[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Europe Turns Back to Coal

[Bill Totten]

Raising Climate Fears

by Elisabeth Rosenthal

The New York Times (April 23 2008)


At a time when the world's top climate experts agree that carbon
emissions must be rapidly reduced to hold down global warming, Italy's
major electricity producer, Enel, is converting its massive power plant
here from oil to coal, generally the dirtiest fuel on earth.

Over the next five years, Italy will increase its reliance on coal to 33
percent from fourteen percent. Power generated by Enel from coal will
rise to fifty percent.

And Italy is not alone in its return to coal. Driven by rising demand,
record high oil and natural gas prices, concerns over energy security
and an aversion to nuclear energy, European countries are expected to
put into operation about fifty coal-fired plants over the next five
years, plants that will be in use for the next five decades.

In the United States, fewer new coal plants are likely to begin
operations, in part because it is becoming harder to get regulatory
permits and in part because nuclear power remains an alternative. Of 151
proposals in early 2007, more than sixty had been dropped by the year's
end, many blocked by state governments. Dozens of other are stuck in
court challenges.

The fast-expanding developing economies of India and China, where coal
remains a major fuel source for more than two billion people, have long
been regarded as among the biggest challenges to reducing carbon
emissions. But the return now to coal even in eco-conscious Europe is
sowing real alarm among environmentalists who warn that it is setting
the world on a disastrous trajectory that will make controlling global
warming impossible.

They are aghast at the renaissance of coal, a fuel more commonly
associated with the sooty factories of Dickens novels, and one that was
on its way out just a decade ago.

There have been protests here in Civitavecchia, at a new coal plant in
Germany, and at one in the Czech Republic, as well as at the Kingsnorth
power station in Kent, which is slated to become Britain's first new
coal-fired plant in more than a decade.

Europe's power station owners emphasize that they are making the new
coal plants as clean as possible. But critics say that "clean coal" is a
pipe dream, an oxymoron in terms of the carbon emissions that count most
toward climate change. They call the building spurt shortsighted.

"Building new coal-fired power plants is ill conceived", said James E
Hansen, a leading climatologist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space
Studies. "Given our knowledge about what needs to be done to stabilize
climate, this plan is like barging into a war without having a plan for
how it should be conducted, even though information is available.

"We need a moratorium on coal now", he added, "with phase-out of
existing plants over the next two decades".


Coal's Advantages

Enel and many other electricity companies say they have little choice
but to build coal plants to replace aging infrastructure, particularly
in countries like Italy and Germany that have banned the building of
nuclear power plants. Fuel costs have risen 151 percent since 1996, and
Italians pay the highest electricity costs in Europe.

In terms of cost and energy security, coal has all the advantages, its
proponents argue. Coal reserves will last for 200 years, rather than
fifty years for gas and oil. Coal is relatively cheap compared with oil
and natural gas, although coal prices have tripled in the past few
years. More important, hundreds of countries export coal - there is not
a coal cartel - so there is more room to negotiate prices.

"In order to get over oil, which is getting more and more expensive, our
plan is to convert all oil plants to coal using clean-coal
technologies", said Gianfilippo Mancini, Enel's chief of generation and
energy management. "This will be the cleanest coal plant in Europe. We
are hoping to prove that it will be possible to make sustainable and
environmentally friendly use of coal."

"Clean coal" is a term coined by the industry decades ago, referring to
its efforts to reduce local pollution. Using new technology, clean coal
plants sharply reduced the number of sooty particles spewed into the
air, as well as gases like sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide. The
technology has minimal effect on carbon emissions.

In fact, the technology that the industry is counting on to reduce the
carbon dioxide emissions that add to global warning - carbon capture and
storage - is not now commercially available. No one knows if it is
feasible on a large, cost-effective scale.


The Struggle to Be Green

The task - in which carbon emissions are pumped into underground
reservoirs rather than released - is challenging for any fuel source,
but particularly so for coal, which produces more carbon dioxide than
oil or natural gas.

Under optimal current conditions, coal produces more than twice as much
carbon dioxide per unit of electricity as natural gas, the second most
common fuel used for electricity generation, according to the Electric
Power Research Institute. In the developing world, where even new coal
plants use lower grade coal and less efficient machinery, the equation
is even worse.

Without carbon capture and storage, coal cannot be green. But solving
that problem will take global coordination and billions of dollars in
investment, which no one country or company seems inclined to spend,
said Jeffrey D Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia
University.

