What would we have achieved, if we become a prosperous nation, but one in which millions either die or suffer from respiratory diseases - because those who had the power to prevent coal-fired power plants from being built in Ghana did not think that decision through properly: and ignored the public health implications of sanctioning the building of such dirty power plants in our homeland Ghana?
Nothing can justify the sanctioning of the construction of such power plants in Ghana. Not when we can ramp up the renewables sector by making it's entire value chain tax-free - and there are enough gas deposits in the oilfields off our nation's shores which can be exploited to provide natural gas to fire thermal power plants in our country.
We must never allow the resolution of what is a pressing short-term power-generating problem, which is only an inconvenient and temporary power deficit, to rush the country into taking a decision that will affect the quality of life of present and future generations of our people over the long term, by condemning them to a lifetime of battling respiratory diseases.
Coal
provides 40 percent of the world’s electricity. It produces 39 percent
of global CO₂ emissions. It kills thousands a year in mines, many more
with polluted air.
Environmentalists say that clean coal is a myth. Of course it is:
Just look at West Virginia, where whole Appalachian peaks have been
knocked into valleys to get at the coal underneath and streams run
orange with acidic water. Or look at downtown Beijing, where the air
these days is often thicker than in an airport smoking lounge. Air
pollution in China, much of it from burning coal, is blamed for more
than a million premature deaths a year. That’s on top of the thousands
who die in mining accidents, in China and elsewhere.
These problems aren’t new. In the late 17th century, when coal
from Wales and Northumberland was lighting the first fires of the
industrial revolution in Britain, the English writer John Evelyn was
already complaining about the “stink and darknesse” of the smoke that
wreathed London. Three centuries later, in December 1952, a thick layer
of coal-laden smog descended on London and lingered for a long weekend,
provoking an epidemic of respiratory ailments that killed as many as
12,000 people in the ensuing months. American cities endured their own
traumas. On an October weekend in 1948, in the small Pennsylvania town
of Donora, spectators at a high school football game realized they could
see neither players nor ball: Smog from a nearby coal-fired zinc
smelter was obscuring the field. In the days that followed, 20 people
died, and 6,000 people—nearly half the town—were sickened.
Coal, to use the economists’ euphemism, is fraught with
“externalities”—the heavy costs it imposes on society. It’s the
dirtiest, most lethal energy source we have. But by most measures it’s
also the cheapest, and we depend on it. So the big question today isn’t
whether coal can ever be “clean.” It can’t. It’s whether coal can ever
be clean enough—to prevent not only local disasters but also a radical
change in global climate.
Last June, on a hot and muggy day in Washington, D.C., President
Barack Obama gave the climate speech that the American coal and electric
power industries had dreaded—and environmentalists had hoped for—since
his first inauguration, in 2009. Speaking in his shirt-sleeves and
pausing occasionally to mop his brow, Obama announced that by June 2014
the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would draft new rules that
would “put an end to the limitless dumping of carbon pollution from our
power plants.” The rules would be issued under the Clean Air Act, a law
inspired in part by the disaster in Donora. That law has already been
used to dramatically reduce the emission of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen
oxides, and soot particles from American power plants. But carbon
dioxide, the main cause of global warming, is a problem on an entirely
different scale.
Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration
In 2012 the world emitted a record 34.5 billion metric tons of
carbon dioxide from fossil fuels. Coal was the largest contributor.
Cheap natural gas has lately reduced the demand for coal in the U.S.,
but everywhere else, especially in China, demand is surging. During the
next two decades several hundred million people worldwide will get
electricity for the first time, and if current trends continue, most
will use power produced by coal. Even the most aggressive push for
alternative energy sources and conservation could not replace coal—at
least not right away.
How fast the Arctic melts, how high the seas rise, how hot the
heat waves get—all these elements of our uncertain future depend on what
the world does with its coal, and in particular on what the U.S. and
China do. Will we continue to burn it and dump the carbon into the air
unabated? Or will we find a way to capture carbon, as we do sulfur and
nitrogen from fossil fuels, and store it underground?
