RSS Feed MenuMembers of Congress who (1) represent states that burn a lot of coal to generate electricity, (2) receive frequent visits from lobbyists for energy-intensive manufacturers in their states, and (3) are thought to be middle-of-the-road in their politics are open, kinda sorta, to passing a bill limiting greenhouse gas emissions, but with a big if.
That big if is that coal must remain a leading selection on the nation’s energy menu.
If CO2 were taxed or capped, the only way to continue burning a lot of coal – the U.S. goes through a billion tons of the stuff every year – would be to bury the prodigious quantities of CO2 that coal-burning power plants let loose.
Easier said than done is a take-home message from a clean coal technology report that an EPA-DOE task force released Thursday.
First, capturing and burying large quantities of CO2 has never been tried at the colossal scale that would be necessary to keep coal plant emissions out of the atmosphere.
Sure, the Norwegians’ Sleipner demo project is pumping a million metric tons of CO2 per year under the seabed. Sleipner is a pinprick. Your garden-variety coal-fired power plant can dump 10 million tons of CO2 into the air every year. The nation’s 1,500 coal plants emit 1,500 times the amount of CO2 that Sleipner sequesters.
A 2007 MIT study said big demonstration plants should be built to identify gremlins that might pop up with large-scale sequestration.
Second, even if the many technical issues could be worked through, there is liability. Who covers the risks of an underground CO2 disposal facility springing a leak and sending a slug of asphyxiating gas wafting to the surface?
An incident like Lake Nyos, when naturally occurring CO2 rose to the surface and suffocated 1,700 people in Cameroon a quarter century ago, would be highly improbable if a site were designed and operated competently, but imagine the damage claims if the worst happened.
Many questions arise. Assuming that insurers would write a policy covering risks that could extend far into the mists of time – and at this point, they won’t – how would they price it? How would sequestration regulators guard against moral hazard? Would banks finance a sequestration site if private insurance were unavailable?
The task force offered up a few ideas for handling the liability hot potato. One is an industry-financed trust fund. Another is a limit on claims. Utilities might not like the first idea. Trial lawyers would hate the second.
The report’s authors weren’t excited about open-ended federal indemnification – who’s up for a utility TARP? – but they left the door open to federal ownership of filled and closed sites if the bureaucrats are satisfied that the buried CO2 would stay put.
Even if the engineers solve the technical problems and the lawyers come to terms on liability questions, public acceptance could be a banana peel that impedes development of sequestration sites. In land use planning circles, the acronym “BANANA” refers to obstreperous community attitudes about unwanted projects: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.
The report gingerly acknowledges that “communities near planned projects will require targeted engagement.”
Bottom line – Like every other energy issue under the sun, carbon sequestration is a bramble bush of complexity. Under the best of circumstances, it’s years away.
busboy33 // Aug 16, 2010 at 12:18 am
“Sure, the Norwegians’ Sleipner demo project is pumping a million metric tons of CO2 per year under the seabed. Sleipner is a pinprick. Your garden-variety coal-fired power plant can dump 10 million tons of CO2 into the air every year. The nation’s 1,500 coal plants emit 1,500 times the amount of CO2 that Sleipner sequesters.”
Am I not doing my math properly (very likely), or do those numbers not add up? The garden-variety plant dumps 10 times the amount that Sleipner can hide, we have 1,500 plants that need to hide CO2 . . . wouldn’t that mean that we produce 15,000 times the amount that Sleipner can stash, not 1,500?
In terms of the post, it doesn’t change anything . . . if anytihng, that further emphasizes his point (a “Sleipner” solution isn’t viable on a mass market scale), its just bugging me that I can’t make the math add up.
Let me emphasize — I am VERY incompetent in anything that involves numbers, so me being wrong is something I expect. It’s just that usually I can see what I’m getting wrong, and I’m missing that here.
busboy33 // Aug 16, 2010 at 12:20 am
I should have added . . . great article.
