I was talking to a friend the other day. He was reflecting on his long career spent trying to give birth to the kind of technology that could still make clean coal a prevalent reality. He was clearly frustrated. Even suggested it might be time to give it up and get a real job. Neither of us spoke. I watched him silently consider the uncomfortable thought of throwing in the towel.  Wondering if this “thing” that he’d poured his life into might still be sitting on the launch pad as he faded into his sunset years.

Left unasked was the question of why. Why, after untold $100′s of millions spent in development, decades of recurring DOE grants, numerous subsidized demonstration plants, endless conferences attended by the 1000′s, acquisition and development of core technologies by the likes of GE, Siemens, and Shell, plus the voluminous rhetoric from all corners extolling the virtues of superior clean coal technology (including even the grudging support from the environmental community), is this stuff still sitting on the launch pad waiting for ignition?

The “stuff” I’m talking about is IGCC – Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle. A hopelessly awful name for an ostensibly sensible technology caught in an endless cycle of ready, set, ….  but never go. To be fair, a few plants have been built worldwide including 2 in the US. But we’re talking about a real launch here. One that can achieve self-sustaining orbit, not just test flights.

Conceptually simple enough, IGCC is the marriage of a gasifier with a gas turbine to make electricity. Instead of running the gas turbines on conventional natural gas, in IGCC they’re run on a hydrogen rich synthetic gas produced by gasifying (rather than burning/oxidizing) carbonaceous fuels like coal or refinery wastes (petroleum coke and  heavy residual oils).  For obvious reasons, it’s easier to market “clean coal” rather than the alphabet techno-soup of IGCC so the power industry co-opted “clean coal” around the same time the coal industry started getting antsy at the  prospects of a carbon constrained future.

Thus, for all practical purposes,  IGCC is synonymous with clean coal today.

The promise of IGCC is the trifecta of low emissions (almost on par with natural gas fired turbines – considered the cleanest fossil fuel technology), low cost solid fuel flexibility (compared to conventional coal power plants), and the ability to capture a significant percentage of carbon economically (as pre-combusted CO2) for subsequent geologic sequestration. IGCC today is viewed by environmental authorities and activists alike as being superior to even the most advanced pulverized coal plant. And unlike an advanced conventional coal plant, you stand a very good chance of successfully permitting an IGCC project today. Maybe even skip the obligatory lawsuits by the Sierra Club et. al.  But at a price.

Before climate change and the prospects of a carbon tax (or cap and trade) entered the picture, IGCC was an also ran for two basic reasons: it cost too much and was too damn complicated (or if you like – too risky). But with carbon constraints on the horizon, IGCC moved to the head of the line because it could be configured to capture carbon far more economically than conventional coal plants. You could almost feel the pulse quicken in those who’d labored so long to bring IGCC to the forefront of power generation technology.  At last, IGCC would lift off and have its day in the sun.

Not so fast. Turns out the price tag for getting IGCC through the permitting process is a steep one.  And that price is committing to costly carbon capture and permanently sequestering the captive CO2 deep underground – forever! Notwithstanding that IGCC can pull this off more economically than with conventional coal technology, the bottom line is it can easily add 50% to the final cost of electricity produced. To get more specific, an IGCC project with carbon capture and sequestration will require a wholesale power price in the range of 10-15 cents/kwh; way above current market.  And I wouldn’t bet on the lower end of that range. Few utilities, and even fewer utility commissions, are going to do the heavy lifting needed to get that beast off the ground.

I could elaborate on complexity and risk which are usually obligatory topics when discussing IGCC but why bother? If the numbers don’t work, IGCC isn’t going anywhere outside of one or two subsidized demonstration project (see recent post regarding NeverGen).  The numbers haven’t worked before. They don’t work now.

And now comes the bad news for my friend….and for IGCC generally. The safe bet is the numbers on IGCC will never work. Blame it on natural gas. Or more specifically, unconventional natural gas. Turns out we have more natural gas than previously thought. A lot more. And while it may cost more to extract than conventional gas, the current view is this cost won’t rise to the level needed to put IGCC into the black. And when solar reaches true grid parity sometime in the next few years, it’ll be renewables backed by natural gas long into the future. Less complex. Less costly. Less coal. And meanwhile, IGCC will continue to sit on the launch pad waiting for liftoff. It may be a long wait.

Blackout: Heinberg on dwindling coal reserves and the siren song of “clean coal”

Posted on grist.com 4:03 PM on 27 Jul 2009
by David Roberts

There isn’t nearly as much coal left as most people think. “Clean coal” will run down limited reserves even faster. If humanity doesn’t begin massive, sustained investment in renewable power sources immediately, civilization could be at risk before the end of the century. And that’s without considering the impacts of climate change.