“We need to push as hard as we can for renewable energy and energy
efficiency, and on reducing carbon emissions from coal,” says Stanford
University researcher Sally Benson, who specializes in carbon storage.
“We’re going to need lots of ‘ands’—this isn’t a time to be focusing on
‘ors.’ ” The carbon problem is just too big.
American Electric Power’s Mountaineer Plant, on the Ohio
River in New Haven, West Virginia, inhales a million pounds of
Appalachian coal every hour. The coal arrives fresh from the ground, on
barges or on a conveyor belt from a mine across the road. Once inside
the plant, the golf-ball-size lumps are ground into dust as fine as face
powder, then blown into the firebox of one of the largest boilers in
the world—a steel box that could easily swallow the Statue of Liberty.
The plant’s three steam-powered turbines, painted blue with white stars,
supply electricity round the clock to 1.3 million customers in seven
states. Those customers pay about a dime per kilowatt-hour, or roughly
$113 a month, to power the refrigerators, washers, dryers, flat screens,
and smartphones, to say nothing of the lights, of an average household.
And as Charlie Powell,
Mountaineer’s plant manager, often said, even
environmentalists like to keep the lights on.
The customers pay not a cent, however, nor does American Electric
Power (AEP), for the privilege of spewing six to seven million metric
tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year from Mountaineer’s
thousand-foot-high stack. And that’s the problem. Carbon is dumped
without limit because in most places it costs nothing to do so and
because there is, as yet, no law against it in the U.S. But in 2009 it
looked as if there might soon be a law; the House of Representatives had
already passed a bill that summer. AEP, to its credit, decided to get
ahead of it.
That October, Mountaineer began a pioneering experiment in carbon
capture. Powell oversaw it. His father had worked for three decades at a
coal-fired power plant in Virginia; Powell himself had spent his career
at Mountaineer. The job was simple, he said: “We burn coal, make steam,
and run turbines.” During the experiment, though, it got a bit more
complicated. AEP attached a chemical plant to the back of its power
plant. It chilled about 1.5 percent of Mountaineer’s smoke and diverted
it through a solution of ammonium carbonate, which absorbed the CO₂. The
CO₂ was then drastically compressed and injected into a porous
sandstone formation more than a mile below the banks of the Ohio.
Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration
The system worked. Over the next two years AEP captured and stored
more than 37,000 metric tons of pure carbon dioxide. The CO₂ is still
underground, not in the atmosphere. It was only a quarter of one percent
of the gas coming out the stack, but that was supposed to be just the
beginning. AEP planned to scale up the project to capture a quarter of
the plant’s emissions, or 1.5 million tons of CO₂ a year. The company
had agreed to invest $334 million, and the U.S. Department of Energy
(DOE) had agreed to match that. But the deal depended on AEP being able
to recoup its investment. And after climate change legislation collapsed
in the Senate, state utility regulators told the company that it could
not charge its customers for a technology not yet required by law.
In the spring of 2011 AEP ended the project. The maze of pipes and
pumps and tanks was dismantled. Though small, the Mountaineer system
had been the world’s first to capture and store carbon dioxide directly
from a coal-fired electric plant, and it had attracted hundreds of
curious visitors from around the world, including China and India. “The
process did work, and we educated a lot of people,” said Powell. “But
geez-oh-whiz—it’s going to take another breakthrough to make it worth
our while.” A regulatory breakthrough above all—such as the one Obama
promised last summer—but technical ones would help too.
Capturing carbon dioxide and storing or “sequestering” it
underground in porous rock formations sounds to its critics like a
techno-fix fantasy. But DOE has spent some $6.5 billion over the past
three decades researching and testing the technology. And for more than
four decades the oil industry has been injecting compressed carbon
dioxide into depleted oil fields, using it to coax trapped oil to the
surface. On the Canadian Great Plains this practice has been turned into
one of the world’s largest underground carbon-storage operations.
