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.”

Is clean coal a fiction or half-truth that forms part of an ideology, i.e. a myth? As with most things, it depends on your point of view and your own ideology. If building a clean coal power plant is simply a matter of a fat check book, willpower and a room full of engineers, an event that simply hasn’t been achieved as of today, does that make clean coal a myth?  If every design aspect of clean coal is fundamentally proven and doable and yet we haven’t put it all together, then is it real or imagined?

Arguably, clean coal is more real today than landing a man on the moon was in the early 1960’s or building an atomic bomb in the early 1940’s. Yet even as the urgency for both energy independence and clean energy grows, the term “clean coal” is being portrayed as the mother of all energy related oxymorons – practically an outright lie.

For those aligned with all things green and renewable to the exclusion of all else, clean coal represents nothing less than a dangerous distraction. Greenpeace calls clean coal “an attempt by the coal industry to try and make itself relevant in the age of renewables.” They portray clean coal as a cynical public relations strategy – the ultimate greenwashing of the dirtiest energy source on earth. You may have seen the add below that is being run by therealnews.com on numerous cable channels. Created by the Reality Coalition whose members include the Alliance for Climate Protection, League of Conservation Voters, National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council and Sierra Club, the viewer is shown a clean coal plant that, well, does not exist. Not surprisingly, advocates for clean coal are crying foul and calling the ad a complete distortion of the truth.

As always, truth can be an elusive commodity. Truth is, no clean coal power plant exists today. Truth is, clean coal technology is real and ready and every part of it exists today. These truths coexist in parallel worlds for a number of reasons.

Clean Coal – When Worlds Collide: When it comes to making electricity, the term “clean coal” is effectively synonymous with “integrated gasification combined cycle”. That mouthful of technical jargon is more commonly referred to by its acronym – IGCC.

Right off the bat, this topic runs smack into a level of  technical complexity that makes having an informed discussion especially challenging for those outside of the energy industry – and even for some of those on the inside. IGCC is a marriage of two technologies that might as well come from two different worlds. One is the world of petrochemicals and refining ruled by chemical engineers – the land of “big oil”. The gasification component lives in this world. The other world is that of power generation or what most of us refer to as the “utility” business. This world is ruled by mechanical engineers who make electricity for a living using fossil fuels, steam turbines and gas turbines – often in a “combined cycle” or “CC” configuration. The CC in IGCC lives in this world.

It’s quite rare to find a utility guy with any real experience with gasification. It’s not just a matter of training and competence. Utilities burn fuels to make steam or fire natural gas directly in gas turbines. That’s what they know. It’s all they’ve needed to know. And since the culture of making electricity is extremely adverse to risk, no sane utility manager goes looking for unknowns like gasification unless compelled or otherwise incented to do so.

Until the early 1980’s the entire industry was a collection of monopolies under the thumb of 50 different state regulatory commissions. Historically, those commissions protected each utility franchise from normal competitive forces in exchange for guaranteed rates of returns as long as they kept the lights on and generally acted prudently. This is largely true even today. As any economist will tell you, innovation is glacial and risk takers are rare in the ossified world of a regulated monopoly . Even after 25+ years of utility deregulation and the emergence of independent risk takers, the idea of designing, building and operating a chemical processing plant (gasifier) as part of making electricity is a daunting prospect for even the most stalwart of U.S. power companies. Of course the petrochem boys, who like to think they can eat power plants for breakfast, would have no problem pulling this off. But they have much bigger fish to fry turning oil and gas into every chemical concoction they can think of for fun and profit. There’s good money in it. It’s what they know. They have no interest in getting into the electricity business.

Thus, the people who know gasification have no interest in the power business and the people who know power have no interest (or qualifications) in owning and operating a complex chemical plant.

Gasify This! Gasification is the “G” in IGCC. Leaders in gasification include Shell, ConocoPhillips and more recently GE (which acquired its technology from Texaco). There are almost 20 major gasification plants in the U.S. and hundreds around the world. Gasification has been around for a 100+ years.

Gasification is about as far away from being a myth as you can get. But what is far less common is the deliberate integration of gasification with gas turbines to make electricity. This integration is the “I” in IGCC. Nevertheless, there are at least 15 IGCC plants operating around the world today with a combined capacity of roughly 4000 megawatts (most new conventional power plants today are 300-600 megawatts each). Two of these IGCC power plants exist in the U.S. – one in Florida owned and operated by Tampa Electric and the other located in Indiana owned and operated by a private independent. Both were built around the mid-90’s with significant federal support from the DOE’s clean coal technology development program. I’ve personally visited both plants. The one in Florida is Tampa Electric’s most profitable (lowest marginal cost) plant.  (If you want to dig deeper into the technology, gasification.org is good place to start.)

