Clean Coal

This article is part of the CoalSwarm coverage of "clean coal."
Sub-articles:
Carbon Capture and Storage Carbon Capture and Storage projects which have been abandoned Clean Coal Clean Coal Marketing Campaign Clean Coal Technology Clean coal - quotable quotes
Related articles:
America's Power America's Power Army Americans for Balanced Energy Choices American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity FutureGen U.S. coal politics

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This article provides an overview of both the political and the marketing dimensions of clean coal, and the technologies for using coal that have variously been touted as "clean." Each topic is explored in greater depth in separate articles, as are several related topics:

• Clean Coal Technology - This article assesses progress to date in creating technologies that aimed at eliminating various environmental and health impacts of coal.

• Clean Coal Marketing Campaign - This article describes the public relations efforts of the coal industry to promote the concept that future coal usage will be safe to the environment and harmless to human health.

• Clean Coal Subsidies describes federal research and development programs aimed at advancing new coal technologies, as well as subsidies provided to commercial coal operations that meet certain official "clean" criteria even though they may continue to generate major pollution streams.

• America's Power, American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, Families Organized to Represent the Coal Economy, and Kansans for Affordable Energy describe coal industry front groups that have advanced in the marketing of "clean coal." The article Bob Henrie describes one of the leading public relations strategists behind the coal industry's "clean coal" campaign.

Introduction

The term "clean coal" is both controversial and complex. Controversy arises out of the coal industry's use of the term in its high-profile marketing campaign aimed at convincing the public and politicians that the goal of using coal without damaging the environment and public health is either a current or a foreseeable reality. Coal opponents assert that such usage is not factually based and that its main purpose is to provide public support and political cover for continued expansion of coal use.

Three factors combine to cause additional complexity in the debate:

• A history of shifting terminology: Over time, the meaning of the term "clean coal" has repeatedly changed, leading to frequent confusion. A hundred years ago the term appeared in newspapers as a synonym for "smokeless" anthracite coal. Today it is frequently used as a shorthand for processes that could allow coal to be used with near-zero greenhouse gas emissions. In the interim it has referred to measures that would reduce various pollutants such as sulfur dioxide and particulates.

• Gap between old plants, new plants, and next-generation plants: By any measure, the bulk of existing coal plants remain highly polluting. Recently built plants include equipment that reduces most of the sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide emissions, but they continue to emit large amounts mercury and other toxins, and they do not capture any carbon dioxide. The timeframe for commercial implementation of carbon capture and storage is hotly debated, with estimates ranging from 10 to 30 years in the future.

• The "whack-a-mole" problem: While the term "clean coal" focuses attention on efforts to reduce to coal's atmospheric impacts, measures to tap down the air impacts of coal often cause other environmental impacts of coal to actually worsen. One example of this perverse phenomenon is the large quantity of toxin-laden sludge produced by sulfur scrubbers. Another is the fact that carbon capture and storage, if implemented, will increase mountaintop removal and other surface mining techniques due to the fact that the energy required by such processes will consume approximately 20-25% of a plant's output.

Shifting terminology

Early 20th Century: "clean coal" meant "smokeless coal"

Prior to World War II, "clean coal" or "smokeless coal" was a marketing term used to describe anthracite and high-grade bituminous coal used for cooking and home heating.

Late 20th Century: "clean coal" meant "coal with lower regulated emissions"

With the arrival of the environmental movement in the late 1960s, the coal industry came under increasing pressure to clean up the myriad of pollutants produced by its mines and plants. Visibility (particulates and nitrous oxides) and acid rain (sulfur dioxide) dominated in the formation of policy established via the 1970 Clean Air Act and subsequent Clean Air Act Amendments in 1977 and 1990, while global warming gases remained unregulated. In response to the new legislation, the coal industry responded with a wide spectrum of technology fixes aimed at lowering "criteria emissions." These included replacement of high-sulfur coal with low-sulfur coal, scrubbers, electrostatic precipitators, coal cleaning techniques, and development of higher efficiency combustion techniques that allowed more electricity to be generated per ton of emissions. By the 1980s, these technologies came to be referred to under the rubric of "clean coal technology," and the term received official recognition in the Department of Energy's Clean Coal Technology Program (1986-1993).

After 2000: "clean coal" starts to mean "zero-emissions coal"

With the arrival of the new millenium and the heightened attention to global warming, the previous usage of "clean coal" to refer to coal with lower regulated emissions was joined by a futuristic new vision, that of "zero-emissions" or "near-zero-emissions coal use. In 2007, President George W. Bush explained the vision as follows:

"One promising solution is advanced clean coal technology. The future of this technology will allow us to trap and store carbon emissions and air pollutants produced by burning coal. Since 2001 the United States has invested more than $2.5 billion to research and develop clean coal. And in partnership with other nations and the private sector we're moving closer to a historic achievement -- producing energy from the world's first zero-emissions coal-fired plant."

