The burning question
The miners’ strike that gripped Britain 25 years ago this year was widely portrayed at the time as a struggle to the death between the government and an industry past its heyday and on its knees. And yet while the UK may have closed down most of its mines, around the world, humanity’s appetite for coal is growing exponentially.
And, with a certain irony, Britain is seen as a focal point for this demand. Kingsnorth in Kent is the proposed site for a 1.6-gigawatt coal-fired power station, potentially one of the largest point sources of carbon dioxide in the world. And the debate over whether or not it should be built recalls the visceral anger associated with the closure of the country’s mines.
E.ON applied to build the new coal plant at Kingsnorth in 2006, but within a year, a Greenpeace protest had shut down the existing Kingsnorth plant. More than 30 activists were arrested, and last summer, a ‘climate camp’ was set up outside the plant by protestors, hundreds of whom have since been arrested while taking direct action against the proposal. Later, six campaigners were acquitted by a jury of causing criminal damage after they shut down Kingsnorth by occupying the smokestack and painting the world ‘Gordon’ on the chimney. It’s thought to be the first case where preventing property damage caused by climate change has been used as part of a ‘lawful excuse’ defence in court.
Plans for the new Kingsnorth station were then called in by the government, with a decision due late this summer. But the power giants continue to argue that coal is essential to keep the lights on, not just in the UK, but across the world. E.ON has since offered to turn Kingsnorth into the world’s largest ‘clean-coal’ power station, but only if it’s given about £1billion of taxpayers’ money to cover building costs.
Dirty fuel
Kingsnorth has come to embody the debate about the future of coal and climate change policies in Britain. ‘You’re locking Britain into another 40 years of fuel use with the hope of mitigating it with a technology that isn’t proven,’ says Joss Garman, climate change campaigner for Greenpeace. ‘This is a litmus test of the government’s green credentials.’
There are plenty of good reasons to dislike coal. It’s the dirtiest and most wasteful of the fossil fuels: it has half the calorific value and double the CO2 emissions of natural gas, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). In practice, only 30 per cent of the energy in coal is converted into electricity – the rest is lost as heat. Pollutants released when it’s burnt include particulates and soot, nitrous and sulphur dioxides and heavy metals.
Coal-fired power stations represent the world’s largest point sources of CO2 and for many people, coal epitomises our current short-sighted energy strategies; it looks backwards to the Industrial Revolution and suggests we’re ignoring warnings about climate change.
Then there are the myriad social issues. Around the world, millions of people are employed by coal operations, but conditions often involve poor wages and a high risk of injury – as witnessed by the steady stream of fatalities in China – and result in long-term scarring and pollution of the landscape.
The consequences of a world that merrily continues to burn coal were spelt out by Dr James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who has written to most G8 leaders, asking them to impose a moratorium on building new coal-fired power plants. Writing in the Guardian earlier this year, Hansen described coal-fired power plants as ‘death factories’ and coal as ‘the single greatest threat to civilisation and all life on our planet’.
Hansen’s voice may be strong, but right now, the clamour for coal is even louder. Kingsnorth may have been singled out by green groups, but a further seven coal-fired power stations have been proposed for the UK, with 80 more across the EU. ‘It’s extremely worrying – coal is historically responsible for around half of all man-made carbon emissions from fossil fuels, and up to 80 per cent of historic emissions in the UK,’ says Garman. ‘Coal is the dirtiest fuel known to man. A resurgence in the coal industry and of coal-burning dinosaurs from the Victorian era at a time of climate change makes no sense.’
Yet the reality is that coal has never gone away, and any presumption that it’s an industry on the wane is utterly misplaced. According to the Energy Information Administration (part of the US Department of Energy), we have only excavated ten per cent of known coal reserves. At current consumption rates, the remainder could satisfy the entire planet’s energy requirements for the next 600 years.
