Like it or lump it: coal is here for the long haul.
In the latest issue of Nature Reports Climate Change, I’ve written an editorial on how coal-fired power capacity is expanding rapidly, yet the rate of development of carbon sequestration to bury the emissions is laging far behind.
As my colleague Jeff Tollefson recently reported in Nature, in the past two years alone, China has developed a startling 170 gigawatts of coal-fired power capacity — more than twice Britain’s entire electricity-generating capacity, installed over a century — and has overtaken the United States as the greatest global emitter of greenhouse gases.
India is also busily expanding it’s coal-based energy supply, with Mumbai-based Tata Power putting US$4 billion into constructing one of the world’s largest coal-fired power plants, intended to come online in 2012. And it’s not just emerging economies hungry to develop quickly that are counting on coal for energy. Despite sizeable opposition, the UK government looks likely to approve development of the first new British coal-fired power plant for 30 years at Kingsnorth in Kent.
Yet the only way in which such developments can proceed without nullifying global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is through the deployment of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded could remove up to 90% of carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants.
On the face of it, the statement from world leaders at last month’s G8 summit in Hokkaido, Japan, seemed promising in its commitment to fund R&D for CCS, supporting the launch of “20 large-scale demonstration projects globally by 2010, taking into account various national circumstances, with a view to beginning broad deployment of CCS by 2020”, and pledging $10 billion annually in government money over the next few years to the task.
Yet, reading between the lines, the R&D funds pledged by G8 leaders seem to come from existing research grants rather than being ‘new money’. And given that CCS has yet to be proved to work on electricity-generating plants, much is needed in the way of investment.
Measured against the sequestration capabilities of the world’s three existing showcase projects, America alone would need 1,500 such plants to store the emissions generated by its electricity industry. Yet its one serious attempt to make CCS operational, in the form of the FutureGen project, was cancelled this year owing to an unexpected hike in costs from $830 million to $1.8 billion. And although the European Commission has called for upwards of a dozen commercial coal plants with CCS to be deployed by 2015, how they will be funded is anyone’s guess.
At this rate of progress, one starts to wonder whether the goal of broad deployment of CCS on coal plants by 2020 is a vain hope.
Olive Heffernan