Gap between old plants, new plants, and next-generation plants

Older coal plants: highly polluting

• Fine particles: The fleet of existing coal plants produces large quanitities of fine particles, also known as PM2.5, formed from soot, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and metals. These fine particles are estimated to result in 24,000 premature deaths in the United States, averaging 14 lost life-years per person.
• Sulfur dioxide: Because most existing coal plants pre-date current air pollution laws, current plants emit about 13 million tons per year of sulfur dioxide, approximately a 40% reduction from 1990 levels.
• Mercury: Coal-fired power plants are the largest source of mercury in the United States, accounting for about 41 percent (48 tons in 1999) of industrial releases. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, eight percent of American women of childbearing age had unsafe levels of mercury in their blood, putting approximately 322,000 newborns at risk of neurological deficits. Mercury exposure also can lead to increase cardiovascular risk in adults.

New plants: cleaner but no carbon controls

As the gas most heavily implicated in global warming, carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from coal plants are a particular concern. Coal is a much more intensive emitter of CO₂ than other fossil fuels. Although coal produces about half of U.S. electricity, it produces about 80 percent of CO₂ emissions in the electricity sector and about of overall U.S. CO₂ emissions, about the same amount as all transportation sources -- cars, SUVs, trucks, buses, planes, ships, and trains -- combined. A 1000 megawatt (MW) coal-fired power plant produces approximately the same amount of global warming as 1.2 million cars. Although new power plants, when equipped with state-of-the-art pollution controls, have significantly less of the type of pollutants that cause acid rain, fine particulate pollution, and mercury toxicity, no currently proposed plants include any equipment to capture emissions of carbon dioxide. Coal-to-liquids technology will have particularly intensive climate effects. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, using liquefied coal as a fuel source would produce 119 percent greater greenhouse gas emissions than using petroleum-based fuel.

Next-generation plants: debating claims of "near-zero-emissions" or "zero-emissions coal"

Climate scientists and environmentalists have criticized carbon capture and storage (CCS), the main enabling technology for zero-emissions coal, as a "pipe dream" that distracted attention and resources from already existing solutions. Dan Becker, director of the Sierra Club's Global Warming and Energy Program, argues that the term clean coal is misleading: "There is no such thing as 'clean coal' and there never will be. It's an oxymoron". The most comprehensive set of arguments in opposition to CCS was advanced by the study "False Hopes: Why Carbon Capture and Storage Won't Save the Climate, published by Greenpeace in May, 2008. "False Hopes" argued as follows:

CCS cannot deliver in time to avoid dangerous climate change. The earliest possibility for deployment of CCS at utility scale is not expected before 2030. To avoid the worst impacts of climate change, global greehouse gas emissions have to start falling after 2015, just seven years away.

CCS wastes energy. The technology uses between 10 and 40% of the energy produced by a power station. Wide scale adoption of CCS is expected to erase the efficiency gains of the last 50 years, and increase resource consumpton by one third.

Storing carbon undedrground is risky. Safe and permanent storage of CO₂ cannot be guaranteed. Even very low leakage rates could undermine any climate mitigation efforts.

CCS is expensive. It could lead to a doubling of plant costs, and an electricity price increase of 21-91%. Money spent on CCS will divert investments away from sustainable solutions to climate change.

CCS carries significant liability risks. It poses a threat to health, ecosystems and the climate. It is unclear how severe these risks will be.

Other objections to the notion of "zero-emissions" or "near-zero emissions" coal include the following:

• Slow penetration. Because CCS cannot be economically retrofitted onto existing power plants, the technology will only be adopted as new power plants are built and old power plants retired. Since coal plants typically last for about 50 years, only about 2% of the fleet is ready for retirement in a given year. Even if CCS did become commercially available between 2020 (Electric Power Research Institute estimate) and 2030 (Greenpeace estimate), it would take several more decades--after 2050--for even half the coal fleet to capture its carbon. But James Hansen and other scientists have said that a phase-out of coal plants that do not sequester their carbon needs to take place by 2030, a full generation earlier.
• Geographic limitations. The actual degree of penetration of the technology will be further restricted by geographic limitations, since not all power station locations are close enough to geologically suitable storage locations. For example, power producing regions of New South Wales and South Australia that produce about 39% of Australia's CO₂ emissions are over 500 km from identified storage locations.
• CCS fails a life-cycle analysis. Because of their high energy requirements, CCS requires large amounts of additional coal to be mined, and the mining, transport, and usage of the additional coal increases emissions of global warming gases, thereby undermine the benefit of CCS. One study estimated a CCS system that removed 85% to 98% of carbon emissions would actually only reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 67% to 78% due to these additional emissions.
• Fig leaf. By providing an illusion of safe use, CCS creates an excuse for allowing continued expansion of coal.
• Diversion of resources. By diverting scare R&D resources, CCS holds up development of cleaner energy sources.