‘Coal has been growing more strongly than any other fossil fuel over the past decade,’ says Brian Ricketts, a senior analyst at the IEA. ‘We, as a planet, are using more coal than ever before. That is not only a long-term trend, it’s a trend that’s going on right now. Coal use in tonnage and as a share of energy sources is increasing. It’s a readily available fuel and it’s easy to extract. People will gravitate to the most economic sources of energy.’
The proportion of the planet’s total energy mix attributed to coal has barely changed since the 1970s. According to Tony Lodge, political and energy analyst at the Centre for Policy Studies, coal generates about 40 per cent of the world’s electricity (compared with about ten per cent each for gas and nuclear). ‘A substantial part of the world’s growth in power generation will be based on coal for at least the next 20–30 years,’ he says.
According to the IEA, in 1973, coal and peat accounted for 24.5 per cent of all primary energy supply; by 2006, this had risen to 26 per cent, and by 2030, coal will make up 28.2 per cent of the world’s energy mix. Half of the USA’s electricity is currently sourced from coal.
Demand has more than doubled in the past three decades. In 1973, total coal production was 2,235 megatonnes, but this rose to 5,543 megatonnes in 2007. China is comfortably the world’s largest producer, accounting for 46 per cent of all coal production (2,549 megatonnes in 2007), up from just 18.7 per cent in 1973. It’s also the world’s sixth-largest importer, bringing in a further 48 megatonnes of hard coal a year. The next largest producers are the USA, India, Australia, South Africa, Russia and Indonesia.
Australia is the largest exporter of coal (244 megatonnes of hard coal in 2007), followed by Indonesia (202 megatonnes) and Russia (100 megatonnes). Japan (182 megatonnes) is the largest importer, followed by Korea, Taiwan, India and the UK.
In 1973, coal and peat accounted for 34.9 per cent of all CO2 emissions from fossil fuels (oil accounted for 50.6 per cent), but by 2006, this had grown to 41.7 per cent, overtaking oil (now 38.5 per cent).
The growth is accelerated by the fact that most of the world’s coal reserves can be found near the surface, and can be retrieved by open-cast mining rather than the more problematic and intensive work of coal mines deep underground. It’s also found plentifully in many developing countries, which seek cheap energy to enable them to develop quickly. And it’s dispersed across the world, and often found in democratic countries, so there’s no need to rely on a handful of autocratic nations in unstable regions.
The UK uses more coal than many people might imagine. It’s the world’s fifth-largest importer, buying 50 megatonnes of hard coal a year, which produces more than 35 per cent of the UK’s baseload electricity during an average year. In recent winters, this has risen to 50 per cent.
‘Coal is plentiful, indigenous, relatively cheap, flexible and responsive to peaks and troughs in demand, can be stockpiled in huge amounts, isn’t prone to outages, and isn’t vulnerable to geopolitical risk,’ says Tony Lodge. ‘Only nuclear power can match these advantages.’
But you don’t need to be an environmental scientist to know that there’s another side to coal. ‘Coal has only one big problem: pollution,’ says Preston Chiaro, chief executive of Rio Tinto’s energy group. ‘Over the years, technology has overcome most of the issues, but the one that hasn’t been tackled is CO2, and that’s because it has only recently dawned on people that it’s an issue.’
Moderating the impact
Mitigating coal’s environmental problems involves a variety of measures, from managing ash, scrubbing sulphur emissions, carbon capture and storage (CCS), gasification, pre-treatment of low-rank coals, and increasing plant efficiencies to reduce consumption. Many coal-fired units all over the world operate at efficiencies well below 30 per cent, according to the IEA, although it predicts that this will improve to around 50 per cent within 15 years.
Solutions include moderating coal’s impact by forcing power stations and their owners to reduce carbon emissions. In the USA, five states have introduced caps on the amount of CO2 that can be produced from a plant. Last autumn, the EU’s environment committee voted for legislation that would cap emissions from power plants with capacities of at least 300 megawatts at 500 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour – enough to prohibit structures such as Kingsnorth, which typically emit up to 850 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour. Greenpeace argues that a cap of 350 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour should be introduced in the UK.