Such is the stark conclusion of Richard Heinberg’s Blackout: Coal, Climate and the Last Energy Crisis, which despite its dry tone and technical complexity is one of the scariest f*cking books I’ve ever read.

Right now the U.S. is on the verge of a momentous gamble, as reflected in the ACES bill: betting that long-term emission reductions can be achieved via carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). ACES postpones serious domestic reductions for over a decade on the assumption (hope?) that CCS technology will mature and drop in price enough to enable the indefinite use of coal.

Similarly, at U.N. talks it is fervently hoped that CCS will enable coal to continue driving developing-world economic expansion (as oil declines, coal use has risen). Nothing approaching WWII-scale investment in renewables and efficiency is on the table.

It’s a game-theoretic exercise played for Dantean stakes. If Heinberg is right, policymakers are operating under two fateful, and possibly fatal, illusions.

First, they think the U.S. has a “250-year supply” of coal, and that China, Russia, Australia, and India have similarly inexhaustible supplies. They’re almost certainly wrong.

The bulk of Heinberg’s book is a methodical walk through several recent studies on coal reserves. (One of the most shocking facts about coal reserves is how little we know about them—they were scarcely studied in any systematic way before 2005.) If you have time for just one, check out “Coal: Resources and Future Production” [PDF], by Germany’s Energy Watch Group. It’s a page-turner!

A key feature of recent studies is that they abandon the conventional but misleading expression of coal supplies: reserves-to-production ratio, or R/P. Divide total reserves (how much is in the ground) by the current rate of production (how much we’re using) and voilà, a big number—a 250-year supply, even.

But rates of fossil-fuel production are not, indeed cannot physically be, static. The easiest reserves are found first. Over time, as more accessible seams are mined out, what remains is increasingly difficult to obtain and expensive to transport. In every coal field,  every country, every region, the energy-return-on-investment (EROI) rises, peaks, and declines. Post-peak, it takes more and more energy to reach the coal and get it where it needs to go. The crucial issue is not how much coal is left in the ground but where we are on the curve, and more to the point, when we cross into negative EROI, the crucial line after which it takes more work to get coal out of the ground than coal returns in energy.

Obviously that line is a moving target. It depends on commodity prices, technology, the cost of transport, and any number of other dynamic variables. Nonetheless, it’s possible to sketch a basic bell curve for EROI (a “Hubbert linearization,” in dorkspeak) for coal production. That’s what the Energy Watch Group (EWG) and others have recently done, and as it turns out, the news ain’t pretty.

(This will all sound very, very familiar to the peak-oil crowd. Turns out coal is a finite fossil fuel too!)

According to the EWG, global coal production will,  best-case scenario, peak and begin declining about 20 years from now. Yikes.

The second fateful illusion: that carbon capture and sequestration can enable the continued expansion of coal use.

Industry insiders admit that CCS technology will not be developed, and costs reduced enough to prompt widespread adoption, until 2035 at best. By then, if CCS becomes a primary climate strategy and EWG-style analysis is correct, humanity will be in the grips of four interrelated costs and risks associated with coal. Quoting Heinberg:

• the need for substantial investment in new CCS technology;
• higher coal prices and shortages due to depletion;
• higher electricity generating costs due to the use of IGCC and CCS; and
• lower electricity generation efficiencies due to the use of CCS, requiring more coal to produce an equivalent amount of electricity.

So at a time when supplies are declining, while commodity and transportation costs are rising, we’ll need much more coal to get the same amount of electricity from a more expensive generation technology. Surely you see the wisdom of the strategy.

Another issue that doesn’t get the press it deserves is the investment necessary to produce the infrastructure for widespread CCS. It’s mind-boggling. Ultimately humanity would be burying more than twice the amount of CO2 that it digs up in coal, more than eight times the amount of yearly volume handled by the global crude oil industry (according to Vaclav Smil). Building the new-gen plants, running more railroad cars to bring the increased coal supplies necessary to run them, building and burying all the CO2 pipelines, maintaining CO2 burial fields … it all requires not only an enormous amount of money but an enormous investment of energy, and fossil energy is a finite commodity.

Heinberg’s conclusion: it’s renewables or nothing.

Imagine the remaining reserves of oil and coal as a savings account. There’s a lot in the bank, but pretty soon income is going to decline and savings are going to get drawn down. The question before us is: how fast should we draw down our fossil savings, and what should we spend them on?

