O&M

Speaking of Coal Power: Coal in a Carbon-Constrained World

Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) have elbowed their way into the nation’s lexicon with the rise in concern over climate change. But few of the journalists who are hyping global warming have taken the trouble to learn the ins and outs of producing affordable electricity from coal.

Citizens of the industrialized world now wring their hands over every decision to build a coal plant because of its CO 2 emissions. Yet China is currently building the equivalent of two 500-MW coal plants every week. It’s a drag when virtually every article in the mainstream media denigrates the fuel that has made the U.S. the economic powerhouse it is today. Try publishing a newspaper or magazine without electricity, I say.

It’s a drag when virtually every article in the mainstream media denigrates the fuel that has made the U.S. the economic powerhouse it is today.

Naturally, my hackles were already rising as I picked up the latest study by a host of MIT academics titled The Future of Coal. I expected the usual diatribe about the evils of coal by folks who probably had never visited a coal plant but somehow know all the answers. But, I must admit, I was pleasantly surprised when the subject was handled in reasonably even-handed fashion. Download your copy of the study, free of charge, from web.mit.edu/coal.

Required Reading

The study says it examines the "role of coal as an energy source in a world where constraints on carbon emissions are adopted to mitigate global warming." My first surprise came when the authors stated that "coal use will increase under any foreseeable scenario because it is cheap and abundant." The study concluded that coal is here to stay under any set of demand growth or carbon cap-and-trade scenarios.

I was next surprised to read several clear and technically accurate statements about the status of integrated gasification combined-cycle (IGCC) technology and the current availability of "proven" CCS technologies. Following are a few that caught my eye:

  • None of the IGCC plants operating worldwide is CCS-capable, and "the opportunity to build ‘capture ready’ features into new coal plants, regardless of technology, are limited."

  • "It is critical that the government not fall into the trap of picking a technology ‘winner.’ " Because IGCC is only one of many capture options, defining it as a best-available control technology (BACT) for coal combustion would be premature.

  • "No CO 2 storage project that is currently operating has the necessary modeling, monitoring, and verification capability to resolve outstanding technical issues, at scale."

  • "Proving sequestration technology will require ten years of operating properly monitored large-scale projects using different geologies."

I strongly advise you to take an hour or so and read through the study, if only because it’s so refreshingly different. For a change, the authors seem to be asking all the right questions and making recommendations based on science, rather than poll results. Washington, are you listening?

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