Technology is also playing a key role, presenting a scenario in which coal can either be ‘cleaned’ before combustion or where CO2 can be stored.
Clean coal technology – which strips out most emissions associated with coal either before or after it’s combusted – is developing apace. Lodge argues that fitting clean coal technology to the UK’s 16 power plants would cost an estimated £6billion. In comparison, he says, 2,000 wind turbines are being put up in the UK over the next six years at a cost of £9billion.
A pre-combustion plant is being built at Hatfield, South Yorkshire, with a capacity of 900 megawatts, which is expected to be online by 2013, using an Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle. This technology turns coal into gas – synthesis gas (syngas). It then removes impurities from the coal gas before it’s combusted. This results in lower emissions of sulphur dioxide, particulates and mercury. It also results in improved efficiency compared to conventional pulverised coal.
‘If the UK’s coal-fired power stations were replaced, over time, with clean coal plants, the UK would stand at the head of an energy revolution,’ says Lodge. ‘It would be secure in supply and comfortably within environmental emissions targets.’
Capturing the moment
Meanwhile, CCS is attracting huge amounts of funding across the world. The principle of CCS is well established. Polluting industries, such as coal, would be able to continue to burn fossil fuels, but CO2, rather than being expelled into the atmosphere, would be harvested in the energy production cycle and securely locked away. The technology is seen by the EU as one of the tools, along with energy reduction and renewable technologies, that will help Europe – and indeed the planet – to reduce CO2 emissions. Methods developed in principle include pre-combustion capture (which would apply to systems such as that at Hatfield), post-combustion capture, and oxyfuels combustion.
Researchers are also seeking to store CO2 produced during the underground gasification of coal. The mining industry of the former Soviet Union has long used injections of oxygen and steam to gasify coal and bring it to the surface. But, as Dermot Roddy, Science City professor of energy at Newcastle University, says, ‘this is a fantastically easy way to pollute the planet’. Roddy aims to develop a technique for re-injecting CO2 into the holes created by removing gasified coal and hopes to operate a demonstration plant by 2012. ‘The key is to link gasification to carbon capture and storage,’ he says.
This spring, the EU approved funding of almost €1billion for up to 12 CCS demonstration projects, which it hopes to have operating by 2015. This process aims to make CCS commercially viable by 2020 and kick-start its wide-scale deployment. ‘The timescale is incredibly ambitious,’ admits Eric Drosin, spokesman for the European Technology Platform for Zero Emission Fossil Fuel Power Plants, which is charged with implementing the demonstration projects. ‘In political terms, this is the equivalent of tomorrow.’
Public scepticism will also play a role. Surveys consistently show that the public is dubious about the potential contribution of CCS to the fight against climate change. This reflects the highly critical stance of the majority of NGOs, which fear that CCS will prolong the world’s fossil fuel dependence and divert money away from investment in renewable energy.
Liability relating to any leakage is another issue. NGOs such as Greenpeace argue that CO2 is waste and thus the existing rules against burying waste at sea should apply.
‘Public perception is an important challenge,’ says Drosin. ‘If people aren’t convinced about the safety and application of CCS then it simply won’t happen. CCS is effectively a bridging technology until we secure a fully renewable future. We are going to be relying on fossil fuels for the next few decades, so we have to find some way of preventing ever more CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere.’
Uncertain future
Scientists admit that there are uncertainties. ‘But none of the challenges with CCS are deal breakers,’ says Stuart Haszeldine, professor of geology at Edinburgh University. ‘The only way to improve certainty is to start building the plants.’
The question of CSS brings us back to Kingsnorth. ‘The problem is that many green groups just don’t understand, or choose not to understand, the new technologies that are coming online,’ says Lodge. ‘I can see why environmentalists have hitched their campaign to Kingsnorth – it’s clearly one they think they can win. But the weak underbelly in their argument is that they won’t understand the technologies that allow you to strip 90 per cent of emissions from coal.