Spending on CCS poses a fateful opportunity cost. If scaling up renewables and efficiency (R&E) is difficult today, it will be doubly so when savings have been drained pursuing CCS infrastructure. According to the scenarios developed by Heinberg and the Post Carbon Institute, massive CCS investment would at best delay an energy crash by a decade or two. I’m dubious of these kinds of scenario exercises, but it’s inarguable that after all that fossil energy is spent on CCS, it can’t be retrieved. There’s no do-over. If it doesn’t work out, the energy needed to build out R&E infrastructure will only be more expensive.

One subject on which Heinberg strikes me as unduly pessimistic is the potential for R&E. He and the Post Carbon Institute think the best-case scenario is a massive, controlled, humane reduction in human population alongside a transition to a much lower-energy, localized form of life. For my part, I incline bright green. Worldchanging‘s Alex Steffen put it well in a recent tweet: “To be bright green is to know that a sane respect for planetary limits imposes no meaningful limits on humanity’s potential, at all.” It is possible to flourish sustainably.

But that’s an argument for another time. At minimum, a sustainable future requires the best possible understanding of available coal reserves and their likely cost. If “clean coal” turns out to be a phantom, chasing it will not only waste time, it may foreclose the only decent options we have left.

The Dirty War Against Clean Coal

WHILE President Obama’s cap-and-trade proposal to reduce greenhouse gases has been the big topic of recent environmental debate, the White House has also been pushing a futuristic federal project to build a power plant that burns coal without any greenhouse gases. Sounds great, right? Except the idea is a rehash of a proposal that went bust the first time around.

More important, the technology already exists to make huge reductions in greenhouse emissions from coal, allowing power companies to begin cutting the carbon footprint of coal today. Instead, advanced-technology coal power sits on the shelf while regulators wait to see what happens with a project that may be just an expensive boondoggle.

The big project, a public-private partnership called FutureGen, was first announced by George W. Bush in 2003. Dreading facing up to the problem of greenhouse gases from electricity generation, the Bush White House suggested that decisions should wait while FutureGen developed a coal-fired power with no emissions. FutureGen’s administrators spent five years on studies, proposals and studies of studies, but never broke ground for a test installation.

Then, in a fit of integrity, the Department of Energy decided the project should be put in Illinois, a Democratic state — Midwestern coal is high in carbon, making this a logical choice — rather than in Republican Texas, which the White House preferred. The administration promptly canceled financing for FutureGen. But this month, Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced he was reviving the project, hinting that the ultimate cost may run to billions of dollars.

FutureGen was better off canceled. Government is good at basic research, poor at commercial-scale applied energy technology. The Synthetic Fuels Corporation, a heavily subsidized attempt begun by the Carter administration to manufacture gasoline substitutes, flopped without ever producing a marketable gallon. The Energy Department has also financed such overpriced, unrealistic projects as the MOD-5B, a wind turbine that weighed 470 tons and stood 20 stories tall: it looked like a gigantic propeller intended to push the earth to a new star system. It ended up being sold for scrap.

The Obama administration’s FutureGen plan calls for yet another year of study before any actual action; test runs may not begin for a decade. No wonder the project’s nickname is “NeverGen.” This is part of a Washington tradition — beginning pie-in-the-sky projects that create an excuse to avoid forms of conservation and greenhouse-gas reduction that are possible immediately. Companies including General Electric have already perfected technology to reduce emissions substantially, called “integrated gasification combined cycle” power. (Yes, it needs a better name.)

Current coal-fired power plants burn pulverized coal using a combustion process that hasn’t changed in a half a century. The new approach turns coal into a gas similar to natural gas, which runs through a device similar to a jet engine. Such plants can achieve near-zero emissions of toxic material and chemicals that form smog, and they require about a third less coal than regular coal-fired power plants to produce an equal amount of energy, which means about a third lower greenhouse gases.

Beyond that, the promising technology of “sequestering” carbon dioxide — pumping it back into the ground to keep it out of atmosphere — appears for technical reasons to be impractical for conventional pulverized-coal power plants. But gasification plants have technical characteristics that should make “sequestration” of carbon feasible. A gasification power plant with sequestration would have around two-thirds lower greenhouse gases than a conventional coal-fired generating station.

The first commercial gasification power plant, designed by General Electric for Duke Energy, is being built in Indiana. Yet, absurdly, most state public-utility commissions have denied requests to construct these environmentally friendly systems. Last year, Virginia denied a major utility’s request to build a coal-fired power plant that would have sequestered nearly all its carbon output.

