The mythological creature known as “clean coal” continues to get a lot of attention, as it should. The US gets almost exactly half of its electricity from burning coal, which emitted over 1.9 billion metric tons of CO2 in 2006, just over 32% of our total CO2 emissions from energy consumption. China is building coal plants at a horrific clip, none of which have CCS capability, just like all those plants currently in service in the US.

In the US, those electrons and CO2 are set in motion by 1,470 generators working in about 600 plants and burning just over a billion tons of coal per year. Moving all that coal around accounts for about 44 percent of the freight tons-miles carried by US railroads.

Did I forget to mention that this is a really big problem?

In my normal trawling through the infosphere for E&E items worthy of your and my time, I recently came across three interesting articles.

Cleaning Coal Won’t Be Dirt Cheap:

Clean coal refers to the idea of harnessing the black rock’s energy while safely disposing of the resulting CO2 rather than sending it skyward. In dueling television commercials, the power industry portrays it as a silver bullet nearly ready to be deployed, while environmental groups allied with Mr. Gore imply it’s a smokescreen from a fossil-fuel industry under fire.

Right now, clean coal seems both possible and improbable. The basic elements of clean coal are already in use in small corners of industry. But whether it is broadly and quickly adopted around the world will depend less on science than on economics. Cleaning coal is very expensive.

…

A year ago, the Pleasant Prairie plant entered this first phase with an experiment to capture its CO2. The machinery for extracting the gas here is three stories tall. But at the 425-acre plant, it seems tiny. Its pipes pull a bit of exhaust from the power plant and then remove the CO2 in a process that involves mixing the gas with ammonia.

So far, the test is grabbing only about 1% of the greenhouse gas the plant coughs out. The method still consumes too much energy, says Sean Black, a manager at Alstom SA, the French company managing the test. “We’re just in the beginning of this process,” he says.

The second step — one not yet attempted here at the Wisconsin plant — is to take the captured CO2 and dispose of it safely, perhaps by burying it. CO2 has been shot underground for decades in places like Texas, where it is injected into aging oil and gas fields to force the remaining fossil fuel up through wells. Some 30 million tons of CO2 are injected into oil and gas wells annually in the U.S., according to federal statistics. That is tiny — less than 1% of the roughly six billion tons of CO2 the country annually exhales.

A sober and relatively even-handed treatment of the topic. Highly recommended.

Why Clean Coal Is Years Away:

Coal’s problems, however, are getting to be so big and serious that they are not just overshadowing the industry but threatening to render it obsolete. About 80 percent of the electricity sector’s carbon dioxide emissions come from burning coal. A price on CO2 pollution, which Congress might impose as early as this year, is expected to be so costly that the mere prospect of it is already shaking things up. Some states have banned new coal plants, and many companies are canceling their plans in other places.

The industry’s greatest hope for survival, as far as CO2 emissions go, is a work-in-progress technological arsenal known as carbon capture and storage, or CCS. With all the makings—and risk—of a classic American gamble, it is in some ways the energy equivalent of missile defense. It’s ambitious, expensive, intricate, and wildly controversial.

This is a longish article, and I can’t do it justice by quoting more of it. Please go read it all.

Debating a ‘Clean Coal’ Future - Council on Foreign Relations:

Coal is responsible for about 40 percent of global electricity generation as well as 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. It is present in seventy nations, with the United States, Russia, and China possessing the largest reserves (PDF). Coal produces a varied spectrum of energy and pollutants depending on its quality–ranging from low-quality lignite to pure coal. The U.S. government’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) projects modest increases in coal use for most of the world by 2030 but significant increases in Asia, particularly in China, where coal power generation is expected to more than double between now and 2030. Though China and India are pursuing other forms of energy, both possess large reserves of coal, making it a natural choice to fuel their rapid growth and acute energy needs. Analysis by CFR Senior Fellow David Victor shows coal is currently the cheapest way for China to generate power (PDF), with hydropower a close second.

Another longish piece, this one containing several worthwhile links to related information.

I also recommend the Union of Concerned Scientists’ report Coal Power in a Warming World, and their links page, Resources: Impacts of Coal-fired Electric Generation.

After thinking a lot about CCS lately, and reading these articles and everything else about it I can get my hands on, I think it’s fair to say that:

• CCS is really nothing more than an indirect form of geoengineering, but without the titanium-plate-bulkhead-reinforced terminology and testosterone saturated posturing. It’s expensive, it’s risky (think about leaks that could release millions of tons of this heavier-than-air gas in the vicinity of “children and other living things”, as the saying once went), and it seems we’ve put ourselves in such a bad situation that it’s hard to imagine a solution that doesn’t include it.
• The first of two huge issues with this technology is scalability. Applying it to a single, new, hand-picked power plant is a far cry from rolling it out on a US- or China-scale. And don’t forget the temporal dimension of any attempt to scale up CCS. We can’t spend a lot of human and technical resources making even numerous plants sequester their emissions and then abandon those sites. We’re stuck babysitting them (and hoping they don’t release their CO2) forever.[1]
• The second issue is one I keep bringing up that no one else seems to talk about, the coal dichotomy. This is the (likely) sizable difference in the cost of CCS for a new plant designed and located with CCS in mind, versus those 600 plants with 1,470 generators already cranking away in the US, plus who knows how many more around the world. I’ve yet to see a breakout of cost estimates for what it will cost to retrofit CCS onto those plants, many of which aren’t nearly old enough that their owners would want to retire them. And then there’s the cost of building and maintaining CO2 pipelines, many of which would run dozens or hundreds of miles to reach an acceptable burial site. Faced with a choice of running a pipeline 300 miles to a “really good” CO2 burial site or running a 20 mile pipeline (or effectively none at all) to a “not quite as good” site, which one do you think companies will try to justify? Any guesses as to whether their judgment will be perfect or the first stab at writing government regulations will be tight enough to prevent a disaster?

As skeptical as I am about CCS, I think it’s critical that we continue all related R&D efforts, as well as think seriously about how to regulate the practice. There seems to be little chance we’ll be able to reduce CO2 emissions to 20% of 1990 levels by 2050 without it.[2] CCS, nuclear waste and proliferation worries, and geoengineering are among the prices we’ll pay for the situation we’ve created over the last 150 years.

[1] The thought of monitoring CO2 burial sites for leaks reminds me of the old programming adage: Never check for an error condition you don’t know how to handle. Aside from an evacuation of nearby population centers, which might or might not happen in time to save people, what do you do if a site decides that it’s tired of storing all that CO2?

[2] Unless, of course, the car salesman I talked to recently is right. He explained to me with great conviction that “the government” has long ago perfected “zero point energy” but doesn’t want to let the common people have it. And no, I don’t think he was drinking.