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In a Test of Capturing Carbon Dioxide, Perhaps a Way to Temper Global Warming    [

    Cheap Coal Threat to Global Climate
    By Ivan Semeniuk
    The New Scientist

    Saturday 17 March 2007 Issue

    Boston - At the back of Ernest Moniz's mind a clock is ticking. Moniz is director of the Laboratory for Energy and the Environment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His mental countdown marks the narrowing window of time that remains for the US to address a looming environmental disaster fuelled by the burning of mountains of cheap American coal.

    "It's going to be used," says Moniz, who co-chaired a report - The Future of Coal - that was released this week. His assertion is the result of three years of economic modelling which predicts that coal consumption in the US will grow significantly by mid-century. "In virtually any scenario that we've explored, coal use increases - even when you place a substantial price on CO2 emissions."

    Unlike oil, which is expensive and concentrated in geopolitically problematic locations, coal is plentiful in those countries where future demand is likely to be greatest, notably the US, China and India. Given that coal generates the most CO2 per unit energy of any fossil fuel, the implications for climate change are serious.

    The report recommends a massive scale-up of technologies that capture the carbon released by coal burning and sequester it underground in porous rock formations. Such technologies have been tried on a small scale, but no single project covers the entire process.

    "We believe the United States and the rest of the world is not demonstrating the necessary urgency," says Moniz. A big increase in funding is needed to develop infrastructure for CO2 capture. What is most needed, he says, is a regulatory framework to select geological sites for carbon sequestration on the scale of 1 million tonnes per year.

    "Our understanding of the technology is better than most people realise," says Howard Herzog, who heads the lab's research on sequestration. A greater obstacle is the lack of incentive for utility companies to invest in carbon capture. "The key thing is to attach a price to carbon emissions," says Moniz. "Without that it can never cost less to capture and sequester CO2 than it would to simply let it go into the atmosphere."

    The MIT report also urges Congress to ensure that existing coal-fired plants will not be exempt from future emissions charges. Without such legislation there could be a rush to build power stations with no provision for carbon capture. The Texas utility giant TXU, which has been in a fight with environmentalists over plans to build 11 old-style coal-fired power stations, said recently that it has dropped eight of them. Meanwhile, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts has said he will introduce a bill to block companies from building plants without carbon capture. The goal is to force owners to use up-to-date technology for storing carbon emissions.

    According to David Keith at the University of Calgary in Alberta, who chairs the CO2 storage group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the US and Canada must start building commercial-scale coal-fired plants that incorporate carbon capture. The US government currently has plans for one, dubbed FutureGen, which is scheduled to begin operating in 2013. To be ready for the approaching coal rush, the MIT report calls on the Department of Energy to fund at least three projects on a similar scale. The report is available at http://web.mit.edu/coal.

    "The US and Canada must start building coal-fired plants that incorporate carbon capture"

 

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    In a Test of Capturing Carbon Dioxide, Perhaps a Way to Temper Global Warming
    By Matthew L. Wald
    The New York Times

    Thursday 15 March 2007

    Washington - American Electric Power, a major electric utility, is planning the largest demonstration yet of capturing carbon dioxide from a coal-fired power plant and pumping it deep underground.

    Various experts consider that approach, known as sequestration, essential to reining in climate change by preventing the gas from being added to the atmospheric blanket that promotes global warming.

    The project, to be announced Thursday by American Electric Power, based in Columbus, Ohio, will use a new process - so far tested only at laboratory scale - that uses chilled ammonia to absorb the gas for collection. The process was developed by Alstom, a major manufacturer of generating equipment, and aims to reduce the amount of energy required to capture the carbon dioxide.

    Some experts have estimated that nearly a third of a power plant's energy output might be needed to pull carbon dioxide from the waste stream. Alstom hopes to hold it to 15 percent.

    The cost must be kept as low as possible if the technology is to be used on a wide scale. Congress is seen as unlikely to impose enormously expensive restraints on emissions. And under proposals to cap emissions nationally and let companies trade credits for extra reductions, only the cheapest methods of reducing greenhouse gases would thrive in the marketplace.

    A report released Wednesday by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology called for prompt work on demonstrating the necessary sequestration technologies.

    The co-chairman of that study, Ernest J. Moniz, a former assistant secretary of energy, said the unusually large scale of the American Electric project made it "quite relevant."

    Climate policy specialists said the project was a significant test of the technology and also a sign that American Electric, which relies on coal for fuel, is expecting carbon emission limits of some kind.

    The initial trial, at the company's Mountaineer plant in New Haven, W.Va., will take a portion of the carbon dioxide from the flue, compress it into liquid form at more than 1,000 pounds of pressure per square inch, and inject it 9,000 feet below the earth's surface, a technique that experts say is not well understood but would be essential to large-scale carbon sequestration.

    The project will begin next year, the company said. A demonstration 6 to 12 times that size, which would be commercial scale, will be conducted soon after at a plant in Oklahoma.

    "This basically represents jumping ahead," said Stuart M. Dalton, director of generation at the Electric Power Research Institute, a utility consortium, in Palo Alto, Calif. His organization has helped organize a test, one-sixth the size of the West Virginia test, that is supposed to begin this year at a coal-fired power plant in Wisconsin. That carbon will be re-released.

    Some plants use a different separation technology to capture and sell food-grade carbon dioxide, used in making carbonated beverages.

    Worldwide, there are several places where carbon dioxide is injected into deep wells, but none are power plants.

    At the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, David G. Hawkins, a climate expert, said, "Under any plausible scenarios of global coal use, we are going to need carbon dioxide capture and storage."

    But Mr. Hawkins and other environmentalists said that Congress should not wait for the outcome of demonstrations like American Electric's to order mandatory controls on carbon emissions.

    Michael G. Morris, the president, chairman and chief executive of the utility, said in a telephone interview that sequestration would be necessary for society but was also enlightened self-interest on the part of his company.

    The Energy Department has concentrated on a different technology, converting coal to a gas and taking the carbon out before the gas is burned. American Electric is also pursuing that technology, but the chilled-ammonia method is applicable to traditional coal plants that use pulverized coal technology, and dozens of them are on the drawing boards.

    "You, me and everyone else needs to understand that the government talks big and moves slow," Mr. Morris said.

    He said the demonstration would cost $800 million, including work to remove conventional pollutants like soot and sulfur dioxide before carbon separation. The company will seek federal grants and will ask state regulators to let it charge customers.

    Carbon from the larger trial at the Oklahoma plant will be sold for injection into old oil fields where pressure and production have fallen.