One reason Virginia gave for the denial was the higher up-front cost of a gasification plant. Yet, once greenhouse gases are regulated (and President Obama’s cap-and-trade plan would in effect tax carbon), the economics of gasification plants may become attractive, with low-emission plants costing less to run.

Another reason for the denials is that utility commissions are waiting for the outcome of the FutureGen experiment. This is a classic instance of the best being enemy of the good. Rather than starting to cut coal-caused carbon emissions right now, we are waiting to see if a hypothetical system could achieve perfection decades from now. Meanwhile, emissions continue willy-nilly.

FutureGen is politically appealing: contractors get subsidies, politicians get to hand out money in their districts and astonishing breakthroughs are promised at unspecified future dates. Why aren’t progressives fighting for an immediate embrace of gasification power? Much of the environmental movement clings to a fairyland notion that coal combustion can soon be eliminated, and therefore no coal-fired power plant of any kind, even an advanced plant, should be built.

Reflecting this mindset, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said he opposes integrated gasification plants — only new solar, wind and geothermal facilities should be allowed. Environmentalists who correctly point out there can never be absolutely “clean coal” thus end up in the position of opposing coal that’s far cleaner than what we are using.

Yet coal use is a future certainty. Half of our power comes from coal, versus about 2 percent from solar and wind: in the next few decades, green power simply cannot grow quickly enough to eliminate the need for coal. We have two choices: do nothing and wait for FutureGen while coal-caused carbon emissions continue unabated; or start building improved coal-fired plants that reduce the problem. Which seems more forward-thinking?

Link to op-ed article in nytimes.com

In the absence of mandates  people don’t build capital intensive power plants that produce electricity at costs that are higher than current market prices. That’s the biggest reason why utilities aren’t rushing towards solar and most other renewables. High cost is also a big part of why we don’t have a real clean coal plant operating or even under construction – yet.

So if you don’t have a mandate, go get one.

One example took place recently in Delaware where NRG Energy supported state legislation that expressly favored gasification – a clear nod towards clean coal. The law mandated that the local utility solicit proposals and purchase the winning bidder’s power under a long-term contract.  Even though the solicitation indirectly favored clean coal, and NRG did indeed bid a total clean coal package including carbon capture and sequestration,  everything changed when another developer proposed a massive offshore wind project along Delaware’s pristine southern shoreline. In a liberal and largely agrarian coastal state like Delaware, the green giant ended up slaying the clean coal dragon – legislation favoring dragons notwithstanding. But when it came time for Delaware authorities to approve the final deal on the offshore wind project, the state’s decision was to make no decision. In short, they punted.  Why? Because that big,  green and windy offshore giant was just  too damn expensive.

The boys at Tenaska took a different tack and got their mandate from the State of Illinois instead. Smart move if you ask me. If you want to get clean coal done, go to the state with the most coal in the Eastern US. In fact, the energy content of Illinois coal is greater than that of all the oil in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait combined. Unfortunately, Illinois coal is high sulfur coal and the downstate Illinois economy has taken a beating ever since the Clean Air Act of 1990 put the squeeze on sulfur emissions. But clean coal technology can handle high sulfur and virtually eliminate it from its emissions profile. So when Tenaska rode into Springfield with a plan for a clean coal plant in downstate Illinois, the legislators were all ears.

On January 16th, 2009 the now notorious and recently impeached Illinois Governor Blago signed Senate Bill 1987 ushering in the first ever Clean Coal Portfolio Standard (“CPS”).  lllinois took a page out the renewable energy playbook and rewrote it for clean coal. The CPS mandates that 5% of all electricity in Illinois must come from clean coal sources by 2015, increasing to 25% by 2025; values comparable to current renewable energy portfolio mandates in many states including California – although the timing is 10-15 years further out for clean coal. To qualify as a Clean Coal plant under the CPS, a plant must capture and permanently store (sequester deep undeground) at least 50% of its CO2 emissions and also have an emissions profile at least as good as any modern plant burning natural gas.

As soon as this legislation was passed by the Senate, Tenaska (a highly experienced power project development company based in Omaha) announced that its clean coal project in Taylorville, Illinois had secured its air permit (authority to construct) from the Illinois EPA and that it intended its Taylorville IGCC (Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle) plant to be the first project to qualify under the new CPS.  Taylorville is dubbed a hybrid IGCC project meaning it can produce both electricity and synthetic natural gas (“SNG”).