‘Just putting down the shutters on coal is unrealistic,’ he continues. ‘These are not bridging technologies: they will generate energy for 45 years or more. Coal is one of the most important fuels in the world. From coal comes a large array of energy by-products. You don’t necessarily have to burn coal to generate electricity.’
Others feel that putting a price on carbon will shift the balance. ‘It’s difficult for humans to avoid using the energy density in coal. It will always be the easier option compared with building windmills or solar power,’ says Haszeldine. ‘But the price of coal has to be charged all the way through. If you believe anything about the linkage between CO2 and climate change or ocean acidification, you can’t afford to burn coal, so you have to do something about it. Companies that dig up coal, oil or gas, transport it and simply burn it will have to change. That kind of behaviour can’t apply any more.
‘At the moment, the disposal of CO2 into the atmosphere is free,’ he says. ‘When that costing is implemented, it will exceed the cost of renewables. Technologies such as CCS are viable if their cost becomes cheaper, or more convenient, than paying the fines for atmospheric disposal. But in the long term – beyond 2050 – renewables are the only feasible energy.’
The social cost of abandoning coal
The 25th anniversary of the miners’ strike in Britain has provided a sharp reminder of the huge number of jobs around the world that are dependent on coal. In 1981, the coal industry employed 229,000 workers in England and Wales; 6,000 are employed today.
Across the world, tens of millions of people are employed by the industry – around five million in China alone. Coal India is the second-biggest employer in the country after the railways, employing 425,000 people. However, out of this vast workforce, relatively few are employed by multinationals such as Rio Tinto. Last year, Rio Tinto Coal Australia and Coal & Allied collectively employed around 3,200 people.
According to the International Institute for Sustainable Development, in the countries of the Southern African Development Community, mining contributes an average of ten per cent of GDP and about 60 per cent of foreign exchange earnings.
Clearly, any shift away from coal could have serious social repercussions. ‘Coal employs significant numbers of people, but the reality is that companies such as ourselves do not make decisions on investments on such issues,’ says Preston Chiaro, chief executive of Rio Tinto’s energy group and chairman of the Coal Industry Advisory Board. ‘If coal proved not to be profitable, we would move into other fields. But if the world didn’t use coal, it would still need energy from somewhere. That source of energy would not be free, and it would require jobs. There may be retraining involved, and there would be some dislocation, but jobs would simply shift to the new market.’
‘It’s about the speed of change rather than change itself,’ says Professor Stuart Haszeldine of Edinburgh University. ‘Humans have always changed. Politically it’s a huge challenge for governments. In the UK, we managed that dislocation moderately well and there’s every reason to expect that other cultures, such as those in India and China, could change in the same way.’
Methane recovery
Carbon capture and storage isn’t the only way in which technology can be used to clean up coal. Efforts are also being focused on ways to tackle another by-product – methane.
Methane isn’t produced by burning coal – it’s released from the coal seams via the process of extracting it from the ground. During the 1950s, a Belgian company specialised in recovering methane from coalmines, but technology has rapidly moved the industry forward. Projects are taking place on all continents, with China taking a particularly energetic approach, mainly by dint of its vast mining industry and swelling landfill. Private companies, along with institutions such as the World Bank and the UN Development Programme, are investing in methane recovery projects. In the USA, the Environmental Protection Agency is also a keen supporter.
‘On a world level, methane recovery has really huge potential,’ says Cameron Davies, chief executive of Alkane Energy, a European firm that specialises in the collection of methane from coal mines. ‘There is so much methane coming from abandoned coalmines. Even if you just captured ten per cent of it, that would be a really substantial amount.’
Methane can be mitigated by burning the gas, which turns it into CO2 and water. Typically, the methane is removed by use of a vacuum pump sitting on top of the mine shaft and then filtered into the local grid. As an incentive, methane recovery can generate credits under the Kyoto Protocol Clean Development Mechanism. Under this system, developed nations and economies in transition can take part in projects in developing countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (or increase sinks), and then get credits for emission reduction amounts.
