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Mounting Costs Slow the Push for Clean Coal
Matthew Wald, New York Times
For years, scientists have had a straightforward idea for taming global warming. They want to take the carbon dioxide that spews from coal-burning power plants and pump it back into the ground.
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.
But it has become clear in recent months that the nation’s effort to develop the technique is lagging badly.
… 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.
(30 May 2008)
Buried, but not dead (Letter to the editor)
Gerry Harant, New Scientist
The notion of capturing carbon dioxide and storing it underground (29 March, p 36) should not be equated with the provision of energy from alternative sources. The process itself would consume large amounts of energy, leading to an increase in the production of greenhouse gases.
As long as all these pollutants were stored safely underground it could serve as a temporary, partial solution to global warming – but it could be a short-lived one. Should economic conditions worsen, carbon sequestration could be halted to allow the considerable quantities of energy that it consumes to be made available for sale.
You don’t need to be a complete cynic to believe that in our volatile political climate this is precisely what would happen.
(14 May 2008)
Contributor Dr. Larry Hughes writes:
One can imagine other energy intensive systems intended to protect the environment being shut down, such as SO2 scrubbers. The economy will trump the environment.
How to Get Off Coal
Jim Hansen, WorldChanging
(1) Urgency of coal moratorium
A successful strategy to avoid climate calamity must start with a moratorium, and eventual phaseout, of coal-fired power plants that do not capture CO2. Other actions are needed, including a carbon price that encourages transition to fuels of the future, discourages scrounging for every last drop of oil, and stymies budding efforts to squeeze oil from the dirtiest fossil deposits (tar shale and its ilk). Also improved agricultural and forestry practices will be needed to draw atmospheric CO2 down. But the urgent, essential action is a coal moratorium.
Side benefits of phasing out coal emissions, for human health and the environment, are so great that it will be feasible to spread a no-dirty-coal energy strategy world-wide once it is started. The West must initiate the moratorium, because the West is responsible for most of the excess CO2 in the air today. We have the potential for an immediate moratorium, and the West has much to gain from early adoption and technology refinement.
Energy experts agree that efficiency and renewable energies can handle near-term needs for energy growth in the United States. New coal plants are being built only because coal is cheap (as long as it receives government subsidies and is not forced to pay for environmental and health damages), because utilities make more money if they sell more energy, and because the political clout of King Coal stymies adoption of national energy policies in the public interest.
(2) Leadership
Political leaders, in both parties, do not yet appreciate fundamental data such as the bar graph of carbon content of individual fossil fuels. It is not rocket science. We cannot prevent use of easily minable reserves of oil or capture tailpipe emissions. But oil reserves are finite, prices are rising, and emissions will peak and decline. The larger CO2 source, the one we must cut off at the pass, is coal (and unconventional fossil fuels, squeezing of oil from tar shale and its ilk).
(30 May 2008)