A key feature of the Illinois CPS is that the state’s electric utilities (Ameren and Exelon) are obligated to purchase power from qualifying clean coal projects under long term power purchase agreements. But only if each resulting contract doesn’t increase the price of power to Illinois rate payers too much. With the Taylorville project already reportedly costing north of $3 billion for a 500 MW project – a capital cost per MW that actually exceeds that of most large solar projects today – it’s far from a done deal. Perhaps thats why Tenaska is building in the optionality of producing natural gas at its Taylorville plant instead of  only electricity; just in case the State balks at the price tag for clean coal power.

Portfolio standards (clean coal or renewables) are enacted to achieve public policy goals. The idea of a Clean Coal Portfolio Standard is a good one just as its counterpart has been for renewables like wind and solar. Without these mandates utilities will default to the lowest cost solutions and the unavoidable fact is clean coal and most renewables are not the cheapest sources of electricity. At least not today. As in Delaware, when the capital cost of a mandate exceeds the political cost, mandates with safety valves have a habit of losing their teeth.

Yet we live in a time when the issues of climate change, environment, national security and clean energy have become forever joined at the hip and are eclipsing the conventional metric of getting the most BTUs per buck. When this has happened in the past, the issue at hand takes on a moral imperative.  A good example is the federal worker safety laws enacated early in the last century when morality finally trumped the argument that worker safety would cost  too much – we finally just did it because it was the right thing to do.  Such moves requires federal action.

For real change to happen on energy policy, we need federally mandated energy portfolio standards, including one for clean coal, with big teeth and no safety valves. It will cost what it needs to cost in order get clean energy and we’ll all adjust to this new reality accordingly. Our newly minted President Obama has arrived in Washington at a time in our history when the country is open to changes, even big changes.

Time will tell if the man from Yes-We-Can can turn his mandate into a Yes-You-Will for the energy industry.

On Monday, Dec 22, 2008 one of the retaining walls in the Tennessee Valley Authority’s  (or “TVA”) 40 acre surface impoundment pond  failed structurally releasing over a billion gallons of toxin-laden coal ash.  Obeying the laws of gravity and taking paths of least resistance, that 40 acre pond transformed itself into a thinner 300+ acre layer of wet gray sludge that spread out all over the town of Harriman, TN.  TVA, the Kingston coal plant’s owner and operator,  is  a federal corporation and the nation’s largest public power company. We own it. We the people.  It’s our waste, our spill and our mess and I’m quite sure the fine folks of Harriman are pissed blind at what’s happened to their town, homes, and businesses.  

And like clockwork, the beating of drums on the evils of coal fired power plants are growing ever louder. “See!”, they beat, “There’s your clean coal. Enough with this dirty  coal!” 

Sure, TVA’s Kingston plant spill is awful and I agree that it’s a poster child for why the days of building more conventional coal plants are numbered. But it doesn’t have to be like this going forward.  If we build real clean coal plants, we won’t have coal ash as we’ve known it and what solid waste is produced won’t be a liquid sludge with water soluble toxins. 

Cost effective clean coal technology means gasification of coal.  Clean coal gasification (unlike combustion) transforms coal into a blend of mostly  hydrogen and carbon monoxide. The carbon gets stripped off, converted into CO2 and then pumped deep underground to be permanently sequestered in suitable geological formations (just like gas is naturally stored before we drill a hole and let it out).  The remaining hydrogen gas  gets combusted in low emissions gas turbines to make power.  Also, in gasification virtually all the mercury is stripped out not to mention the sulfur.

But unlike the nasty wet goop produced at TVA’s Kingston plant (and similar existing coal plants),  the high temperatures of a gasifier renders coal ash into a vitrified (glass like) dry solid.  This solid byproduct is inert, insoluble in water, and is a useful synthetic aggregate that has market value. 

So let’s recap. With real clean coal plants using gasification there’s no ash sludge, no “wet dump” containment ponds, no soluble toxins, and no risk of billions of gallon of ash spills in Harriman or other town.  

These unique and positive characteristics of clean coal gasification are part of what makes the recent campaigns against clean coal such a one sided distortion.  I can’t decide if  these campaigns are rooted in cynicism, ignorance or simple faith but they’re certainly not rooted in reality. 

I’m a big fan of renewable energy and the good news is there’s going to be a lot more renewable energy in our future. But I’m also a pragmatist rooted in the reality of how our electrical supply system works. To quote a leader in the energy business,  “If you do the math, you will learn that you cannot solve global warming through clean coal alone, but without clean coal, you simply cannot solve global warming.”