Energy
Cleaner US coal plants are not enough
October 11, 2005
By Timothy Gardner
New York - The world's first substantially cleaner coal plants are being planned in the US, but they may do little to cut global warming risks until the country forms climate regulations, experts say.
US utilities are planning a fleet of new coal plants amid bountiful domestic supplies of the fuel and all-time high natural gas prices. But only a fraction of those will use the Holy Grail of clean coal technology - integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) - because of the high initial cost.
IGCC gasifies coal before it is burned, preventing large quantities of pollutants harmful to human health, such as particulates, small components and mercury, from going up the smokestack.
"This is the way we need to go to preserve the coal option," says John Stowell, an environmental strategist at utility Cinergy.
IGCC can be paired with pipes that capture the leading greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. Most scientists believe greenhouse gases lead to global warming, which could have catastrophic consequences such as rising seas and stronger hurricanes.
Capturing can be added much more cheaply to IGCC than conventional coal plants.
American Electric Power (AEP) and Cinergy plan to build IGCC plants in the Midwest in the next decade. Both companies are also involved with the US energy department's FutureGen coal demonstration project, which aims to capture carbon.
But they don't plan yet to add the capturing equipment on the IGCC plants they aim to build.
That concerns some environmentalists, especially as the technology could increase coal use and open up vast areas of high-sulphur coal in the Midwest to mining.
"If IGCC is not built with carbon capture and storage, it may as well be the old dirty stuff," says Dave Hamilton, the Sierra Club's global warming programme director.
President George W Bush dropped out of the Kyoto protocol on global warming early in his first term. That means US companies aren't required to limit greenhouse gases, as they are in most other industrialised countries.
"Until there is such a requirement, we're not going to put that technology in place," says Melissa McHenry, a spokesperson for AEP.
IGCC start-up costs can run 20 percent over conventional plants, but new incentives could ease the pain. The new federal Energy Act contains up to $800 million (R5.2 billion) in investment tax credits for IGCC. Those could help utilities build six to 10 of the first commercial IGCC plants by 2010 or soon after, says Stuart Dalton, a power expert at the Electric Power Research Institute, an industry-funded group.
Dalton says those incentives are in addition to billions of dollars in other federal coal, gasification and carbon sequestration incentives, as well as incentives in Illinois and other states.
In addition to the start-up costs, electricity prices could rise if power plant operators adopt carbon capturing technology, according to a recent UN report.
But carbon capturing on IGCC plants adds only 25 percent to the cost of electricity, compared with a 60 percent boost from conventional coal plants that add capturing, says Ed Lowe, the gasification manager at GE Energy.
In addition, he says, IGCC can remove 90 percent of the mercury in coal at 10 percent of the cost of conventional clean coal plants. GE also aims to halve the start-up cost, he says.
IGCC plants are so clean that utilities hope they will soon lead to a boost in Midwestern coal mining.
Connie Holmes, a spokesperson for the National Mining Association, says IGCC and other clean coal technologies could open high-sulphur coal fields in Illinois, Ohio, western Kentucky and Pennsylvania that mining houses have avoided since the 1990 Clean Air Act made burning fuel from the region more expensive.
US electricity demand should rise 50 percent from 2003 to 2025, according to the department of energy. Much of that generation could be coal based, as natural gas supplies thin.
In the mid-1990s, not one utility had plans to build a coal plant. Now more than 120 US coal plants have been proposed, more in the past year than in the previous 12 years, according to the National Energy Technology Laboratory.
Companies are eyeing looming carbon caps, such as those envisioned by the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a group of nine northeastern states. The initiative seeks to break with Bush by forming regional carbon dioxide markets.
While utilities don't yet capture carbon, those with IGCC could be well placed to do so in the future.
AEP agrees that over time there could be cost savings.
"We feel that for the operating life of the plant ... [IGCC] is the best and most cost-effective route," says AEP spokesperson Pat Hemlepp.
Some environmentalists are cautiously optimistic about IGCC, but say renewables such as wind and solar power could replace some of the need for coal. "We believe it should be the requirement for a modern power plant, but until [carbon constraint] happens, this is still just the shiny object that distracts us from the nearly 500 dirty coal plants that are polluting the air," says Greenpeace energy policy specialist John Coequyt.
- Reuters
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