Increased mountaintop removal

The concept of "clean coal" focuses on reducing air pollution. But the increased energy requirements of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) mean more mining to provide the 10% to 40% energy penalty created by the carbon capture and sequestration process.

Support for development of CCS

The main argument in favor of CCS is the "critical path" argument. Ceding that CCS is not currently able to achieve the "zero-emissions" objective, some environmentalists argue that the emitting plants should be built if they provide partial steps toward enabling CCS technology to move toward commercial maturity. A prominent exponent of this position is John Thompson, director of the Coal Transition Program for the Clean Air Task Force, which has intervened in favor of at least one power plant even though that plant would only capture and store only a fraction of its carbon dioxide emissions. Thompson said,

"Look, we need to move forward and get the infrastructure for carbon capture and sequestration in place now. And we can't look at this from a U.S. perspective only. The largest coal company in the world isn't Peabody Coal any longer; by the end of next year [China's] Shenhua will probably be the world's largest coal producer. We have to get CCS working in this country so that we have a technology that we can provide to China and India. If environmentalists at the grassroots simply want to fight and stop every single coal plant, then IGCC technology will never develop to a workable level."

Clean Coal has been mentioned by George W. Bush on several occasions, including his 2007 State of the Union Address. Bush's position is that clean coal technologies should be encouraged as one means to reduce the country's dependence on foreign oil. Senator Hillary Clinton has also recently said that "we should strive to have new electricity generation come from other sources, such as clean coal and renewables."

In Australia, clean coal is often referred to by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd as a possible way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.[1] The previous Prime Minister, John Howard, stated that nuclear power is a better alternative, as clean coal technology may not prove to be economically favorable.

This usage was featured in the literature for such projects as the now defunct FutureGen in the U.S. and the ongoing GreenGen project in China. Zero-emission technology most typically involved the vision of coal gasification, in which pollutants would be separated out of the emissions stream prior to combustion, together with carbon capture and sequestration, in which carbon dioxide would be liquified and stored permanently underground. Although the coal industry employed advertising that focused on this new of clean coal in support of current-generation plants, the Department of Energy's timeline for its Carbon Sequestration Technology Roadmap indicated that even under optimistic assumptions, carbon sequestration would remain primarily in the demonstration stage for at least the coming decade.

Opposition to "Clean Coal"

Complaints focus on the environmental impacts of mountaintop removal mining, the projected high costs of carbon capture and storage, the human health dangers of large, rapid releases of carbon dioxide, the global warming risk posed by small levels leakage over long periods, increases in coal mining needed to run scrubbers as well as carbon capture and storage systems.

Critics of "clean coal" contend that there is no such thing as "clean coal," since even technology projected by 2020 will still release large amounts of pollutants compared to renewable energy sources such as wind, concentrated solar power, photovoltaic power, hydropower, and geothermal power. They also point out that there can be a large amount of energy required and pollution emitted in transporting the coal to the power plants. Opponents note that carbon capture and storage technology has yet to be used or proven on such a large scale and that it may not be successful. There are also concerns that pumping sequestered CO2 into oil and gas wells to help make the fuels easier to pump out of the ground will lead to further consumption of fossil fuels, and CO2 emissions, thus adding to global warming.

Clean Coal in Australian Politics

WWF Australia on Clean Coal

Australian Greens Senator Christine Milne accused the Climate Institute Australia and WWF Australia of abandoning "any remaining pretence of being part of the mainstream environment movement", by supporting "clean coal" in an alliance with mining companies and unions.

HRL Limited challenged over "clean coal" claims

In July, 2007, the Australian Climate Justice Program, with the support of Greenpeace, lodged a complaint with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) over HRL Limited’s use of the term "clean coal" in relation to its proposed new brown coal-fired power plant in Victoria.

Resources

External links

• "A last chance for coal: Making carbon capture and storage work," Green Alliance (supported by BP), August 10, 2008.

Wikipedia also has an article on Clean Coal. This article may use content from the Wikipedia article under the terms of the GFDL.