The clean coal PR push is looking more and more hollow. In The NYT, Matt Wald paints a grim picture: cost overruns, technological uncertainty, waning support from utilities, and a mess of unanswered questions about everything from security to legal liability.
But one assumption running through the article needs to be exposed and unequivocally rejected.
According to John Thompson of the Clean Air Task Force, without clean coal -- that is, carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) -- "we're not going to have much of a chance for stabilizing the climate." Why?
The fear is that utilities, lacking proven chemical techniques for capturing carbon dioxide and proven methods for storing it underground by the billions of tons per year, will build the next generation of coal plants using existing technology. That would ensure that vast amounts of global warming gases would be pumped into the atmosphere for decades.
Think about that. If we can't hand coal utilities a way to remove the carbon from their emissions, they'll go right on burning dirty coal. Says Wald, "Coal is abundant and cheap, assuring that it will continue to be used." Even if it's going to consign civilization to unthinkable suffering, we'll keep doing it, because it's cheap.
That is insane on many levels, but let's just mention three.
First of all, coal isn't cheap. The rock itself is still fairly cheap on a on a dollar-per-BTU basis -- though that's changing rapidly -- but what matters is the cost of delivered power, and on that basis coal-fired power plants, qua investments, suck. The cost of building power plants is spiking, up 130 percent since 2000 and 76 percent in just the last three years. Last year, the price for supercritical coal exceeded $2500/kW.
New, Clean Air Act-compliant coal plants of any kind are expensive, but IGCC plants are more expensive yet, and according to MIT adding carbon capture and sequestration (large-scale tests will be done by 2020!) will add another 40 percent on to the price of delivered power. Given our practical experience to date -- the aborted FutureGen clean coal project topped out at an estimated $6500/kW -- that's probably optimistic.
Coal isn't cheap. That's why 59 proposed plants got scuttled last year.
Second of all, an activity that leads to an uninhabitable planet cannot, by definition, be "cheap." To the extent coal appears cheap, it is an artifact of grotesque market failure, our inability to hold Big Coal accountable for even a fraction of the damage it does. But the damage is real. The health and environmental costs of coal are real costs. Subtract them from the societal value of coal and you get a negative sum.
So we don't have to -- indeed, cannot -- stand by and allow utilities to "build the next generation of coal plants using existing technology." To borrow a phrase from my four-year-old, they are not the boss of us. We are the boss of them. They will build what we, as a nation and as a species, let them build. We do not have to sacrifice our future for the benefit of electrical utilities.
Third and finally, we'll manage just fine without coal. If CCS doesn't work out, a moratorium on new coal plants is put in place, and we slowly begin shuttering existing coal plants, we will not be cast into economic misery and privation. New sources are rapidly developing and deploying; the energy efficiency market is exploding; both those trends will be turbo-charged by a price on carbon and a moratorium on coal. Once the horrific danger of climate change becomes unavoidably clear, there will be enormous public investment in green R&D and infrastructure. Renewables and efficiency will be huge industries, generating good jobs and economic growth. The market will reward efficiency and low-consumption living arrangements. America will adjust, and it will be easier than the economic models predict. It always is.
Our fate is not tied to coal's.
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Comments View as Flat
Sean Casten Posted 2:19 am
30 May 2008
Well said
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GRLCowan Posted 3:37 am
30 May 2008
They will learn
Aboveground CO2 has already been inadvertently begun. Doing so advertently is permanent and much cheaper than burial. More at here.
--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.html
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GRLCowan Posted 3:46 am
30 May 2008
Inadvertence
I meant to say, aboveground CO2 storage has already been inadvertently begun.
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Teryn Norris Posted 6:02 am
30 May 2008
Understating the Coal Challenge
David -- It seems that you are misrepresenting the scale of the coal challenge to your readers.
I posted a response here.
Coal is cheap - that's why even with a carbon dioxide price of $38 per ton, Europe just announced the construction of 50 new coal plants. And it's why the EIA projects global coal demand will double by 2030 and that China's total coal-related emissions will grow by 232% between 2004 and 2030.
Coal is cheap, plentiful, and it's one of the greatest challenges the world has ever faced. CCS is just one tool that will help us overcome it. Massive and strategic investments to reduce the price of alternative and next-generation energy and carbon capture technologies is another. But imagining that we'll just institute a global coal moratorium and a carbon price - and all our problems will be solved by efficiency and renewables - is not.
So what gives, David?
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Wolverine Posted 7:03 am
30 May 2008
The Problem With Energy Privatization
The problems posed by the desires of private utilities and mining companies to make money by selling and burning as much coal (and uranium) as possible shows why things like energy infrastructure, from the mines to the plants, should be owned by the government, i.e., theoretically the people. With no lobbyists urging them to promote more ecologically and environmentally destructive energy use, the people would be in a much better position to do things like put a complete moratorium on new coal plants and phase out the old ones, as suggested by James Hansen in a previous column. The fact that privately owned coal companies and utilities are a major roadblock to doing this is reason enough for the government to condemn them and buy them through eminent domain.
And before all you right wing anti-government types start crying about why this is a bad idea, answer this: In an society such as this one where elections are regularly held for public offices, the public has a chance to change things to its liking. Corporations, which own the coal companies and private utilities, are pure tyrannies where the public has absolutely no say in what they do.
All enterprises that greatly effect the public and the Earth should be publicly owned. Otherwise, we get the "coal problem."
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Jon Rynn Posted 7:11 am
30 May 2008
Wolverine --
Hansen actually considers himself a conservative, I believe, which is why in his post he made a passing reference to not setting up a big "bureaucracy", which is why he likes tax-and-dividend. In fact, he's never called for any kind of government intervention, as far as I can tell. if that sounds like cognitive dissonance to you, check out Ken Ward's latest post and the ensuing discussion of the term.
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Russ Posted 5:53 pm
30 May 2008
privatization
Wolverine says:
I already know what their answer is, with regard to publicly traded companies: That "we the public" ARE these companies. ExxonMobil has had a propaganda campaign to that effect, in advertisements and columns by mercenaries like Ben Stein, for some time now.
Of course it's a let-them-eat-cake lie - just look at ExMob's long history of suppressing any sort of shareholder dissent. I'm not familiar with the state of things in the coal industry, but I'd be surprised if it was much different.
"Just buy stock, go to shareholder meetings and advocate your views"; yup, this is let-them-eat-cakeism just like "if you don't like the law, change it" or, most offensive of all, "if you don't like the system, vote".
All these good-civics lies amount in practice to allowing oneself to be distracted and go through ineffectual motions while the processes of totalitarian private expropriation and complete environmental destruction are carried through to the end. The fact is, the enemy knows the window is closing, the party is almost over, so they're rushing to "get in everything under the wire", to use this political window to seize and reorganize everything so they'll be in a position to physically enforce dominance when they can no longer rely on law and governments to do so.
If you doubt this, just consider what's being discussed here, the fundamental insanity of privatizing such core systems as food, energy, and water(look over at today's Grist news for a link to water privatization), things so critical socially and biologically. It is obvious on its face that such systems must, practically and morally, be managed for the public good (including with good environmental stewardship). So what can you say about a political structure which, for puely ideological reasons, wants to concentrate them in the hands of private sociopathy? ("Sociopath" is of course meant literally - they not only say "greed is good" and aggressively seek profit to the exclusion and contempt of all other values in practice, this is also, according to capitalist ideology and its concomitant laws, what it's supposed to do in theory. This is declared in principle the highest good. Now what would you say about an individual who lived his private life that way, proclaiming such a value? You'd call him a monster.)
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