June 2009
And, with a certain irony, Britain is seen as a focal point for this demand. Kingsnorth in Kent is the proposed site for a 1.6-gigawatt coal-fired power station, potentially one of the largest point sources of carbon dioxide in the world. And the debate over whether or not it should be built recalls the visceral anger associated with the closure of the country’s mines.
E.ON applied to build the new coal plant at Kingsnorth in 2006, but within a year, a Greenpeace protest had shut down the existing Kingsnorth plant. More than 30 activists were arrested, and last summer, a ‘climate camp’ was set up outside the plant by protestors, hundreds of whom have since been arrested while taking direct action against the proposal. Later, six campaigners were acquitted by a jury of causing criminal damage after they shut down Kingsnorth by occupying the smokestack and painting the world ‘Gordon’ on the chimney. It’s thought to be the first case where preventing property damage caused by climate change has been used as part of a ‘lawful excuse’ defence in court.
Plans for the new Kingsnorth station were then called in by the government, with a decision due late this summer. But the power giants continue to argue that coal is essential to keep the lights on, not just in the UK, but across the world. E.ON has since offered to turn Kingsnorth into the world’s largest ‘clean-coal’ power station, but only if it’s given about £1billion of taxpayers’ money to cover building costs.
Dirty fuel
Kingsnorth has come to embody the debate about the future of coal and climate change policies in Britain. ‘You’re locking Britain into another 40 years of fuel use with the hope of mitigating it with a technology that isn’t proven,’ says Joss Garman, climate change campaigner for Greenpeace. ‘This is a litmus test of the government’s green credentials.’
There are plenty of good reasons to dislike coal. It’s the dirtiest and most wasteful of the fossil fuels: it has half the calorific value and double the CO2 emissions of natural gas, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). In practice, only 30 per cent of the energy in coal is converted into electricity – the rest is lost as heat. Pollutants released when it’s burnt include particulates and soot, nitrous and sulphur dioxides and heavy metals.
Coal-fired power stations represent the world’s largest point sources of CO2 and for many people, coal epitomises our current short-sighted energy strategies; it looks backwards to the Industrial Revolution and suggests we’re ignoring warnings about climate change.
Then there are the myriad social issues. Around the world, millions of people are employed by coal operations, but conditions often involve poor wages and a high risk of injury – as witnessed by the steady stream of fatalities in China – and result in long-term scarring and pollution of the landscape.
The consequences of a world that merrily continues to burn coal were spelt out by Dr James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who has written to most G8 leaders, asking them to impose a moratorium on building new coal-fired power plants. Writing in the Guardian earlier this year, Hansen described coal-fired power plants as ‘death factories’ and coal as ‘the single greatest threat to civilisation and all life on our planet’.
Hansen’s voice may be strong, but right now, the clamour for coal is even louder. Kingsnorth may have been singled out by green groups, but a further seven coal-fired power stations have been proposed for the UK, with 80 more across the EU. ‘It’s extremely worrying – coal is historically responsible for around half of all man-made carbon emissions from fossil fuels, and up to 80 per cent of historic emissions in the UK,’ says Garman. ‘Coal is the dirtiest fuel known to man. A resurgence in the coal industry and of coal-burning dinosaurs from the Victorian era at a time of climate change makes no sense.’
Yet the reality is that coal has never gone away, and any presumption that it’s an industry on the wane is utterly misplaced. According to the Energy Information Administration (part of the US Department of Energy), we have only excavated ten per cent of known coal reserves. At current consumption rates, the remainder could satisfy the entire planet’s energy requirements for the next 600 years.
‘Coal has been growing more strongly than any other fossil fuel over the past decade,’ says Brian Ricketts, a senior analyst at the IEA. ‘We, as a planet, are using more coal than ever before. That is not only a long-term trend, it’s a trend that’s going on right now. Coal use in tonnage and as a share of energy sources is increasing. It’s a readily available fuel and it’s easy to extract. People will gravitate to the most economic sources of energy.’
