The Washington Post (pg. Financial A8)  [Printer-friendly version]
August 11, 2009

COAL'S FUTURE WAGERED ON CARBON CAPTURE

Efforts to Tame Greenhouse Gas Enjoy Funding But Face Hurdles

By Steven Mufson; Washington Post Staff Writer

At 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 stack -- so wide that
it would take six adults with their arms fully stretched to reach
around it -- will 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 formations -- a critical part of the global effort to
slow climate change. This is the technique that promoters say will
make coal "clean" 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. It has pledged $1 billion more to a model plant called
FutureGen. 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 world's coal plants. Coal plants in the
United States account for a third of U.S. greenhouse emissions. In the
past five years China has brought online coal-fired electricity equal
in size to total U.S. 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. Pessimists say
it might take much longer, and may never be ready for widespread use
without attaching a punishingly high price to carbon.

"There is no credible pathway towards prudent greenhouse gas
stabilization targets without CO2 emissions reduction from existing
coal power plants," Ernest Moniz, a professor at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and a member of President Obama's Council of
Advisers on Science and Technology, said in a report earlier this
year. "We urgently need technology options for these plants and
policies that incentivize implementation."

Coal "is still the elephant in the room," said John Ashton, special
representative for climate change at Britain's Foreign and
Commonwealth Office, at a meeting in Washington last month. "We can't
deal with it, we can't tame it without... carbon capture and
storage." He said that to meet the newly agreed upon target of
limiting global warming to two degrees, nations must make carbon
capture "standard technology by 2020."
Obstacles Ahead

The West Virginia plant belongs to American Electric Power, an
electric utility that is the largest consumer of coal in the United
States. "Clearly carbon capture and storage is essential for a company
like AEP, and I would argue equally essential for the United States,
because you can't go through the process of prematurely shutting down
half the supply base of the American utility industry," 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 plant's
output. Morris's 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 France's Alstom, would take the
exhaust of the plant after the coal is burned and "bubble" 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
plants -- equal to around seven average-sized plants -- a $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 plant's 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.
Where to Put It?

Storage carries its own challenges. This involves pumping the carbon
dioxide into the ground, a way of sweeping coal's harmful byproduct
under the Earth's rug -- forever. That can't be done just anywhere.
Most of the Earth's 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. Coal plants could
also sell carbon dioxide to oil companies that use it to boost oil
recovery in aging wells.

Many coal plants will have to be hooked up to new pipeline networks to
carry the carbon dioxide to areas more suitable for storage. If linked
to enhanced oil recovery projects, that could help cover costs.
Otherwise, those lines will be an added expense.

"If 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," John Tombari, an executive at Schlumberger
Carbon Services, said in congressional testimony. "The sheer scale of
the challenge is daunting, and the industry that will need to develop
to achieve this will be massive."
Enormous Undertaking

Varun Rai, a research fellow at Stanford University's Center for
Environmental Science and Policy, says that there is a "disconnect"
between "what is happening and what is needed by 2030." 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? According to the International Carbon Bank and
Exchange, a private service provider for carbon trading, a new VW
Beetle driven about 12,000 miles a year will generate enough carbon
dioxide to fill up the Washington Monument three times. The United
States produces enough carbon dioxide to cover the nation's 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 "beyond the likely lifespan of
any corporation." And who will pay for that? If consumers pay a fee
for storage, that fee will grow over time, and tomorrow's consumers
might end up paying big legacy costs to make sure they contain the
emissions of today's consumers. Many companies want the government to
relieve them of any liability for unexpected consequences. (A
naturally occurring "burp" of carbon dioxide from a Cameroon lake in
1986 killed hundreds of people.)
Passage of Time

One of the prevailing theories about carbon capture and storage and
about other climate-friendly technologies is that they will get better
and cheaper over time. It is central to selling climate policies to
consumers, because it permits policymakers to assert that costs will
be tamed and energy prices will get only modestly higher.

"I'm prepared to bet on American ingenuity," said Sen. John F. Kerry
(D-Mass.), when asked about the still dim prospects for carbon capture
and storage. He said he believed that there are some "game-changing
possibilities" being worked on.

Indeed, one company claims to have a technique that would bubble a
power plant's emissions through sea water and then trap the carbon
dioxide in cement. Other firms say they have pre-combustion strategies
for extracting carbon dioxide, though they face the same challenges
when it comes to storage.

A Stanford University study of carbon capture technologies warned that
"the conventional wisdom that experience with technologies inevitably
reduces costs does not necessarily hold." It said that it found "the
opposite of the conventional wisdom to be true" for U.S. nuclear power
from 1960 to 1980 and global liquefied natural gas from 1960 to 1995
-- both areas with substantial government support. Indeed, it found
costs increased.