Scrubbing King Coal
NEWS: How come energy companies are gaga over alternative fuels? First off, define "alternative."
|
|
|
|
The commercial begins with a voice-over asking, "What do you think cars will be running on in the future?"
"Grass, leaves, trees, garbage," suggests a soccer mom standing on a leafy street.
"Hydrogen fuel cells," says a gray-haired hippie lady standing with her bike by a city park.
"Give me a solar car—I'm there," declares a sporty young man.
"We need to be really cautious of what we're putting into our cars," explains a slacker dude. "What we're doing is really messing things up. We need to make that change." As portentous music swells, an animated sun blooms into a yellow and green flower.
The lovely sentiment is brought to you by BP, which since 2000 has touted its "Beyond Petroleum" identity with a multimillion-dollar ad campaign as well as a pledge to spend $8 billion on "alternative energy" by 2015. But the reality is a bit more complex than the commercials suggest. Of the $3 billion the company will spend for 2006-2008, only about half is going toward wind and solar, with the rest dedicated to more dubious alternatives like synthetic gas made from petroleum. By comparison, in 2006 alone, BP's capital expenditures on oil and gas exploration, production, refining, and marketing came to $16.2 billion; its revenues were $274 billion, and its profits $22 billion.
BP may be the most audacious practitioner of fossil greenwashing, but it is hardly the only one. Shell has invested big in such environmentally devastating ventures as the Canadian tar sands and liquefied natural gas while making only modest forays into wind energy, solar, and hydrogen fuel cells—a total investment of about $1 billion as of 2006. Meanwhile, Americans for Balanced Energy Choices, an industry-funded coal advocacy group, has been running ads with slogans like "Our commitment goes beyond clean." And in 2005, GE announced its "ecomagination" campaign, which included a TV commercial featuring buff, sweaty models posing as coal miners and the voice-over, "Harnessing the power of coal is looking more beautiful every day."
Across the board, the companies that control fossil fuels have begun to respond to rising concern about global warming with what amounts to a three-point strategy: First, make small overtures toward developing renewable energy, and milk them for maximum PR value. Second, invest more generously in carbon-based "alternative energy" that gets passed off as green. Third, invoke the goal of energy independence to pump, mine, transport, and sell more and more of the same old fuels to an ever-hungrier market.
One of the slipperiest tactics involves redefining what constitutes clean energy. In a 2006 report, the oil-industry-friendly Institute for Energy Research said that U.S. oil and gas companies had invested $98 billion in "emerging energy technologies" in North America from 2000 to 2005. But the vast majority of this funding went to develop "frontier hydrocarbons"—new, often filthy methods of producing more oil and gas. In fact, a report from the Center for American Progress found that between 2001 and 2007, a period of unprecedented profits, the top five private oil companies spent an average of just one-half of one percent of total profits on renewable fuels. (BP and Shell topped the list at 1.2 percent; ExxonMobil occupied the bottom at 0.)
From Big Fuel's point of view, the logic makes sense: Energy generated by the sun, wind, and tides is not a tangible commodity in the same way that oil, gas, and coal are; thus, a better way to preserve control of the market is to tap frontier or speculative resources, such as drilling farther offshore and in protected areas like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Perhaps the greatest beneficiary of industry's "alternative" efforts is coal, America's most abundant fossil fuel. There are about 600 coal-fired power plants around the country providing nearly 50 percent of our electricity. But since 2006, at least three dozen of the 153 new conventional coal plants planned for the coming decade have been canceled due to resistance from citizens and state and local governments.
In response, energy companies—often in joint ventures involving coal, oil and gas, electric, and mining interests—have launched schemes to turn coal into gas or liquid fuel, sometimes called syngas, synoil, or "clean coal." Minnesota's Excelsior Energy has partnered with ConocoPhillips on a coal-gasification project. Chevron owns coal mines in Wyoming, New Mexico, and Alabama, and has developed a coal conversion technology business, which it sold to GE in 2004. GE, in turn, has licensed the technology to companies including dkrw Energy out of Houston, which is developing one of the nation's first coal-to-liquid plants in Wyoming. Last May, BP announced a joint venture with mining giant Rio Tinto to produce hydrogen energy using natural gas and gasified coal in the Powder River Basin, where Rio Tinto has three coal mines.