The proportion of the planet’s total energy mix attributed to coal has barely changed since the 1970s. According to Tony Lodge, political and energy analyst at the Centre for Policy Studies, coal generates about 40 per cent of the world’s electricity (compared with about ten per cent each for gas and nuclear). ‘A substantial part of the world’s growth in power generation will be based on coal for at least the next 20–30 years,’ he says.
According to the IEA, in 1973, coal and peat accounted for 24.5 per cent of all primary energy supply; by 2006, this had risen to 26 per cent, and by 2030, coal will make up 28.2 per cent of the world’s energy mix. Half of the USA’s electricity is currently sourced from coal.
Demand has more than doubled in the past three decades. In 1973, total coal production was 2,235 megatonnes, but this rose to 5,543 megatonnes in 2007. China is comfortably the world’s largest producer, accounting for 46 per cent of all coal production (2,549 megatonnes in 2007), up from just 18.7 per cent in 1973. It’s also the world’s sixth-largest importer, bringing in a further 48 megatonnes of hard coal a year. The next largest producers are the USA, India, Australia, South Africa, Russia and Indonesia.
Australia is the largest exporter of coal (244 megatonnes of hard coal in 2007), followed by Indonesia (202 megatonnes) and Russia (100 megatonnes). Japan (182 megatonnes) is the largest importer, followed by Korea, Taiwan, India and the UK.
In 1973, coal and peat accounted for 34.9 per cent of all CO2 emissions from fossil fuels (oil accounted for 50.6 per cent), but by 2006, this had grown to 41.7 per cent, overtaking oil (now 38.5 per cent).
The growth is accelerated by the fact that most of the world’s coal reserves can be found near the surface, and can be retrieved by open-cast mining rather than the more problematic and intensive work of coal mines deep underground. It’s also found plentifully in many developing countries, which seek cheap energy to enable them to develop quickly. And it’s dispersed across the world, and often found in democratic countries, so there’s no need to rely on a handful of autocratic nations in unstable regions.
The UK uses more coal than many people might imagine. It’s the world’s fifth-largest importer, buying 50 megatonnes of hard coal a year, which produces more than 35 per cent of the UK’s baseload electricity during an average year. In recent winters, this has risen to 50 per cent.
‘Coal is plentiful, indigenous, relatively cheap, flexible and responsive to peaks and troughs in demand, can be stockpiled in huge amounts, isn’t prone to outages, and isn’t vulnerable to geopolitical risk,’ says Tony Lodge. ‘Only nuclear power can match these advantages.’
But you don’t need to be an environmental scientist to know that there’s another side to coal. ‘Coal has only one big problem: pollution,’ says Preston Chiaro, chief executive of Rio Tinto’s energy group. ‘Over the years, technology has overcome most of the issues, but the one that hasn’t been tackled is CO2, and that’s because it has only recently dawned on people that it’s an issue.’
Moderating the impact
Mitigating coal’s environmental problems involves a variety of measures, from managing ash, scrubbing sulphur emissions, carbon capture and storage (CCS), gasification, pre-treatment of low-rank coals, and increasing plant efficiencies to reduce consumption. Many coal-fired units all over the world operate at efficiencies well below 30 per cent, according to the IEA, although it predicts that this will improve to around 50 per cent within 15 years.
Solutions include moderating coal’s impact by forcing power stations and their owners to reduce carbon emissions. In the USA, five states have introduced caps on the amount of CO2 that can be produced from a plant. Last autumn, the EU’s environment committee voted for legislation that would cap emissions from power plants with capacities of at least 300 megawatts at 500 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour – enough to prohibit structures such as Kingsnorth, which typically emit up to 850 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour. Greenpeace argues that a cap of 350 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour should be introduced in the UK.
Technology is also playing a key role, presenting a scenario in which coal can either be ‘cleaned’ before combustion or where CO2 can be stored.