So if IGCC is synonymous with clean coal, and the “G” in IGCC is for real, and the “CC” in IGCC is for real, and there’s ample evidence that we can “I” them together, then how can “clean coal” be called a myth?

It Ain’t “Clean Coal” Til You Put It In A Hole! The “myth” argument is all about CO2. What makes a clean coal power plant a true “clean” coal plant is the capture and permanent storage of the CO2 that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere.  Such permanent geological storage of CO2 is referred to as “carbon sequestration”. To date, gasification is the only technology that lends itself to reasonably affordable capture of CO2. CO2 capture is a fully proven add-on to the gasification process. In the extreme, nearly all the carbon can be removed leaving almost 100% hydrogen gas to be burned in the gas turbines to make electricity. And the only byproduct of hydrogen combustion is water! The “captured” CO2 is compressed and injected underground into suitable geological formations thousands of feet in the ground where the CO2 is permanently “sequestered”.

This brings us to the bloodied front line of the clean coal war. Developers of new coal fired power plants are being effectively attacked. Opposition groups are stopping new coal plants because most utilities are not including carbon capture and sequestration in their designs. They haven’t because they haven’t had to, it raises costs substantially, and frankly there’s no cost effective way (yet!) to capture carbon from conventional coal plants.  Those bold enough to mush ahead with IGCC and sequestration are then bombarded with arguments claiming permanent underground storage of CO2 is unproven, dangerous, and too expensive. And indeed, electricity from such a plant would cost between 50-100% more than from a new conventional coal plant. But then again so would solar but that’s another story for another day. Not surprisingly, this sends utility commissioners running for the hills.

In retaliation, clean coal defenders fire back with the Dakota Gasification Plant in North Dakota. This plant gasifies coal into a synthetic natural gas, captures the CO2, and sequesters it in depleted oil fields to help squeeze out some additional oil production. Right behind Dakota comes Norway’s offshore CO2 injection at Sleipner where Statoil started injecting CO₂ in 1996. At Sleipner, geologic sequestration has proved to be an environmentally sound and financially prudent disposal option for CO₂. To which the renewables-only-brigade counter with cries of too small scale compared to the amount of CO2 we’d need to sequester, claims of insufficient proof, and the dropping of the “what if the CO2 escapes and kills us all” fear-bomb (CO2 is heavier than air and if released quickly in large quantity could blanket the ground and suffocate populations in low lying areas)? To be fair, each army in this war has large arsenals including numerous “weapons of mass deception” but more on that some other time.

I’ve had some exposure to sequestration and the geologists who specialize in this area. When asked why they think permanent sequestration of CO2 is technically viable the answer is quite simple and compelling. Did you ever wonder about all that oil and natural gas we’ve been drilling for and releasing/pumping up the past 100 years or so? No matter how it was formed way down there, certain geological formations are quite capable of keeping gas trapped deep underground for millions of years until we drill a hole to let it out. Why can’t we find similar geology, drill a hole and pump down CO2 so it stays put just like natural gas? In fact, we can. It gets better! Geologists also point out that over a few decades CO2 eventually solidifies into mineral deposits thus further mitigating concerns over the integrity of long term carbon sequestration.

Git ‘er done! Perhaps the most vexing of all facts staring back at clean coal advocates is, that despite all the arguments in favor of real clean coal power generation, no true clean coal power plant exists today. This vexing reality is why the Reality Coalition folks are doing the happy dance over their televised advertisement of the non-existent clean coal plant. This is where culture, politics, finance and the risk-adverse power utility industry come together in a Gordian knot that needs cutting.

A clean coal plant is big, expensive, complex and frankly a bit intimidating for the utility industry to take on alone without some protection. Only the federal government has a big enough knife to cut that knot. Some would argue that that is reason enough to run, not walk, away from clean coal as fast as we can into the arms of an all-solar-and-wind-all-the-time renewable energy world. The reason we haven’t yet is the all-renewables alternative is either as costly, if not more so, than clean coal plus we haven’t yet figured out how to keep the lights on when the wind stops or the sun goes down. I’m all for responsible clean energy of all types but I’m also a big fan of keeping the lights on. We have to be pragmatic about this. We’re going to need to lean on coal for at least another generation so let’s make it as clean as we can.

In the near term, the key impediment to clean coal is mostly political and not technical or financial. All the pieces needed to make a clean coal power plant a reality exist today except the political will to overcome any remaining obstacles. We are far better prepared to build clean coal plants today than we were putting men on the moon.  A comprehensive national clean energy program, including clean coal, is about real national security – economic, environmental and homeland. What we have here now is a failure to launch. Only this time it’s something far more urgent and necessary than sending a man to the moon.