Coal gasification involves using heat and pressure to convert coal into gaseous components; so far, three syngas plants are operating in the United States commercially, and many more are in development. The coal-to-liquid (ctl) process known as Fischer-Tropsch, which turns coal into synthetic diesel fuel, was developed in the 1920s by German chemists; it powered the Nazi army in World War II and South Africa during the apartheid era. But other than some brief overtures toward ctl during the oil crisis of the 1970s, the process has never been developed in the United States—until now.
In theory, these technologies produce lower levels of particulate matter and acid-rain-producing sulfur and nitrogen compounds than burning the coal directly. But on the carbon front, they fail miserably: Syngas plants produce more CO2 than natural gas plants, and ctl produces more than twice as much per gallon of fuel as oil does.
To solve this problem, companies say they will employ carbon sequestration or carbon capture and storage (ccs), in which the CO2 emissions are stored, usually deep underground, rather than released into the atmosphere. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that ccs could reduce CO2 emissions from a plant by 80 to 90 percent; on the other hand, it also could increase a plant's energy requirements by anywhere from 10 to 40 percent, and the overall cost of generating energy from 25 to 125 percent.
In addition to being difficult and expensive, ccs is potentially dangerous: In 1986, an eruption of CO2 from a naturally occurring pocket under a Cameroon lake bed instantly suffocated nearly 1,800 people; leaks from an underground storage site could be likewise deadly. "That stuff is crazy," says Tyson Slocum, who heads Public Citizen's energy project. "Totally unproven. Stuffing hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the ground—there are huge liabilities."
For this reason, Slocum says, energy companies are pushing to transfer as much legal and financial responsibility as possible to the federal government. Last April industry lawyer Kipp Coddington of Alston & Bird testified before a Senate committee that if the industry was going to invest billions of dollars in carbon sequestration, the related risks had to be "identified, quantified, and minimized." As Slocum puts it, "Once underground, [the CO2] becomes the responsibility of the American people."
Small-scale carbon sequestration has been carried out primarily by pumping CO2 into depleted oil wells, which serves the additional purpose of forcing more oil to the surface. But no power plant is yet operating with a full ccs system. The much-publicized FutureGen facility—a U.S. government-funded, coal-fueled plant that was supposed to achieve zero emissions through ccs—was canceled in January 2008, five years after it was announced. (The Department of Energy cited cost overruns and said it intended to fund several smaller plants instead.)
Peter Montague, director of the Environmental Research Foundation, has noted that the coal, oil, gas, and mining industries, as well as electric utilities, "are eager to get carbon sequestration going" because it will benefit them all by "removing the need for substantial innovation and reducing competition from renewable fuels." But for the coal industry, he writes, ccs may be the key to survival—not because it is actually a viable solution to coal's vast environmental problems, but because it seems like one.
Energy companies have made it abundantly clear that any forward movement on ccs, as well as other clean-coal technology, depends on the government's shouldering a good share of the expense. They got a fair bit of what they wanted in last year's energy bill, which jettisoned key measures to support solar and wind power (including a requirement that utilities move toward generating 15 percent of their power from renewables) but set aside billions for research into CO2 sequestration. The subsidies come on top of an even larger set of handouts found in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which included some $4 billion in direct grants, loan guarantees, and tax incentives for gasification and other clean-coal initiatives.
This isn't surprising, as the coal industry, and coal-rich states, enjoy clout in Congress that even Big Oil can only dream about. West Virginia legend Robert Byrd chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, and the state's Nick Rahall heads the House Natural Resources Committee. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell is from Kentucky, and majority leader Harry Reid is from Nevada. Last year, Kentucky's Republican senator Jim Bunning and Illinois' Barack Obama launched an informal coal caucus on Capitol Hill (see "Fossil Fools"); the two cosponsored legislation supporting coal-to-liquid plants (Obama has since backpedaled from the idea), and Bunning plans to refloat it this year. North Dakota's powerful senator Byron Dorgan also backed legislation that would support a ctl plant in his home state.
And the push is likely to continue—at the state level, as well as in Washington. Last year in Kentucky, the governor signed a bill to provide a subsidiary of Peabody Energy, the world's largest coal company, with $250 million in tax breaks and other incentives to build a coal-gasification plant. In Wyoming, the legislature put through an exemption on the sales tax for synthetic fuel made from coal and has pursued a public-private partnership to develop it. Legislators are also looking at a new category of below-ground rights, which could provide a free, publicly controlled zone for storing sequestered carbon. Says Bill Bensel, an organizer with Wyoming's Powder River Basin Resource Council, "We're just trying to show we can be as green as we can, so we can sell more coal."