Clean coal technology – which strips out most emissions associated with coal either before or after it’s combusted – is developing apace. Lodge argues that fitting clean coal technology to the UK’s 16 power plants would cost an estimated £6billion. In comparison, he says, 2,000 wind turbines are being put up in the UK over the next six years at a cost of £9billion.
A pre-combustion plant is being built at Hatfield, South Yorkshire, with a capacity of 900 megawatts, which is expected to be online by 2013, using an Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle. This technology turns coal into gas – synthesis gas (syngas). It then removes impurities from the coal gas before it’s combusted. This results in lower emissions of sulphur dioxide, particulates and mercury. It also results in improved efficiency compared to conventional pulverised coal.
‘If the UK’s coal-fired power stations were replaced, over time, with clean coal plants, the UK would stand at the head of an energy revolution,’ says Lodge. ‘It would be secure in supply and comfortably within environmental emissions targets.’
Capturing the moment
Meanwhile, CCS is attracting huge amounts of funding across the world. The principle of CCS is well established. Polluting industries, such as coal, would be able to continue to burn fossil fuels, but CO2, rather than being expelled into the atmosphere, would be harvested in the energy production cycle and securely locked away. The technology is seen by the EU as one of the tools, along with energy reduction and renewable technologies, that will help Europe – and indeed the planet – to reduce CO2 emissions. Methods developed in principle include pre-combustion capture (which would apply to systems such as that at Hatfield), post-combustion capture, and oxyfuels combustion.
Researchers are also seeking to store CO2 produced during the underground gasification of coal. The mining industry of the former Soviet Union has long used injections of oxygen and steam to gasify coal and bring it to the surface. But, as Dermot Roddy, Science City professor of energy at Newcastle University, says, ‘this is a fantastically easy way to pollute the planet’. Roddy aims to develop a technique for re-injecting CO2 into the holes created by removing gasified coal and hopes to operate a demonstration plant by 2012. ‘The key is to link gasification to carbon capture and storage,’ he says.
This spring, the EU approved funding of almost €1billion for up to 12 CCS demonstration projects, which it hopes to have operating by 2015. This process aims to make CCS commercially viable by 2020 and kick-start its wide-scale deployment. ‘The timescale is incredibly ambitious,’ admits Eric Drosin, spokesman for the European Technology Platform for Zero Emission Fossil Fuel Power Plants, which is charged with implementing the demonstration projects. ‘In political terms, this is the equivalent of tomorrow.’
Public scepticism will also play a role. Surveys consistently show that the public is dubious about the potential contribution of CCS to the fight against climate change. This reflects the highly critical stance of the majority of NGOs, which fear that CCS will prolong the world’s fossil fuel dependence and divert money away from investment in renewable energy.
Liability relating to any leakage is another issue. NGOs such as Greenpeace argue that CO2 is waste and thus the existing rules against burying waste at sea should apply.
‘Public perception is an important challenge,’ says Drosin. ‘If people aren’t convinced about the safety and application of CCS then it simply won’t happen. CCS is effectively a bridging technology until we secure a fully renewable future. We are going to be relying on fossil fuels for the next few decades, so we have to find some way of preventing ever more CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere.’
Start the slideshow (8 pictures)
Uncertain future
Scientists admit that there are uncertainties. ‘But none of the challenges with CCS are deal breakers,’ says Stuart Haszeldine, professor of geology at Edinburgh University. ‘The only way to improve certainty is to start building the plants.’
The question of CSS brings us back to Kingsnorth. ‘The problem is that many green groups just don’t understand, or choose not to understand, the new technologies that are coming online,’ says Lodge. ‘I can see why environmentalists have hitched their campaign to Kingsnorth – it’s clearly one they think they can win. But the weak underbelly in their argument is that they won’t understand the technologies that allow you to strip 90 per cent of emissions from coal.
