logos: smog as branding opportunity. A few days before my ride around Tangshan, the more than 10 million inhabitants of the northeastern city of Harbin were enveloped by coal pollution. Schools closed; people kept to their homes; highways shut down because drivers couldn’t see the road. During my visit, I picked up a Beijing newspaper with a full-page glossy ad insert for the city’s “first high tech condominium project that realizes real-time control of PM2.5 levels.”

 

According to one major research project involving almost 500 scientists in 50 nations, outdoor air pollution annually contributes to about 1.2 million premature deaths in China. Another study argued that eliminating coal pollution in northern China would raise average life expectancy there by nearly five years. (By contrast, wiping out all cancer would increase US life expectancy by just three years.) Last year 10 Chinese scientists calculated that reducing PM2.5 to US levels would cut the total death rate in big Chinese cities between 2 and 5 percent. A different way of saying this is that in some places, the side effects of breathing are responsible for as many as 1 out of every 20 deaths.

 

Understanding these numbers, affluent Chinese are beginning to send their children out of the country. Not-so-affluent Chinese, like the people I spoke to in Hebei, have little recourse. “What good are these jobs [in Hebei's new industry] if they’re at the expense of our health?” asked the woman in the Hello Kitty socks.

 

China’s coal fumes have effects far outside Hebei. Smoke from coal plants rises high and absorbs sunlight, heating the air. Black-carbon particles interact with clouds, helping them both trap heat and block solar radiation. Soot lands on glaciers and ice fields in a fine mist, covering them with a thin black film. Sunlight reflects less from smoky ice; indeed, the dusting of coal particles is helping to melt the poles and uncover the Himalayas. Last year an international team calculated that black carbon was the second-most important human emission contributing to climate change. The most important, of course, is carbon dioxide; coal is the greatest single source for it too.

 

The simplest solution to all these woes would be to ban immediately all of the world’s 7,000 coal-fired power plants, including the almost 600 in the US—simple but impossible.

 

“For power generation, there are alternatives to fossil fuels,” says Barry Jones, a general manager of the Global CCS Institute. (The institute, an Australia-based association of international governments and energy companies, helped me make contacts in China but provided no financial assistance or editorial supervision.) “But for some industrial processes, there are no alternatives.” Examples include steel and cement, essential building blocks for all modern societies. Most steel is smelted in large blast furnaces. The furnaces require coke, a solid fuel made by burning coal in a low-oxygen environment. Not only an energy source, coke literally supports the iron ore in the furnace and participates in the chemical reactions that transform pig iron into steel. According to Vaclav Smil, an energy researcher and prolific author on the subject, producing a ton of steel requires almost half a ton of coke. Coal is also the primary fuel for cement manufacturers. “In theory, coal could be replaced,” Jones says. “But that would involve rebuilding every cement plant in the world.”

 

More important from China’s perspective, more than one-quarter of its citizens still live on less than $2 a day. These people—more than 350 million men, women, and children, an entire United States of destitution—want schools and sewers, warm homes and paved highways, things that people elsewhere enjoy without reflection. China can’t provide enough energy to make and maintain these things with oil or natural gas: The nation has little of either and not much incentive to import them at great cost. (Asian natural gas prices are roughly five times higher than US prices.) Nor can solar, wind, or nuclear fill China’s needs, even though it is deploying all three faster than any other country. Meanwhile, it has the third-biggest coal reserves in the world.

 

China, like most of the rest of the world, “pretty much has to use coal,” says Dean, the fuel analyst. “Or, I guess, leave people in the dark.” And since coal is not going away, coal plants around the world will need to find a way to capture and store their emissions. “It’s just crazy not to develop this technology.”

 

 

Source: http://www.wired.com/