[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Burnt Out

[Bill Totten]

The government's plans for clean coal are another great green scam.

by George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian (March 18 2008)


"Coal is so clean and fresh that the prime minister brushes his teeth
with it, Downing Street said last night. Mr Brown said advances in coal
technology meant it was now one of the cleanest substances on Earth, and
an unrivalled remover of stains and scaling". So says the satirical
website the Daily Mash {1}. The real claims are scarcely battier.

Ministers are about to decide whether to approve a new coal burning
power station at Kingsnorth in Kent. This would be the first such plant
built in Britain since the monster at Drax was finished in 1986. As well
as coal, it will burn up the government's targets, policies and promises
on climate change.

John Hutton, the secretary of state in charge of energy, has started
justifying the decision he says he hasn't made. "For critics", he argued
last week, "there's a belief that coal fired power stations undermine
the UK's leadership position on climate change. In fact the opposite is
true." {2} Quite so: if we don't burn this stuff the Chinese might get
their hands on it. Or could he be a true believer? Does he really think
there's such a thing as clean coal?

Clean coal's definition changes according to whom the industry is
lobbying. Sometimes it means more efficient power stations (which still
produce almost twice as much carbon dioxide as gas plants). Sometimes it
means removing sulphur dioxide from the smoke (which boosts the carbon
dioxide). {3} Sometimes it means carbon capture and storage: stripping
the carbon out of the exhaust gases, piping it away and burying it in
geological formations. None of these equate to clean coal, as you will
see if you visit an opencast mine. But they create a marvellous amount
of confusion in the public mind, which gives the government a chance to
excuse the inexcusable.

In principle, carbon capture and storage (CCS) could reduce emissions
from power stations by eighty to ninety per cent. While the whole
process has not yet been demonstrated, the individual steps are all
deployed commercially today: it looks feasible. The government has
launched a competition for companies to build the first demonstration
plant, which should be burying carbon dioxide by 2014.

Unfortunately, despite Hutton's repeated assurances, this has nothing to
do with Kingsnorth or the other new coal plants he wants to approve. If
Kingsnorth goes ahead, it will be operating by 2012, two years before
the CCS experiment has even begun. The government says that the
demonstration project will take "at least fifteen years" to assess {4}.
It will take many more years for the technology to be retrofitted to
existing power stations, by which time it's all over. On this schedule,
carbon capture and storage, if it is deployed at all, will come too late
to prevent runaway climate change.

Kingsnorth will produce around 4.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide
every year {5}; if all eight of the proposed coal plants are built, they
will account for 46% of the emissions Britain can produce by 2050,
assuming the government sticks to Brown's new proposed target of an
eighty per cent cut {6}. Aviation, using the government's own figures,
will account for another 184% {7} (these figures are explained on my
website). Even if we stopped breathing, eating, driving and heating our
homes, the new runways and coal burners the government envisages would
more than double our national greenhouse gas quota.

The government seeks to bamboozle us by arguing that the new power
stations will be "CCS ready", meaning that one day, in theory, they
could be retrofitted with the necessary equipment. But even this turns
out to be untrue. In January, Greenpeace obtained an exchange of emails
between EO.N - the company hoping the build the new plant (yes the same
EO.N that broadcasts footage of fluttering sycamore keys, suggesting
that its dirty old habits have gone with the wind) - and Gary Mohammed,
the civil servant drawing up the planning conditions {8}. Mohammed
begins by sending an email of such snivelling obsequiousness that you
can almost smell the fear on it. "Drafting the conditions for
Kingsnorth. If possible I would like to cover CCS ... I admit this
suggested condition could be without justification and premature but no
harm in trying to gauge your opinion". (This "suggested condition" was
actually government policy. Who's running this country?) EO.N replied by
claiming that the secretary of state "has no right to withhold approval
for conventional plant" (in fact he has every right). All it would allow
the government to specify was that the potential for CCS "will be
investigated". Mr Mohammed wrestled with his conscience for all of six
minutes before replying. "Thanks. I won't include. Hope to get the set
of draft conditions out today or tomorrow."

This exchange took place in mid-January, a few days before the European
Commission published a proposed directive specifying that all new
coal-fired power stations must be CCS ready {9}. Mr Mohammed must have
known that he was helping EO.N to win approval for the plant before the
directive comes into force next year.

You might by now be beginning the derive the impression that carbon
capture and storage is not the green panacea that ministers have
suggested. But you haven't heard the half of it. Even if it does become
a viable means of disposing of carbon dioxide, new figures suggest that
it's likely to enhance rather than reduce our total emissions.

For the companies which will bid to bury the gas, one technique is more
attractive than the others. This is to pump it into declining oil
fields. The gas dissolves into the remaining oil, reducing its viscosity
and pushing it into the production wells. It's called enhanced oil
recovery (EOR). The oil the companies sell offsets some of the costs of
carbon storage.

