"Coal is so clean and fresh that the prime minister brushes his teethwith it, Downing Street said last night. Mr Brown said advances in coaltechnology meant it was now one of the cleanest substances on Earth, and anunrivalled remover of stains and scaling." So says the satirical websitethe Daily Mash(1). The real claims are scarcely battier.
Ministers are about to decide whether to approve a new coal burning powerstation at Kingsnorth in Kent. This would be the first such plant built inBritain since the monster at Drax was finished in 1986. As well as coal, it willburn up the government’s targets, policies and promises on climate change.
John Hutton, the secretary of state in charge of energy, has started justifyingthe decision he says he hasn’t made. "For critics," he argued lastweek, "there’s a belief that coal fired power stations undermine theUK’s leadership position on climate change. In fact the opposite istrue."(2) Quite so: if we don’t burn this stuff the Chinese might gettheir hands on it. Or could he be a true believer? Does he really thinkthere’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 almosttwice as much carbon dioxide as gas plants). Sometimes it means removing sulphurdioxide from the smoke (which boosts the CO2(3)). Sometimes it means carboncapture and storage: stripping the carbon out of the exhaust gases, piping itaway and burying it in geological formations. None of these equate to cleancoal, as you will see if you visit an opencast mine. But they create amarvellous amount of confusion in the public mind, which gives the government achance to excuse the inexcusable.
In principle, carbon capture and storage (CCS) could reduce emissions from powerstations by 80-90%. While the whole process has not yet been demonstrated, theindividual steps are all deployed commercially today: it looks feasible. Thegovernment has launched a competition for companies to build the firstdemonstration plant, which should be burying CO2 by 2014.
Unfortunately, despite Hutton’s repeated assurances, this has nothing to dowith Kingsnorth or the other new coal plants he wants to approve. If Kingsnorthgoes ahead, it will be operating by 2012, two years before the CCS experimenthas even begun. The government says that the demonstration project will take"at least 15 years" to assess(4). It will take many more years for thetechnology to be retrofitted to existing power stations, by which time it’sall over. On this schedule, carbon capture and storage, if it is deployed atall, will come too late to prevent runaway climate change.
Kingsnorth will produce around 4.5 million tonnes of CO2 every year(5); if alleight of the proposed coal plants are built, they will account for 46% of theemissions Britain can produce by 2050, assuming the government sticks toBrown’s new proposed target of an 80% cut(6). Aviation, using thegovernment’s own figures, will account for another 184% (7)(these figures areexplained on my website). Even if we stopped breathing, eating, driving andheating our homes, the new runways and coal burners the government envisageswould more than double our national greenhouse gas quota.
The government seeks to bamboozle us by arguing that the new power stations willbe "CCS ready", meaning that one day, in theory, they could beretrofitted with the necessary equipment. But even this turns out to be untrue.In January, Greenpeace obtained an exchange of emails between EO.N - the companyhoping the build the new plant (yes the same EO.N that broadcasts footage offluttering sycamore keys, suggesting that its dirty old habits have gone withthe wind) - and Gary Mohammed, the civil servant drawing up the planningconditions(8). Mohammed begins by sending an email of such snivellingobsequiousness that you can almost smell the fear on it. "Drafting theconditions for Kingsnorth. If possible I would like to cover CCS … I admitthis suggested condition could be without justification and premature but noharm in trying to gauge your opinion." (This "suggestedcondition" was actually government policy. Who’s running this country?)EO.N replied by claiming that the secretary of state "has no right towithhold approval for conventional plant" (in fact he has every right). Allit would allow the government to specify was that the potential for CCS"will be investigated." Mr Mohammed wrestled with his conscience forall of six minutes before replying. "Thanks. I won’t include. Hope to getthe set of draft conditions out today or tomorrow."
This exchange took place in mid-January, a few days before the EuropeanCommission published a proposed directive specifying that all new coal-firedpower stations must be CCS ready(9). Mr Mohammed must have known that he washelping EO.N to win approval for the plant before the directive comes into forcenext year.