Since 2000 more than 20 million metric tons of carbon dioxide have
been captured from a North Dakota plant that turns coal into synthetic
natural gas, then piped 200 miles north into Saskatchewan. There the
Canadian petroleum company Cenovus Energy pushes the CO₂ deep into the
Weyburn and Midale fields, a sprawling oil patch that had its heyday in
the 1960s. Two to three barrels of oil are dissolved out of the
reservoir rock by each ton of CO₂, which is then reinjected into the
reservoir for storage. There it sits, nearly a mile underground, trapped
under impermeable layers of shale and salt.
For how long? Some natural deposits of carbon dioxide have been in
place for millions of years—in fact the CO₂ in some has been mined and
sold to oil companies. But large and sudden releases of CO₂ can be
lethal to people and animals, particularly when the gas collects and
concentrates in a confined space. So far no major leaks have been
documented at Weyburn, which is being monitored by the International
Energy Agency, or at any of the handful of other large storage sites
around the world. Scientists consider the risk of a catastrophic leak to
be extremely low.
They worry more about smaller, chronic leaks that would defeat the
purpose of the enterprise. Geophysicists Mark Zoback and Steven
Gorelick of Stanford University argue that at sites where the rock is
brittle and faulted—most sites, in their view—the injection of carbon
dioxide might trigger small earthquakes that, even if otherwise
harmless, might crack the overlying shale and allow CO₂ to leak. Zoback
and Gorelick consider carbon storage “an extremely expensive and risky
strategy.” But even they agree that carbon can be stored effectively at
some sites—such as the Sleipner gas field in the North Sea, where for
the past 17 years the Norwegian oil company Statoil has been injecting
about a million tons of CO₂ a year into a brine-saturated sandstone
layer half a mile below the seabed. That formation has so much room that
all that CO₂ hasn’t increased its internal pressure, and there’s been
no sign of quakes or leaks.
Sources:
EPA; Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center/Oak Ridge National
Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy; Woods Hole Research Center
European researchers estimate that a century’s worth of European
power plant emissions could be stored under the North Sea. According to
the DOE, similar “deep saline aquifers” under the U.S. could hold more
than a thousand years’ worth of emissions from American power plants.
Other types of rock also have potential as carbon lockers. In
experiments now under way in Iceland and in the Columbia River Basin of
Washington State, for example, small amounts of carbon dioxide are being
injected into volcanic basalt. There the gas is expected to react with
calcium and magnesium to form a carbonate rock—thus eliminating the risk
of gas escaping.
The CO₂ that Statoil is injecting at Sleipner doesn’t come from
burning; it’s an impurity in the natural gas the company pumps from the
seabed. Before it can deliver gas to its customers, Statoil has to
separate out the CO₂, and it used to just vent the stuff into the
atmosphere. But in 1991 Norway instituted a carbon tax, which now stands
at around $65 a metric ton. It costs Statoil only $17 a ton to reinject
the CO₂ below the seafloor. So at Sleipner, carbon storage is much
cheaper than carbon dumping, which is why Statoil has invested in the
technology. Its natural gas operation remains very profitable.
At a coal-fired power plant the situation is different. The
CO₂ is part of a complex swirl of stack gases, and the power company
has no financial incentive to capture it. As the engineers at
Mountaineer learned, capture is the most expensive part of any
capture-and-storage project. At Mountaineer the CO₂ absorption system
was the size of a ten-story apartment building and occupied 14 acres—and
that was just to capture a tiny fraction of the plant’s carbon
emissions. The absorbent had to be heated to release the CO₂, which then
had to be highly compressed for storage. These energy-intensive steps
create what engineers call a “parasitic load,” one that could eat up as
much as 30 percent of the total energy output of a coal plant that was
capturing all its carbon.
One way to reduce that costly loss is to gasify the coal before
burning it. Gasification can make power generation more efficient and
allows the carbon dioxide to be separated more easily and cheaply. A new
power plant being built in Kemper County, Mississippi, which was
designed with carbon capture in mind, will gasify its coal.