‘Just putting down the shutters on coal is unrealistic,’ he continues. ‘These are not bridging technologies: they will generate energy for 45 years or more. Coal is one of the most important fuels in the world. From coal comes a large array of energy by-products. You don’t necessarily have to burn coal to generate electricity.’
Others feel that putting a price on carbon will shift the balance. ‘It’s difficult for humans to avoid using the energy density in coal. It will always be the easier option compared with building windmills or solar power,’ says Haszeldine. ‘But the price of coal has to be charged all the way through. If you believe anything about the linkage between CO2 and climate change or ocean acidification, you can’t afford to burn coal, so you have to do something about it. Companies that dig up coal, oil or gas, transport it and simply burn it will have to change. That kind of behaviour can’t apply any more.
‘At the moment, the disposal of CO2 into the atmosphere is free,’ he says. ‘When that costing is implemented, it will exceed the cost of renewables. Technologies such as CCS are viable if their cost becomes cheaper, or more convenient, than paying the fines for atmospheric disposal. But in the long term – beyond 2050 – renewables are the only feasible energy.’
The social cost of abandoning coal
The 25th anniversary of the miners’ strike in Britain has provided a sharp reminder of the huge number of jobs around the world that are dependent on coal. In 1981, the coal industry employed 229,000 workers in England and Wales; 6,000 are employed today.
Across the world, tens of millions of people are employed by the industry – around five million in China alone. Coal India is the second-biggest employer in the country after the railways, employing 425,000 people. However, out of this vast workforce, relatively few are employed by multinationals such as Rio Tinto. Last year, Rio Tinto Coal Australia and Coal & Allied collectively employed around 3,200 people.
According to the International Institute for Sustainable Development, in the countries of the Southern African Development Community, mining contributes an average of ten per cent of GDP and about 60 per cent of foreign exchange earnings.
Clearly, any shift away from coal could have serious social repercussions. ‘Coal employs significant numbers of people, but the reality is that companies such as ourselves do not make decisions on investments on such issues,’ says Preston Chiaro, chief executive of Rio Tinto’s energy group and chairman of the Coal Industry Advisory Board. ‘If coal proved not to be profitable, we would move into other fields. But if the world didn’t use coal, it would still need energy from somewhere. That source of energy would not be free, and it would require jobs. There may be retraining involved, and there would be some dislocation, but jobs would simply shift to the new market.’
‘It’s about the speed of change rather than change itself,’ says Professor Stuart Haszeldine of Edinburgh University. ‘Humans have always changed. Politically it’s a huge challenge for governments. In the UK, we managed that dislocation moderately well and there’s every reason to expect that other cultures, such as those in India and China, could change in the same way.’
Methane recovery
Carbon capture and storage isn’t the only way in which technology can be used to clean up coal. Efforts are also being focused on ways to tackle another by-product – methane.
Methane isn’t produced by burning coal – it’s released from the coal seams via the process of extracting it from the ground. During the 1950s, a Belgian company specialised in recovering methane from coalmines, but technology has rapidly moved the industry forward. Projects are taking place on all continents, with China taking a particularly energetic approach, mainly by dint of its vast mining industry and swelling landfill. Private companies, along with institutions such as the World Bank and the UN Development Programme, are investing in methane recovery projects. In the USA, the Environmental Protection Agency is also a keen supporter.
‘On a world level, methane recovery has really huge potential,’ says Cameron Davies, chief executive of Alkane Energy, a European firm that specialises in the collection of methane from coal mines. ‘There is so much methane coming from abandoned coalmines. Even if you just captured ten per cent of it, that would be a really substantial amount.’
Methane can be mitigated by burning the gas, which turns it into CO2 and water. Typically, the methane is removed by use of a vacuum pump sitting on top of the mine shaft and then filtered into the local grid. As an incentive, methane recovery can generate credits under the Kyoto Protocol Clean Development Mechanism. Under this system, developed nations and economies in transition can take part in projects in developing countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (or increase sinks), and then get credits for emission reduction amounts.
June 2009
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