You might by now be beginning the derive the impression that carbon capture andstorage is not the green panacea that ministers have suggested. But youhaven’t heard the half of it. Even if it does become a viable means ofdisposing of carbon dioxide, new figures suggest that it’s likely to enhancerather than reduce our total emissions.
For the companies which will bid to bury the gas, one technique is moreattractive than the others. This is to pump it into declining oil fields. Thegas dissolves into the remaining oil, reducing its viscosity and pushing it intothe production wells. It’s called enhanced oil recovery (EOR). The oil thecompanies sell offsets some of the costs of carbon storage.
A few weeks ago, the green thinker Jim Bliss roughly calculated theenvironmental costs of this technique. He used as his case study the scheme BPproposed (but abandoned last year) for pumping CO2 into the Miller Field off thecoast of Scotland. It would have buried 1.3m tonnes of CO2 and extracted 40million barrels of oil(10). Taking into account only the four major fuelproducts, Bliss worked out that the total carbon emissions would outweigh thesavings by between seven and fifteen times(11).
So has the government ruled out enhanced oil recovery? Not a bit of it. Its memoabout the demonstration project says that Mr Hutton’s department "willwant to ensure that the treatment of EOR and non-EOR projects are dealt with ona level playing field basis."(12) Another document suggests it favours thistechnique: enhanced oil recovery will lead to "increased energy security,domestic revenue and employment"(13). But, the government notes, this willhave to happen before the North Sea’s oil infrastructure is dismantled."Now is the perfect opportunity to realise the significant opportunitiesoffered by CCS."(14)
Like biofuels and micro wind turbines, carbon capture and storage turns out tobe another great green scam. It will come too late to prevent runaway climatechange, the government has no intention of enforcing it and even if it had thetechnique is likely to boost our carbon emissions. This is what John Huttoncalls "meeting our international obligations"(15). Heaven knows whatbreaking them might look like.
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. TheDaily Mash
2. John Hutton, 10th March 2008. The Future of Utilities. Speechto the Adam Smith Institute.
3. The commonest technique for flue gas desulphurisation is the limestone gypsumprocess. As well as making the power station slightly less efficient, thechemical reaction produces CO2. 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) TechnologiesFor Coal-Fired Combustion Plant.
4. BERR, 19th November 2007. Competition for a Carbon Dioxide Capture andStorage Demonstration Project. ProjectInformation Memorandum.
5. Greenpeace, 2007. Letter to AlistairDarling.
6. Here’s how Greenpeace makes this calculation: "In December 2007,Gordon Brown said he aspired to an 80% cut in emissions by 2050. That would giveus a carbon budget of 117.8mt/CO2/per year. The new coal plants currentlyproposed--10.6 GW of capacity - would emit more than 54 million tonnes of carbondioxide which represents almost half of that quota. (10.6 GW x 7884 hours ofgeneration per year, assuming 90% operational = 83.57 TWH/y. 83.57 TWH/y x 0.65= 54 mt/CO2/y)."
Advertisement
7. This is 80% of the 1990 level, namely 161.5MtC (please note that thisweight refers to elemental C, not CO2). That leaves 32.3MtC.
The Dept for Transport’s conservative figures suggest aviation emissions willrise to 15.7 MtC by 2050. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changeestimates that net radiative forcing from aircraft emissions is 2.7 times thatof the CO2 alone, which gives a nominal carbon equivalent of 42.4MtC. Thegovernment’s figures systematically underestimate the UK’s contribution, byassuming that British people are responsible for 50% of the seats on flightsleaving or arriving in the UK. The true figure is 70%, which means the totalequivalent figure is 59.35MtC.
8. You can read these emails here
9. Commission Of The European Communities, 23rd January 2008. Proposal for aDirective of the European Parliament and of the Council on the geologicalstorage of carbon dioxide and amending CouncilDirectives 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.
10. BP, 30th June 2005. BP’s plan to generate electricity from hydrogen andcapture carbon dioxide could set a new standard for cleaner energy. Pressrelease
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. StoringCO2 under the North Sea Basin--a key solution for combating climate change,p9.
14. ibid, p9.
