Clean Coal - Is it necessary?

In the discussion of reduction of GHG emissions from the production of electricity, coal and nuclear are raised as an answer to the assertion that it is impractical or even technically impossible to supply current and future energy needs with renewables.

Here is a quote from Mark Jaccard, an advocate of Clean Coal:

Renewable energy is seemingly inexhaustible and environmentally benign, yet many of its manifestations are characterized by low energy density, variability of output and inconvenient location

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Starting from the negligible market share of renewables today, and in a growing global energy system, it will be an enormous and likely very expensive endeavor to force the wholesale replacement of fossil fuels with a renewables dominated system in the course of just one century.

This assertion is offered without any numbers to back it up. This is usually the case when this assertion is made by advocates of coal and nuclear power. Does it stand up to scrutiny?

To answer this question, I turn to the work of Mark Z. Jacobson, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University. Dr. Jacobson has done extensive work in quantifying both the cost and energy production capacity of large wind systems. He has also done pioneering work on measuring the winds available at a height of 80 meters (260 ft), which is the hub height of modern, high power (1.5MW) wind turbines.

In November of 2001, Jacobson et al published a letter in Science Magazine in which they assess the cost of displacing over half of America's coal-fired power plants with wind energy. This is accomplished using 225,000 1.5 MW turbines in the presence of 7 to 7.5 m/s winds, giving capacity factors of 0.35 to 0.4. This would generate 128,000 MW of power. They compared this cost to the cost of building new coal plants, and found the costs to be roughly equivalent, about 3 to 4 cents per kWh. However, the new coal plant cost did not include the cost of carbon sequestration. The costs that were compared were direct+environmental/health+subsidy. Although wind has much lower environmental and health costs, coal, oil and gas are more heavily subsidized.

The cost of retrofitting existing coal plants with carbon capture systems that scrub a significant amount of the carbon dioxide is currently prohibitive. Research is being done on this, but no cost-effective systems are currently in view.

IGCC/CS (Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle/Carbon Sequestration) coal plants are not now being constructed. The US Government is investing $10 billion in research and development on a program called FutureGen. This plant will be constructed over a 10 year period and will cost over $500 million to build, half of which is being put up by a consortium of coal producers. The plant will be located over a geologic formation such as a salt dome that will enable the concentrated CO2 to be captured. The system must be impermeable over thousands of years to be effective.

In the Sleipner gas field sequestration project in Norway injects liquified CO2 into an underwater saline aquifer. The $80million cost of the project does not include the ongoing cost of capturing the CO2. This increases the cost of the coal plant electricity by 3.5 to 5.5 cents, making it uncompetitive.

The conclusion is, that if you look at the numbers, there is no reason why the United States should not start today on a massive wind survey project, and building large, modern wind farms in appropriate locations as fast as we can. The main problem with wind is not technical capacity or cost. It is the political will to redirect subsidies from fossil fuels to wind, and for the public to support the transition of the power generation infrastructure to renewables as opposed to fossil fuels.

Comments

[Zeno Swijtink (reposted by JDE)]

Dave,

The issue I think is liquid fuel, not electricity.

To make the comparison more complete you need to compare the conversion of coal into liquid fuel, with producing hydrogen from electricity from wind power, and the successive energy losses in the transformation, with costs and losses in transportation of fuels, and GHG sequestration.

I referred to Mark Jaccard's new book and to Amanda Little, Grist's Muckraker, who writes in her column this week on cleaner coal, on another site in your blog yesterday since the server was irregular

http://climateprotectioncampaign.typepad.com/cpc/2005/12/us_behavior_at__1.html

Zeno Swijtink

[Zeno Swijtink]

Charles Kennedy, the English Liberal Democrat leader, set out his view of the politics of climate change in Britain last Monday.

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/libdems/story/0,9061,1670825,00.html

"The answer to our energy problems is not to pour money into nuclear power and build up even more problems for the future. We need a government determined to find an energy mix that is economically sustainable and works for the environment.

That means real incentives to cut demand;
· concerted action to cut out waste;
· cleaner fossil fuels;
· carbon capture and storage;
· and the kind of proper funding for renewables already being brought forward by Liberal Democrat ministers in Scotland."

Tony Blair apparently is looking into expanding nuclear energy.