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<div class="byline"><big><big>Mounting Costs Slow the Push for Clean
Coal</big></big><br>
<br>
By <a
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/matthew_l_wald/index.html?inline=nyt-per"
title="More Articles by Matthew L. Wald">MATTHEW L. WALD</a></div>
<div class="timestamp">Published: May 30, 2008</div>
<nyt_text> </nyt_text>
<p>WASHINGTON — For years, scientists have had a straightforward idea
for taming <a
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier"
title="Recent and archival news about global warming.">global warming</a>.
They want to take the carbon dioxide that spews from coal-burning power
plants and pump it back into the ground.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>But it has become clear in recent months that the nation’s effort to
develop the technique is lagging badly.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“It’s a total mess,” said Daniel M.
Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at
the University of California, Berkeley.</p>
<p>“Coal’s had a tough year,” said John Lavelle, head of a business at <a
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/general_electric_company/index.html?inline=nyt-org"
title="More information about General Electric Co">General Electric</a>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Yet, simple as the idea may sound, considerable
research is still needed to be certain the technique would be safe,
effective and affordable. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Major corporations sense the possibility of a profitable new
business, and G.E. signed a partnership on Wednesday with <a
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/schlumberger_ltd/index.html?inline=nyt-org"
title="More information about Schlumberger Ltd.">Schlumberger</a>, the
oil field services company, to advance the technology of carbon capture
and sequestration. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.” </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>But the situation is not hopeless. One new gasification proposal
survives in the United States, by <a
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/duke_energy_corporation/index.html?inline=nyt-org"
title="More information about Duke Energy Corp">Duke Energy</a> for a
plant in Edwardsport, Ind.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.”
</p>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
"I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves." – Che Guevara</pre>
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