Climate Change Challenge: Is Clean Coal a Solution?

This is is a forthcoming chapter from The Climate Challenge: 101 Solutions to Global Warming by Guy Dauncey. New Society Publishers, Fall, 2009.

Thank you to Guy for giving us permission to post this article.

CLEAN COAL – HOPE OR HYPE?

Coal is an amazing legacy from Earth’s past, that we have used to transform the planet. Before we started using fossil fuels, we were limited by the supply of firewood, and the tiny amount of power we could squeeze out of wooden waterwheels and windmills. If they had not discovered coal, Europeans would probably have cut down the remaining forests and then reverted to tribal warfare.
 
It was coal that made the Industrial Revolution possible, and it is still an enormous presence on our planet. We mine and burn 5.5 billion tonnes a year, causing 33% of the world’s CO2 emissions, and there are plans for many more traditional coal-fired power plants in the US, China, India, and elsewhere. In 2006, China built 110 GW of new coal-fired power plants – almost two plants a week. When it comes to the climate, coal-fired power is a disaster.
 
Share of electricity from coal [1]

• Poland 93%
• South Africa 93%
• Australia 80%
• China 78%
• Israel 71%
• USA 50%
• Germany 47%
• Canada 17%World 39%

Mining coal is enormously destructive of the land, especially when mountaintops are blasted to pieces. In the Appalachians of West Virginia an estimated 750,000 to a million acres of hardwood forest, a thousand miles of waterways, and more than 470 mountains – and their surrounding communities – have been erased from existence since 1990. [2] It is also a major cause of death, both for the miners who died from black lung disease and for the thousands who die prematurely each year because of air pollution from coal-fired power plants. [3]
 
As a result of coal mining, coal seam fires are also burning in China, India, USA and other countries. Most fires in the developed world are under control, but not in the developing world – in China they consume up to 200 million tonnes of coal a year. Globally, the fires may be causing 2-3% of the world’s CO2 emissions, and an urgent international initiative is needed to tackle them. [4]
 
The coal industry has a solution, however: “clean coal”. In Norway, Statoil injects a million tonnes a year of unwanted CO2 that contaminates its natural gas into the Sleipner field under the North Sea, since it’s cheaper than paying Norway’s carbon tax. Using the same carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology, the idea is that future coal-fired power plants would capture their CO2 and bury it underground in depleted oil and gas fields. The idea has won praise and money from politicians of every stripe, and the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity is investing $3.5 billion in CCS projects. When you look more closely, however, CCS loses its shine:
 
Firstly, CCS requires 10% to 40% more coal to be burnt per kWh of electricity, so more coal has to be mined and burnt. [5]
 
Next, since carbon capture itself requires energy, and there are no reductions in coal mining’s fugitive methane emissions or coal’s transport-related CO2, only 60-85% of the CO2 can be captured by CCS. [6] The resulting electricity will produce 225-442 grams of CO2 per kWh, compared to wind (9-16 g) and solar thermal (9-11 g). [7]
 
Thirdly, CCS will cost up to 75% more than conventional coal-fired power, requiring a carbon price of $30 a tonne to make it competitive. The coal industry has been fighting any suggestion of carbon pricing, since it will make conventional coal uncompetitive.
 
Fourthly, once buried, the CO2 may leak out at 0.1% to 1% a year, raising difficult questions around ownership, liability, and permitting. If a rush of stored CO2 escaped in an earthquake, it would kill everyone living nearby. 
 
Fifthly, there’s the sheer scale of what’s needed. The IEA has estimated that for a 60% reduction in coal’s CO2 emissions, 6,000 Sleipner-sized projects would be needed, and millions of miles of pipeline to carry the CO2 to its underground storage sites.
 
The sixth concern is that CCS will not be technically feasible at a utility scale until 2030, [8] by which time solar and solar thermal will be cheaper (wind already is), and not commercially viable until after 2050, so the market may simply take a pass, as it is doing for nuclear energy.
 
Given these realities, CCS is a very expensive distraction, designed to make coal look good, but in reality taking scarce taxpayers’ dollars away from solutions that can make a real difference. [9]
 
What should we do? There is one good hope for CCS technology, which is that by burning biomass for power instead of coal, and applying CCS, we could create carbon-negative electricity that would actually suck CO2 out of the atmosphere. For this reason alone, biomass CCS research should continue.
 
Governments should place an immediate ban on new non-CCS coal-fired projects, as New Zealand and British Columbia have done, and set a date by which power companies will be required to stop buying coal-fired power, as California has done. We should also begin to phase out all coal mining, compensating their investors and helping their workers to train for new jobs.

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American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity: www.cleancoalusa.org

Carbon Capture and Storage: www.co2capture.org.uk

CCS Technologies: http://sequestration.mit.edu

Coal Fires, by Anupma Prakash: www.gi.alaska.edu/~prakash/coalfires

Coal Fires: www.itc.nl/personal/coalfire

False Hope: www.greenpeace.org/CCSreport

Just Transition Alliance: www.jtalliance.org

The Future of Coal (MIT): http://web.mit.edu/coal

World Coal Institute: www.worldcoal.org

In the battle against global warming, CCS will arrive on the battlefield far too late to help the world avoid dangerous climate change.
 - United Nations Development Program, 2007

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1. World Coal Institute, 2006 data.
2. ‘Clean’ Coal? Don’t Try to Shovel That. Washington Post, March 2, 2008.
3. Top Ten Reasons Coal is Dirty. From Coal is Dirty, a joint project managed by The DeSmog Project, Rainforest Action Network, and Greenpeace USA
4. Dr. Anupma Prakash, Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks.
5. Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage. IPCC Summary for Policymakers, 2006.
6. Can coal live up to its clean promise? New Scientist, March 27, 2008, and Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security, by Mark Jacobson. Energy and Environmental Science, Dec 1, 2008.
7. Jacobson study: Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security, by Mark Jacobson. Energy and Environmental Science, Dec 1, 2008.
8. The Future of Coal. MIT, 2007.
9. See Carbon Capture and Storage by Peter Viebahn et al, in State of the World 2009: Into a Warming World (Worldwatch Institute)