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Indiana OKs Coal Plant That Can Fight Carbon
Timothy Gardner and Scott Disavino, Reuters
Indiana regulators approved on Tuesday a US$2 billion Duke Energy power station that will be the first large-scale US coal plant to use a technology that could help the industry begin to fight global warming.
The Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission approved the 630 Megawatt plant, which will gasify coal using integrated gasification combined cycle technology.
The process separates out regulated pollutants, such as mercury, as well as carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas.
“This plant will be hands down the lowest-emitting plant in the country,” said Kurt Waltzer, a Midwest coal expert for the Clean Air Task Force, a nonprofit organization
(22 November 2007)
Environmentalism and the future of coal, part one
Jeremy Carl, Gristmill
As I understand it, David’s primary problem with the article is that he believed we were just “assuming” coal’s future prominent role in our energy system. And in some sense he is right — as someone who is researching the global coal system every day, I am assuming coal’s future (particularly in China and India.) I’ll outline why I feel this way in the rest of this post, but for now, I’ll simply point out that I am not the only one who believes this. The IEA said as much in its recent bleak report where it predicted coal use would grow 73% between 2005 and 2030. Avoiding a significant rise in coal use over the next 25 years would require both a technological and policy revolution “on an unprecedented scale,” according to the IEA.
Let me be clear — there is no doubt that coal is as dirty a form of energy as we have, both in its mining and its combustion. I’m not suggesting that the environmental community should advocate for coal usage or even accept our current and growing level of coal usage globally. I’m not even saying that elements in our community shouldn’t be out in the streets protesting against coal. What I do want to say is that as an empirical matter, the environmental community has little power to eliminate or even dramatically reduce the usage of coal over the short to medium term (say the next 20 years at a minimum). Frankly, even to keep global coal use flat over that time would be an incredible, almost inconceivable, achievement. So, in addition to whatever advocacy work environmentalists choose to do against coal, we also need to deal with coal as a short-term and probably long-term reality.
But don’t take my word for it, or even the IEA’s.
Jeremy Carl is a Research Fellow at the Stanford University’s Program on Energy and Sustainable Development
(21 November 2007)
Part 2 is now online at Gristmill.
