CoalAAEs future wagered on carbon capture.

By Steven Mufson

WASHINGTONAuAt a bend in the Ohio River, a bulky new device is being attached to a 30-year-old coal plant near the small town of New Haven, W.Va. The device is being housed in a building four stories tall and bigger than a football field. A 150-foot-tall exhaust stackAuso wide that it would take six adults with their arms fully stretched to reach around itAuwill reach into the sky. And pipelines will run out of the building and into saline aquifers two miles underground. The entire contraption will start up as early as September. The purpose: Capturing carbon dioxide emissions and stashing them in underground rock formationsAua critical part of the global effort to slow climate change. This is the technique that promoters say will make coal AocleanAo and critics say is an expensive pipe dream. The stimulus bill devoted $2.4 billion to pilot projects. On Monday the Obama administration awarded $20 million of that to a program that uses supersonic shockwaves to compress carbon for storage, on top of $408 million in stimulus money awarded to two other carbon pilot projects. If the Waxman-Markey climate bill becomes law, a new Carbon Storage Research Corp. would pump another $1.1 billion a year into researching this nascent technology, and first movers would get billions of dollars more in bonus emission allowances that could be sold. Coal companies and environmentalists alike are counting on a breakthrough in carbon capture and storage technology to siphon off harmful emissions from the worldAAEs coal plants. Coal plants in the United States account for a third of US greenhouse emissions. In the past five years China has brought online coal-fired electricity equal in size to total US installed capacity, and new plants are coming online in the developing world all the time. Without a breakthrough on coal plants, it may be impossible to meet emission limits climatologists say are needed. Yet carbon capture and storage remains the elusive holy grail of the coal industry, an idea that could contain the damage inflicted by coal-burning power plants but a technology that remains expensive, energy intensive and largely untested. Even optimists say it will not be commercially available for another six to 10 years. The West Virginia plant belongs to American Electric Power (AEP), an electric utility that is the largest consumer of coal in the United States. AoClearly carbon capture and storage is essential for a company like AEP, and I would argue equally essential for the United States, because you canAAEt go through the process of prematurely shutting down half the supply base of the American utility industry,Ao said Michael Morris, chief executive of AEP. But the AEP project illustrates the tremendous obstacles ahead. As big as it is, the equipment there will only capture the emissions from 20 megawatts of power generation, a meager 15 percent of the plantAAEs output. MorrisAAE predecessors were smart enough to buy lots of extra land at the West Virginia plant, but other coal plants would have trouble finding room. The big capture device, built by FranceAAEs Alstom, would take the exhaust of the plant after the coal is burned and AobubbleAo it through a solution of chilled ammonia. The CO2 will bond with the ammonia and be separated from other gases. Then the carbon dioxide will be separated from the ammonia and compressed for storage. The huge carbon capture and storage devices are hugely expensive, too. AEP executives estimate that the cost of carbon capture for a modest-size coal plant of about 235 megawatts would start at $700 million. That works out to about $100 for a ton of carbon dioxide, far above the projections made by the Environmental Protection Agency about prices under a cap-and-trade scheme similar to one passed by the House in June. MIT put the cost of carbon capture and storage at $50 to $70 a ton. (The Waxman-Markey bill would give the first six gigawatts of plantsAuequal to around seven average-sized plantsAua $90 per ton subsidy in the form of free allowances.) Capture and storage devices also require large amounts of energy. The Alstom approach sucks up about 15 percent of the power plantAAEs energy output; other processes use as much as 30 percent. That means the utility must purchase other energy sources to cover the shortfall. (The energy lost is part of the $700 million cost, AEP executives said.) As a result, many experts say countries would be better off retrofitting old coal plants or replacing them with new, more efficient ones. Retrofits could result in emission reductions of 4 to 5 percent, MIT said in its study. More costly replacements of older plants could cut more than a quarter of their emissions. Storage carries its own challenges. This involves pumping the carbon dioxide into the ground, a way of sweeping coalAAEs harmful byproduct under the EarthAAEs rugAuforever. That canAAEt be done just anywhere. Most of the EarthAAEs rug has holes; it is too porous to keep carbon dioxide bottled up. At the AEP plant in West Virginia, the gas will go into a saline aquifer; in other parts of the country storage can be established below geologic caps. The Obama administration has decided to provide $1 billion to fund FutureGen, a small, new coal plant in Illinois that would store 60 percent of its emissions in sandstone formations thousands of feet underground. Many coal plants will have to be hooked up to new pipeline networks to carry the carbon dioxide to areas more suitable for storage. AoIf carbon sequestration is to have an impact on the CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, we will need to inject billions of tons of CO2 underground over the next 40 to 50 years and store them for very much longer,Ao John Tombari, an executive at Schlumberger Carbon Services, said in congressional testimony. AoThe sheer scale of the challenge is daunting, and the industry that will need to develop to achieve this will be massive.Ao Varun Rai, a research fellow at Stanford UniversityAAEs Center for Environmental Science and Policy, says that there is a AodisconnectAo between Aowhat is happening and what is needed by 2030Ao. He said that the world will need to capture and store 1.5 billion to 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide by 2025. How big is that? The United States produces enough carbon dioxide to cover the nationAAEs entire land mass with a layer one foot deep every year. Greenpeace, a foe of coal-fired power, says that to sequester all the emissions from coal-fired plants, the volume of CO2 would be equal to 28 million train cars a day, or a Grand Canyon every 15 days. Legal quagmires also lurk. Someone will need to take responsibility for monitoring and maintaining storage sites that will have to last hundreds of years, said Tombari, far Aobeyond the likely lifespan of any corporationAo. And who will pay for that? If consumers pay a fee for storage, that fee will grow over time, and tomorrowAAEs consumers might end up paying big legacy costs to make sure they contain the emissions of todayAAEs consumers. LATWP News Servic

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