Existing plants, which are generally designed to burn pulverized
coal, require a different approach. One idea is to burn the coal in pure
oxygen instead of air. That produces a simpler flue gas from which it’s
easier to pull the CO₂. At the DOE’s National Energy Technology
Laboratory in Morgantown, West Virginia, researcher Geo Richards is
working on an advanced version of this scheme.
“Come and see our new toy,” he says, hunching his shoulders
against a bitter Appalachian winter day and walking briskly toward a
large white warehouse. Inside, workers are assembling a five-story
scaffold for an experiment in “chemical looping.” Making pure oxygen
from air, Richards explains, is costly in itself—so his process uses a
metal such as iron to grab oxygen out of the air and deliver it to the
coal fire. In principle, chemical looping could radically cut the cost
of capturing carbon.
Richards has dedicated more than 25 years of his career to making
carbon capture more efficient, and for him the work is largely its own
reward. “I’m one of those geeky people who just like seeing basic
physics turned into technology,” he says. But after decades of watching
politicians and the public tussle over whether climate change is even a
problem, he does sometimes wonder if the solution he’s been working on
will ever be put to practical use. His experimental carbon-capture
system is a tiny fraction of the size that would be required at a real
power plant. “In this business,” Richards says, “you have to be an
optimist.”
In West Virginia these days, century-old coal mines are
closing as American power plants convert to natural gas. With gas prices
in the U.S. near record lows, coal can look like yesterday’s fuel, and
investing in advanced coal technology can look misguided at best. The
view from Yulin, China, is different.
Yulin sits on the eastern edge of Inner Mongolia’s Ordos Basin,
500 dusty miles inland from Beijing. Rust-orange sand dunes surround
forests of new, unoccupied apartment buildings, spill over highway
retaining walls, and send clouds of grit through the streets. Yulin and
its three million residents are short on rain and shade, hot in summer
and very cold in winter. But the region is blessed with mineral
resources, including some of the country’s richest deposits of coal.
“God is fair,” says Yulin deputy mayor Gao Zhongyin. From here coal
looks like the fuel of progress.
The sandy plateaus around Yulin are punctuated with the tall
smokestacks of coal power plants, and enormous coal-processing plants,
with dormitories for live-in workforces, sprawl for miles across the
desert. New coal plants, their grids of dirt roads decorated with
optimistic red-bannered gateways, bustle with young men and women in
coveralls. Coal provides about 80 percent of China’s electric power, but
it isn’t just for making electricity. Since coal is such a plentiful
domestic fuel, it’s also used for making dozens of industrial chemicals
and liquid fuels, a role played by petroleum in most other countries.
Here coal is a key ingredient in products ranging from plastic to rayon.
Coal has also made China first among nations in total carbon
dioxide emissions, though the U.S. remains far ahead in emissions per
capita. China is not retreating from coal, but it’s more than ever aware
of the high costs. “In the past ten years,” says Deborah Seligsohn, an
environmental policy researcher at the University of California, San
Diego, with nearly two decades’ experience in China, “the environment
has gone from not on the agenda to near the top of the agenda.” Thanks
to public complaints about air quality, official awareness of the risks
of climate change, and a desire for energy security and technological
advantage, China has invested hundreds of billions of dollars in
renewable energy. It’s now a top manufacturer of wind turbines and solar
panels; enormous solar farms are scattered among the smokestacks around
Yulin. But the country is also pushing ultraefficient coal power and
simpler, cheaper carbon capture.
These efforts are attracting both investment and immigrants from
abroad. At state-owned Shenhua Group, the largest coal company in the
world, its National Institute of Clean-and-Low-Carbon Energy was until
recently headed by J. Michael Davis, an American who served as assistant
U.S. secretary for conservation and renewable energy under the first
President Bush and is a past president of the U.S. Solar Energy
Industries Association. Davis says he was drawn to China by the
government’s “durable commitment” to improving air quality and reducing
carbon dioxide emissions: “If you want to make the greatest impact on
emissions, you go where the greatest source of those emissions happens
to be.”
