[Sustain] NYT: Mounting Costs Slow the Push for Clean Coal

[Eric Brooks]

Mounting Costs Slow the Push for Clean Coal

By MATTHEW L. WALD 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/matthew_l_wald/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
Published: May 30, 2008

WASHINGTON --- For years, scientists have had a straightforward idea for 
taming global warming 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>. 
They want to take the carbon dioxide that spews from coal-burning power 
plants and pump it back into the ground.

President Bush is for it, and indeed has spent years talking up the 
virtues of "clean coal." All three candidates to succeed him favor the 
approach. So do many other members of Congress. Coal companies are for 
it. Many environmentalists favor it. Utility executives are practically 
begging for the technology.

But it has become clear in recent months that the nation's effort to 
develop the technique is lagging badly.

In January, the government canceled its support for what was supposed to 
be a showcase project, a plant at a carefully chosen site in Illinois 
where there was coal, access to the power grid, and soil underfoot that 
backers said could hold the carbon dioxide for eons.

Perhaps worse, in the last few months, utility projects in Florida, West 
Virginia, Ohio, Minnesota and Washington State that would have made it 
easier to capture carbon dioxide have all been canceled or thrown into 
regulatory limbo.

Coal is abundant and cheap, assuring that it will continue to be used. 
But the failure to start building, testing, tweaking and perfecting 
carbon capture and storage means that developing the technology may come 
too late to make coal compatible with limiting global warming.

"It's a total mess," said Daniel M. Kammen, director of the Renewable 
and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.

"Coal's had a tough year," said John Lavelle, head of a business at 
General Electric 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/general_electric_company/index.html?inline=nyt-org> 
that makes equipment for processing coal into a form from which carbon 
can be captured. Many of these projects were derailed by the short-term 
pressure of rising construction costs. But scientists say the result, 
unless the situation can be turned around, will be a long-term disaster.

Plans to combat global warming generally assume that continued use of 
coal for power plants is unavoidable for at least several decades. 
Therefore, starting as early as 2020, forecasters assume that carbon 
dioxide emitted by new power plants will have to be captured and stored 
underground, to cut down on the amount of global-warming gases in the 
atmosphere.

Yet, simple as the idea may sound, considerable research is still needed 
to be certain the technique would be safe, effective and affordable.

Scientists need to figure out which kinds of rock and soil formations 
are best at holding carbon dioxide. They need to be sure the gas will 
not bubble back to the surface. They need to find optimal designs for 
new power plants so as to cut costs. And some complex legal questions 
need to be resolved, such as who would be liable if such a project 
polluted the groundwater or caused other damage far from the power plant.

Major corporations sense the possibility of a profitable new business, 
and G.E. signed a partnership on Wednesday with Schlumberger 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/schlumberger_ltd/index.html?inline=nyt-org>, 
the oil field services company, to advance the technology of carbon 
capture and sequestration.

But only a handful of small projects survive, and the recent 
cancellations mean that most of this work has come to a halt, raising 
doubts that the technique can be ready any time in the next few decades. 
And without it, "we're not going to have much of a chance for 
stabilizing the climate," said John Thompson, who oversees work on the 
issue for the Clean Air Task Force, an environmental group.

The fear is that utilities, lacking proven chemical techniques for 
capturing carbon dioxide and proven methods for storing it underground 
by the billions of tons per year, will build the next generation of coal 
plants using existing technology. That would ensure that vast amounts of 
global warming gases would be pumped into the atmosphere for decades.

The highest-profile failure involved a project known as FutureGen, which 
President Bush himself announced in 2003: a utility consortium, with 
subsidies from the government, was going to build a plant in Mattoon, 
Ill., testing the most advanced techniques for converting coal to a gas, 
capturing pollutants, and burning the gas for power.

The carbon dioxide would have been compressed and pumped underground 
into deep soil layers. Monitoring devices would have tested whether any 
was escaping to the atmosphere.

About $50 million has been spent on FutureGen, about $40 million in 
federal money and $10 million in private money, to draw up preliminary 
designs, find a site that had coal, electric transmission and suitable 
geology, and complete an Environmental Impact Statement, among other steps.

But in January, the government pulled out after projected costs nearly 
doubled, to $1.8 billion. The government feared the costs would go even 
higher. A bipartisan effort is afoot on Capitol Hill to save FutureGen, 
but the project is on life support.

The government had to change its approach, said Clarence Albright Jr., 
the undersecretary of the Energy Department, to "limit taxpayer exposure 
to the escalating cost."

Trying to recover, the Energy Department is trying to cut a deal with a 
utility that is already planning a new power plant. The government would 
offer subsidies to add a segment to the plant dedicated to capturing and 
injecting carbon dioxide, as long as the utility bore much of the risk 
of cost overruns.

It is unclear whether any utility will agree to such a deal. The power 
companies, in fact, have been busy pulling back from coal-burning power 
plants of all types, amid rising costs and political pressure. Utility 
executives say they do not know of a plant that would qualify for an 
Energy Department grant as the project is now structured.

Most worrisome to experts on global warming, the utilities have recently 
been canceling their commitments to a type of plant long seen as a 
helpful intermediate step toward cleaner coal.

In plants of this type, coal would be gasified and pollutants like 
mercury, sulfur and soot removed before burning. The plants would be 
highly efficient, and would therefore emit less carbon dioxide for a 
given volume of electricity produced, but they would not inject the 
carbon dioxide into the ground.

But the situation is not hopeless. One new gasification proposal 
survives in the United States, by Duke Energy 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/duke_energy_corporation/index.html?inline=nyt-org> 
for a plant in Edwardsport, Ind.

In Wisconsin, engineers are testing a method that may allow them to bolt 
machinery for capturing carbon dioxide onto the back of old-style power 
plants; Sweden, Australia and Denmark are planning similar tests. And 
German engineers are exploring another approach, one that involves 
burning coal in pure oxygen, which would produce a clean stream of 
exhaust gases that could be injected into the ground.

But no project is very far along, and it remains an open question 
whether techniques for capturing and storing carbon dioxide will be 
available by the time they are critically needed.

The Electric Power Research Institute, a utility consortium, estimated 
that it would take as long as 15 years to go from starting a pilot plant 
to proving the technology will work. The institute has set a goal of 
having large-scale tests completed by 2020.

"A year ago, that was an aggressive target," said Steven R. Specker, the 
president of the institute. "A year has gone by, and now it's a very 
aggressive target."

-- 
"I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves." -- Che Guevara

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