Illustration: Andrew Bannecker
Stop the Global Warming Machines!
Stop the Coming Genocides - Food/Water/Energy Chaos!
Weekly Vigil - presently April 27, 2008 Earth Day
April 20 marked 1 year-52 vigils later-and also the Anniversary of the infamous Ludlow-Rockefeller Coal massacre where 12 children were burnt
to death by the State militia. Mother Jones was there.
Sundays Noon-1pm
Ottawa, Ontario - Canada
U.S. Embassy
490 Sussex Dr.
Paradigm Shift Environmental Alliance
psea4earth@gmail.com
Please see the following links or google "abolition of coal
http://quebec.indymedia.org/en/node/28427
FYI, coal gasification wasn't a response to resistance to coal, it was resurrection of an 80s effort to "find a way forward for coal" knowing emissions controls couldn't be far off. I know IGCC and coal gasification well, as attorney for landowners near the proposed site of Excelsior Energy's Mesaba Project (legalectric.org, my client's site at mncoalgasplant.com and another local group at camp-site.info) What's been killing these IGCC plants, which are going down in flames as all coal plants should, is that the technology does NOT provide any great emissions improvement (demonstrated by MN's Pollution Control Agency analysis); it is way too costly (capitol cost $2,155,680,783 for 600MW, or $3,595/kW; base wholesale cost of $96-104/MW before considering transmission); and MN's ALJs on the case and PUC said it's not in the public interest and rejected the PPA that Excelsior was trying to force on ratepayers.
CCS is coal's "nuclear waste storage." It's a fiction that they're using to sell IGCC, and even the DOE, in the EIS addendum for Gilberton, PA coal-to-liquids, and in Excelsior's Mesaba Project DEIS, say it's not going to happen anytime soon. Those that propose CCS do so knowing that at best there's a possibility of capturing 30% easily (they don't go further), that it entails a significant capital cost (Excelsior's Micheletti tossed out a "$1 billion" guesstimate), and it sucks efficiency right out of the plant cutting output by 25% or more. None of that addresses the cosmic "nuclear waste" problem -- what do we do with the CO2. Given the seismic impacts of injection of gas, do we want to inject millions of tons annually at Matoon, IL, near the epicenter of the recent 5.2 earthquake? Excelsior's Mesaba Project would produce 5.4 million tons of CO2 annually, yet Green Chameleon Gov. Tim Pawlenty's Climate Change Advisory Group recommended it be EXEMPTED from CO2 limitations and a moratorium! For a guy who wants to be V.P., avoidance of decisive action isn't going to win him any votes.
The DOE recognizes and admits in Mesaba Project's Notice of Intent that IGCC is too risky for private investment, and a financing scheme has been developed by Harvard School of Business, the "Three Party Covenant" which gives a blueprint for developers to finagle public financing, at federal and state levels, so that they can try to build these unsupportable projects at our expense. Mesaba Project was one of the first out of the chute, and costs were relatively openly disclosed (not without a fight and FOIA to the DOE) and available to the public, and costs was a primary stake in its heart. Other projects can be presumed to have at least similar costs, and likely higher, and with costs like these, even PV solar looks good. IGCC isn't going anywhere. The truth is out, and it cannot stand the light of day. It's time to focus on renewable energy, as Minnesota did when Xcel chose wind with hydro backup for its next baseload power; as Delaware did when its PSC wisely chose a wind/gas combo and eliminated NRG's coal gasification project as a contender in an open RFP (unfortunately, it faces strong political opposition from utility toadies trying to kill the wind project, another story for another day); as Arizona did when a utility proposed a concentrated solar with natural gas back up. We can leave coal in the dust, where it belongs. It can be done, but it's not a simple one-stop flick of the switch solution. Reworking our electric generation and use requires thoughtful matching of resource, selection of site near load, 20+% conservation NOW, and a simple cheap solar heater on the wall of every house! We must start now and build an energy future we can live with. NO NEW COAL PLANTS!
Carol A. Overland
legalectric.org
Attorney for mncoalgasplant.com against Excelsior Energy's Mesaba Project
EPA comment here: legalectric.org/weblog/2127/
The EPA comment notes that "… therefore, we would, in reviewing the CWA Section 404 permit, reject the project purposes as stated by the applicant and the resulting alternatives analysis up on which it is based."