JeninCT // Aug 16, 2010 at 7:34 am
I would just like to point out that coal is alot cleaner than it used to be, so progress is being made whether anyone can figure out how to bury CO2 without asphyxiating future generations or not (global warming is sounding better all the time…).
sinz54 // Aug 16, 2010 at 9:14 am
The truth is, NONE of the proposed “alternative energy” approaches have ever been tried on the “colossal scale” required to power a nation like America.
That includes solar and wind power, which have never been tried in a nation which is second only to China in power consumption; a nation filled with NIMBY protesters and zoning regulations and EPA regulations on protecting ecosystems.
So far, the ONLY energy source we have that emits no CO2 and has been proven for 50 years is nuclear power. That’s it. With anything else, you’re taking an enormous risk on scalability.
I live in MA where the only major wind power farm, Cape Wind, was delayed for 10 years as MA residents fought against the project–including the Kennedy family, whose hypocrisy on global warming and alternative energy infuriated the hard-core enviros. And which ended up with 40% fewer windmills than had been originally proposed, under an EPA “compromise.”
At that rate, it would take the United States centuries to convert entirely to alternative energy.
Carney // Aug 16, 2010 at 10:26 am
When most people think of words like clean and dirty, they don’t think of colorless, odorless, non-toxic, naturally present and naturally exhaled gases like CO2.
The term “clean coal” originally began as a way to describe coal that was free or freer from emissons of its primary polutant: soot, smoke, and particulate matter (SSPM), the cause of smog. These things pass the “Mom test” as dirty: they foul and discolor everything. Black roadside snow comes, not from mud, but from SSPM from automobile exhaust. Except for springtime pollen, the gray dust covering car windows comes from SSPM. And SSPM is a far more urgent pollution issue than CO2: more than 40,000 Americans die from it each year, according to the EPA under Bush. Not even the most hysterical carbon alarmist can claim such a toll for CO2.
Much progress has been made in the fight against SSPM emissions from coal plants, and more can be done without backbreaking expense.
CO2 is a long-term problem. There are other, more urgent short-term environmental issues, SSPM foremost among them. Others are sulfur, mercury, NOx, and more.
Re-defining CO2 as “dirty” and its absence as “clean” may or may not be justified, but let’s not succumb to the stampede that suddenly ignores prior progress and the need for more on other pollutants.
JosephP // Aug 17, 2010 at 12:23 am
Clean Coal is not merely “years away”—it is simply an impossibility.
CO2 gas is an unavoidable product of burning coal (or any fossil fuel). This is a simple law of thermodynamics—you cannot get the energy out of a hydrocarbon without producing CO2 as a byproduct. So all “clean coal” concept really amounts to is that the CO2 will be collected before it is emitted into the atmosphere, and pumped underground where it will need to stay forever.
To be able to store and pump underground all the CO2 that would be scrubbed from the exhaust under the “clean coal” concept would require an infrastructure of pipelines and pumps that would exceed the size of the existing petroleum infrastructure of wells, pipelines, and storage tanks.
Does anyone really think that the coal industry plans to create such an infrastructure, simply to make its industrial process cleaner? Of course not.
And this says nothing to the question of where to put all that CO2 in the first place. If it ever leaks out all at once near a populated area, it would drown every living thing that breathes for miles around. Imagine if this happened near a city like Los Angeles (particularly vunerable because of its valley location). It would make the natural disaster mentioned in the article that occurred at Cameroon pale in comparison. It could even result in deaths exceeding those in the bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. So finding suitable remote locations for pumping the CO2 underground will not be easy.
Of course, if the CO2 merely leaks out slowly (over a period of years, decades, or centuries), it may not kill anything but would make the entire expensive process have been for naught. The CO2 released by a slow leak would be just as bad as if it had simply been released into the atmosphere at the coal smokestack.
In fact, all the coal industry intends to do with all this “clean coal” talk is to continue to milk the government for funding for this pie-in-the-sky concept, while promoting the claim to a gullible public that coal can really be made clean. Meanwhile, they will continue business as usual, with coal fired power plants belching out the toxic gases that naturally result from burning the coal industry’s dirty product.