December 15, 2007

Carbon credits and debits

Dr. Robert Peltier, PE

Coal: Asia’s energy present and future

If China makes good on plans to add as many as 500 coal-fired plants over the next decade, they would account for half the world’s total in that category. Having just passed the U.S. in carbon emissions, China will surely increase its lead in coming years. And don’t forget India, which has 200 coal plants of its own in development. The U.S. has a paltry few dozen serious projects in the queue.

China’s economy is growing at a white-hot 10% a year, and it is being fueled by coal-fired electricity. Soon, it may also be driven by nuclear power, thanks to a building program that dwarfs ours—more than 30,000 MW of new reactors by 2020. Although the new nukes won’t produce any GHGs, their 30 GW of “clean” capacity will be overwhelmed by the “dirty” capacity of new Chinese coal plants growing at 8 GW a month over the past two years. China doesn’t have much choice. Use of natural gas is limited by its high price and the country’s undeveloped pipeline network. Big hydropower, represented by the Three Gorges Dam, is by all accounts an environmental disaster.

It’s time we realized that coal combustion will be increasing in China and India for decades to come. If we spend trillions over those same decades to reduce our CO₂ emissions in ways that drive up power costs, the only guaranteed outcome is that China and India are going to eat more of our economic lunch.
—Dr. Robert Peltier, PE Editor-in-Chief