US Army Corps of Engineers comment here:
legalectric.org/weblog/2121/
The Corps also believes that there continue to be several NEPA deficiencies in the DEIS. These are 1) not addressing the alternative of a stand alone Phase I project; 2) not all direct actions are disclosed (e.g., not all wetland impacts appear to be disclosed in the impact tables); 3) not all impacts of connected actions are disclosed (e.g. need for additional high voltage transmission lines beyond the nearest substation); 4) not all impacts due to plant operations are disclosed (e.g., no evaluation of train and truck emissions over the 20 year life of the plant); and 5) an unresolved issue regarding the DOE’s ability to evaluate alternatives to the applicant’s proposed project.
The Mesaba Project FEIS is now delayed and no one's talking about how long... the state's project manager said that comments raised issues and that they're going to have to "do more research." Yup, that's an understatement...
SUBMISSION TO MINNESOTA LEGISLATURE REGARDING MINNESOTA LEGISLATURE CLIMATE CHANGE ADVISORY GROUP'S RECOMMENDATION TO EXEMPT A PROPOSED COAL-FIRED POWER PLANT, EXCELSIOR ENERGY, FROM CO2 EMISSION RESTRICTIONS
http://floodiceorfire.wordpress.com/2008/04/25/excelsior/
Of course, fossil fuel interests are not very enthusiastic about fission; it does not use much of their core competencies and makes most of their capital investments rather useless.
Fission does not need pipelines or tankers, it does not require the ability to negotiate with tyrants, it does not require drilling rigs, off shore platforms, or geologists with fancy seismic maps. Instead of huge product sales with relatively small numbers of workers, nuclear plants require hundreds of reasonably well paid and trained workers who often question the authority of less trained financial people.
Yep - fission is very threatening to the establishment fossil industry. Good thing that there are some information sources like Mother Jones that are helping people to understand a bit more about how the world really works and to recognize green washing campaigns for what they are, an attempt to keep the establishment in power.
CO2 is not a taxable event. Kyoto treaty has an agenda of subverting U S and the NGO's and tax loving governments get bigger every year.
That's my life, an underemployed aircraft mechanic, lost in a cultural war against radical muslims.
Outstanding in the cornfield,
beyond biofeedback
cheers
I know people hope that conservation + wind/solar can fill the gap of future energy needs, but that's just not realistic. I was in a high end coffee shop in San Francisco this morning. The patrons skew environmentally conscious. And, yet, almost every one in there was using laptops, cell phones, iPods -- in many cases simultaneously! The lights were all on and there were even lights just to illuminate the menu board. The point is that energy consumption is actually increasing, not decreasing.
Toward the end of WWII, the Nazi navy supported Coler’s work in an attempt to use an advanced example of his invention to recharge submarine batteries without the need for a sub to surface. The Allies bombed his laboratory in early 1945. However, he survived and after World War II, he helped British Intelligence to recreate and validate his inventions. A portion of their report, first published as a classified document in 1946, was declassified in 1978. It is readily available on the internet.
Not only will this revolutionary source of energy eliminate the need for fuel of any kind, but it also has the capability of turning cars and trucks into power plants, wirelessly providing up to 150 kW when suitably parked.
The first application will be to demonstrate that a plug-in hybrid car can be modified so that it no longer needs to plug-in. Our firm, Magnetic Power Inc., expects to be able to demonstrate this within 12 months.
Instead of plugging a car into the house, the house can be wirelessly connected to future cars, providing a home with up to 10 kW of power. This will be especially welcome following emergencies such as earthquakes, ice storms, hurricanes and tornadoes.
We anticipate the replacement of an automobile engine on a prototype basis with no more than three years of development, and maybe less.
Since building new coal burning or nuclear power plants takes more time and deservedly creates opposition, utilities can instead purchase power from vehicles. Two are already interested, along with several very large domestic companies.
When cars and trucks are powered by these systems, many vehicles might be paid for, over a reasonable time period, by local utilities, as they purchase power.
It is very little known that our planet faces an extremely dangerous potential threat from Methane released by melting permafrost. This potential catastrophe may endanger all human life in the not-too-distant future.
Those with scientific training will be properly skeptical, until there is independent laboratory validation of this surprising potential. That should take place before the end of this summer.
Demonstration Devices and toys are expected to be available next year, along with 1 kW generators that can be linked together to power homes.
The Articles on our website, magneticpowerinc.com provide additional information. Several articles can also be found on the renewableenergyworld.com site.
Many of the positive economic, social and political impacts of this work are obvious.
Successful commercialization may help to rapidly reduce the threat of Global Warming, as well as our dangerous and very expensive dependency on imported oil.