Coal's Bright Future

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On their own, however, these technologies aren't enough to decrease overall emissions because the world's coal-burn rate is rising so quickly. For overall emissions to fall, plants also need carbon capture and storage ( ccs) technologies that shunt the compressed CO2 deep into the ground, perhaps into depleted oil and gas reserves, or into saline aquifers beneath the ocean floor. Sequestration technology works — oil companies have been using it for years — but so far it hasn't been used in conjunction with a power plant. The promise of ccs coal plants has won the approval of some environmental groups. OnEarth magazine, published by the Natural Resources Defense Council in the U.S., recently opined: "Until coal is replaced with cleaner fuels, we must somehow make it part of the solution." Germana Canzi, a senior climate and energy campaigner for Friends of the Earth, says: "We are supporting ccs as an option to bridge the gap between the fossil fuels of today and the cleaner fuels of tomorrow."

There are obstacles that will likely mean we won't see too many full-scale coal-fired plants with ccs technology soon. Building a supercritical, 1,000-MW coal-fired plant with ccs technology from the ground up could cost around $2 billion — about 30% more than the price of a standard plant. Also, pipelines to transmit the CO2 to a burial site need to be built. Legal issues must be tackled, too. For instance, current international treaties that define burial of carbon below seabeds as "dumping" have to be amended. Still, new and refitted power plants using supercritical or igcc technologies could be made carbon-capture ready for little additional expense. "If anyone is building a new coal plant that is not capture ready, they're really stupid," says Jonathan R. Gibbins, an energy expert at London's Imperial College.

There is some movement toward a cleaner-coal future in Europe. Vattenfall is building a $63 million, 30-MW pilot plant in the east German town of Schwarze Pumpe that uses another, untested clean-coal technology: oxyfuel. The plant will burn coal with pure oxygen instead of air, mixed with CO2 to keep heat levels manageable. What's left is pure CO2. Some is recirculated to aid combustion; the rest is easily captured for sequestration. If the combustion technology works, Vattenfall will build a 250-MW demonstration plant that will transport the captured CO2 to an underground storage site. It hopes to start building full-scale carbon-free plants around 2015 to 2020.

In Britain, Powerfuel's Budge expects to break ground early next year on a $1.5 billion, 900-MW plant in South Yorkshire. It's adjacent to the Hatfield Colliery, a shuttered coal mine Powerfuel is now reopening. The plant will use igcc technology, and Powerfuel — now majority-owned by Russia's Kuzbassrazrezugol — expects to pipe the carbon into North Sea–oil reservoirs, where it can help flush out additional oil reserves. Several other carbon-capture ready projects have been proposed. E.ON, for instance, wants to build an igcc plant in the north of England that's capture ready, but says it needs a government subsidy. Imperial College's Gibbins says it's imperative that three to four projects quickly get funded to prove the validity of these technologies. "If climate change is urgent, then carbon capture and storage is a really big deal. And the sooner we do it, the more options we have," he argues. At a time when oil and gas are getting neither cheaper nor more plentiful, the world needs all the options it can find.