"Figuring out carbon capture is really critical - it may not work in the
end - and if it is not viable, the situation, with respect to climate
change, is far more dire", Mr Sachs said.

There are a few dozen small demonstration projects in Europe and in the
United States, most in the early stages. But progress has not been
promising.

At the end of January, the Bush administration canceled what was
previously by far the United States' biggest carbon-capture
demonstration project, at a coal-fired plant in Illinois, because of
huge cost overruns. The costs of the project, undertaken in 2003 with a
budget of $950 million, had spiraled to $1.5 billion this year, and it
was far from complete.

The European Union had pledged to develop twelve pilot carbon-capture
projects for Europe, but says that is not enough.

Many have likened carbon capture's road from the demonstration lab to a
safe, cheap, available reality as a challenge equivalent to putting a
man on the moon. Norway, which is investing heavily to test the
technology, calls carbon capture its "moon landing".

It may be even harder than that. It is a moon landing that must be
replicated daily at thousands of coal plants in hundreds of countries -
many of them poor. There is a new coal-fired plant going up in India or
China almost every week, and most of those are not constructed in a way
that is amenable to carbon capture, even if it were developed.

Plants that could someday be adapted to carbon capture cost ten to
twenty percent more to build, and only a handful exist today. For most
coal power plants the costs of converting would be "phenomenal",
concluded a report by the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

Then there is the problem of storing the carbon dioxide, which is at
some level an inherently local issue. Geologists have to determine if
there is a suitable underground site, calculate how much carbon dioxide
it can hold and then equip it in a way that prevents leaks and ensures
safety. A large leak of underground carbon dioxide could be as dangerous
as a leak of nuclear fuel, critics say.

As for its plant here, Enel says it will start experimenting with
carbon-capture technology in 2015, in the hopes of "a solution" by 2020.

"That's too late", Mr Sachs said.

In the meantime, it and other new coal plants will be spewing more
greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere than ever before, meaning
that current climate predictions - dire as they are - may still be "too
optimistic", Mr Sachs said. "They assume the old energy mix, even though
coal will be a larger and larger part".


An Efficient Plant

On many other fronts, the new Enel plant is a model of efficiency and
recycling. The nitrous oxide is chemically altered to generate ammonia,
which is then sold. The resulting coal ash and gypsum are sold to the
cement industry.

An on-site desalination plant means that the operation generates its own
water for cooling. Even the heated water that comes out of the plant is
not wasted: it heats a fish farm, one of Italy's largest.

But Enel's plan to deal with the new plant's carbon emissions consists
mostly of a map of Italy with several huge white ovals superimposed -
subterranean cavities where carbon dioxide potentially could be stored.

The sites have not been fully studied by geologists as yet to make sure
they are safe storage sites and well sealed. There is no infrastructure
or equipment that could move carbon into them.

The new Enel plant here opens its first boiler in two months. It will
immediately produce fewer carbon emissions than the ancient oil boiler
it replaces, but only because it will produce less electricity,
officials here admit.


Unhappy Neighbors

In the towns surrounding Civitavecchia, the impending arrival of a huge
coal plant, with its three silvery domes, is being greeted with a hefty
dose of dread.

"They call it clean coal because they use some filters, but it is really
nonsense", said Marza Marzioli of the No Coal citizens group in the
nearby ancient Etruscan town of Tarquinia. "If you compare it to old
plants, yes it's better, but it's not 'clean' in any way".

The group says that Enel has won approval for a dangerous new coal plant
by buying machines for a local hospital and by carrying out a public
relations campaign. Enel advertisements for the project show a young
girl erasing a plant's smokestack.

Most people who took part in a 2007 local referendum voted no, but the
plant went ahead anyway, the group said.

The European Union, through its emissions trading scheme, has tried to
make power plants consider the costs of carbon, forcing them to buy
"permits" for emissions. But with the price of oil so high, coal is far
cheaper, even with the cost of permits to pollute factored in, Enel has
calculated.

Stephan Singer, who runs the European energy and climate office of WWF,
formerly the World Wildlife Fund, in Brussels, said that math was
shortsighted: the cost of coal and permits will almost certainly rise
over the next decade.

"If they want coal to be part of the energy solution, they have to show
us that carbon capture can be done now, that they can really reduce
emissions" to an acceptable level, Mr Singer said.

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/world/europe/23coal.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

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