Will Latta, founder of the environmental engineering company LP
Amina, is an American expat in Beijing who works closely with Chinese
power utilities. “China is openly saying, Hey, coal is cheap, we have
lots of it, and alternatives will take decades to scale up,” he says.
“At the same time they realize it’s not environmentally sustainable. So
they’re making large investments to clean it up.” In Tianjin, about 85
miles from Beijing, China’s first power plant designed from scratch to
capture carbon is scheduled to open in 2016. Called GreenGen, it’s
eventually supposed to capture 80 percent of its emissions.
Last fall, as world coal consumption and world carbon
emissions were headed for new records, the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) issued its latest report. For the first time it
estimated an emissions budget for the planet—the total amount of carbon
we can release if we don’t want the temperature rise to exceed 2 degrees
Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), a level many scientists consider a
threshold of serious harm. The count started in the 19th century, when
the industrial revolution spread. The IPCC concluded that we’ve already
emitted more than half our carbon budget. On our current path, we’ll
emit the rest in less than 30 years.
Changing that course with carbon capture would take a massive
effort. To capture and store just a tenth of the world’s current
emissions would require pumping about the same volume of CO₂ underground
as the volume of oil we’re now extracting. It would take a lot of
pipelines and injection wells. But achieving the same result by
replacing coal with zero-emission solar panels would require covering an
area almost as big as New Jersey (nearly 8,000 square miles). The
solutions are huge because the problem is—and we need them all.
“If we were talking about a problem that could be solved by a 5 or
10 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, we wouldn’t be
talking about carbon capture and storage,” says Edward Rubin of Carnegie
Mellon University. “But what we’re talking about is reducing global
emissions by roughly 80 percent in the next 30 or 40 years.” Carbon
capture has the potential to deliver big emissions cuts quickly:
Capturing the CO₂ from a single thousand-megawatt coal plant, for
example, would be equivalent to 2.8 million people trading in pickups
for Priuses.
The first American power plant designed to capture carbon is
scheduled to open at the end of this year. The Kemper County
coal-gasification plant in eastern Mississippi will capture more than
half its CO₂ emissions and pipe them to nearby oil fields. The project,
which is supported in part by a DOE grant, has been plagued with cost
overruns and opposition from both environmentalists and
government-spending hawks. But Mississippi Power, a division of Southern
Company, has pledged to persist. Company leaders say the plant’s use of
lignite, a low-grade coal that’s plentiful in Mississippi, along with a
ready market for its CO₂, will help offset the heavy cost of pioneering
new technology.
The technology won’t spread, however, until governments require
it, either by imposing a price on carbon or by regulating emissions
directly. “Regulation is what carbon capture needs to get going,” says
James Dooley, a researcher at DOE’s Pacific Northwest National
Laboratory. If the EPA delivers this year on President Obama’s promise
to regulate carbon emissions from both existing and new power plants—and
if those rules survive court challenges—then carbon capture will get
that long-awaited boost.
China, meanwhile, has begun regional experiments with a more
market-friendly approach—one that was pioneered in the U.S. In the 1990s
the EPA used the Clean Air Act to impose a cap on total emissions of
sulfur dioxide from power plants, allocating tradable pollution permits
to individual polluters. At the time, the power industry predicted
disastrous economic consequences. Instead the scheme produced
innovative, progressively cheaper technologies and significantly cleaner
air. Rubin says that carbon-capture systems are at much the same stage
that sulfur dioxide systems were in the 1980s. Once emissions limits
create a market for them, their cost too could fall dramatically.
If that happens, coal still wouldn’t be clean—but it would be much
cleaner than it is today. And the planet would be cooler than it will
be if we keep burning coal the dirty old way."
End of culled article from the online edition of National Geographic magazine written by Michelle Nijhuis.
Michelle
Nijhuis has won multiple awards for her writing about the environment.
Robb Kendrick’s last piece, in April 2013, was on
reviving extinct species.