A few weeks ago, the green thinker Jim Bliss roughly calculated the
environmental costs of this technique. He used as his case study the
scheme BP proposed (but abandoned last year) for pumping carbon dioxide
into the Miller Field off the coast of Scotland. It would have buried
1.3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide and extracted forty million barrels
of oil {10}. Taking into account only the four major fuel products,
Bliss worked out that the total carbon emissions would outweigh the
savings by between seven and fifteen times {11}.

So has the government ruled out enhanced oil recovery? Not a bit of it.
Its memo about the demonstration project says that Mr Hutton's
department "will want to ensure that the treatment of EOR and non-EOR
projects are dealt with on a level playing field basis" {12}. Another
document suggests it favours this technique: enhanced oil recovery will
lead to "increased energy security, domestic revenue and employment"
{13}. But, the government notes, this will have to happen before the
North Sea's oil infrastructure is dismantled. "Now is the perfect
opportunity to realise the significant opportunities offered by CCS" {14}.

Like biofuels and micro wind turbines, carbon capture and storage turns
out to be another great green scam. It will come too late to prevent
runaway climate change, the government has no intention of enforcing it
and even if it had the technique is likely to boost our carbon
emissions. This is what John Hutton calls "meeting our international
obligations" {15}. Heaven knows what breaking them might look like.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1.
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=782&Itemid=59

2. John Hutton, 10th March 2008. The Future of Utilities. Speech to the
Adam Smith Institute.
http://www.berr.gov.uk/about/ministerial-team/page45211.html

3. The commonest technique for flue gas desulphurisation is the
limestone gypsum process. As well as making the power station slightly
less efficient, the chemical reaction produces carbon dioxide. The two
key reactions are:

CaCO3 + SO2 = CaSO3 + CO2

and

CaSO3 + _O2 + 2H2O = CaSO42H2O

See: Dept of Trade and Industry, March 2003. Flue Gas Desulphurisation
(Fgd) Technologies For Coal-Fired Combustion Plant.
http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file20875.pdf

4. BERR, 19th November 2007. Competition for a Carbon Dioxide Capture
and Storage Demonstration Project. Project Information Memorandum.
http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file42478.pdf

5. Greenpeace, 2007. Letter to Alistair Darling.
http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/files/pdfs/climate/kingsnorth_objection.pdf

6. Here's how Greenpeace makes this calculation: "In December 2007,
Gordon Brown said he aspired to an eighty per cent cut in emissions by
2050. That would give us a carbon budget of 117.8mt/CO2/per year. The
new coal plants currently proposed - 10.6 GW of capacity - would emit
more than 54 million tonnes of carbon dioxide which represents almost
half of that quota. (10.6 GW x 7884 hours of generation per year,
assuming ninety per cent operational = 83.57 TWH/y. 83.57 TWH/y x 0.65 =
54mt/CO2/y)".

7. This is eighty per cent of the 1990 level, namely 161.5MtC (please
note that this weight refers to elemental C, not CO2). That leaves 32.3MtC.

The Dept for Transport's conservative figures suggest aviation emissions
will rise to 15.7 MtC by 2050. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change estimates that net radiative forcing from aircraft emissions is
2.7 times that of the carbon dioxide alone, which gives a nominal carbon
equivalent of 42.4MtC. The government's figures systematically
underestimate the UK's contribution, by assuming that British people are
responsible for fifty per cen of the seats on flights leaving or
arriving in the UK. The true figure is seventy per cent, which means the
total equivalent figure is 59.35MtC.

8. You can read these emails here:
http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/files/pdfs/climate/FOI-1.pdf

9. Commission Of The European Communities, 23rd January 2008. Proposal
for a Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on the
geological storage of carbon dioxide and amending Council Directives
85/337/EEC, 96/61/EC, Directives 2000/60/EC, 2001/80/EC, 2004/35/EC,
2006/12/EC and Regulation (EC) No 1013/2006.
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2008:0018:FIN:EN:PDF

10. BP, 30th June 2005. BP's plan to generate electricity from hydrogen
and capture carbon dioxide could set a new standard for cleaner energy.
Press release.
http://www.bp.com/genericarticle.do?categoryId=97&contentId=7006978

11. Jim Bliss, 17th January 2008. Oil companies and Climate Change.
http://numero57.net/?p=224
Jim Bliss was asked to do this by the environmental writer Merrick Godhaven.

12. BERR, 19th November 2007, ibid.

13. The North Sea Basin Task Force, June 2007. Storing CO2 under the
North Sea Basin - a key solution for combating climate change, page 9.
http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file40159.pdf

14. ibid, page 9.

Copyright (c) 2006 Monbiot.com

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/03/18/burnt-out-2/

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