Read Present at the Future Online
Authors: Ira Flatow
“Those power plants will have zero emissions. They will not emit any of the pollution that we’re looking at today: sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, even mercury. Also, because we’re concerned about global climate change and reducing the carbon intensity of the energy sector both here in the United States and around the world, that will be possible as we capture CO
2
for permanent storage in underground aquifers. And these power plants will also produce hydrogen as a byproduct. And that hydrogen can be used to fuel automobiles. So I’m very optimistic about the future of coal and where technology allows us to go with that.”
Not so fast, literally, says Jeff Goodell, author of Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America’s Energy Future. “The coal industry is very good at touting new technology and less good at actually doing anything about it. There is new technology that’s available now, called IGCC, integrated gasification combined cycle, a kind of a gasification of coal. But the industry has resisted building these plants. They prefer to tout these plants that are ten or twenty years down the road and continue building the same old thing.
“The fact is that carbon dioxide from coal plants has gone up about twenty-seven percent since 1990, and they’re continuing to go up. And global warming is an increasing, very urgent problem. We need to cut emissions, most scientists agree, by fifty percent or more by the year 2050. And the coal industry is going in exactly the op
posite direction. The only way that you can think about coal as clean is in just a very narrow way of thinking about it. The fact is that coal can only be considered clean by the narrowest of definitions. It’s true that the levels of air pollution of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide that Joe mentioned have fallen. But one of the things he doesn’t mention is that the coal industry fought tooth and nail against all of those laws that required those reductions during the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s, spent millions of dollars lobbying against them.”
As for the greenhouse gas CO
2
emitted by burning coal, what about sequestration? Pumping CO
2
underground, storing where it cannot get back into the atmosphere?
Goodell certainly agrees that “sequestration will certainly work. It’s working now, and they’re doing it in many places in the oil industry. They pump CO
2
down underground into oil fields to help push the oil out. There’s no question that we can build coal plants that can sequester CO
2
underground. The question is, first of all, how soon we will do it. The second question is, its capacity is quite limited. It works in certain places, in certain geologic areas where the structure of the geology underground is just right. For example, it
worked great in Montana or Wyoming, but it’s not going to work at all in the southeast.”
Another, problem, says Goodell, is a cultural one. “We haven’t even begun, as a society, to think about [this]: Do we want to embark on this huge campaign to bury millions and millions of tons of CO
2
underground, all over Americă The biggest sequestration field right now is in Canada. And it will, after twenty-five years of use, sequester about twenty-five million tons of CO
2
, which sounds like a lot, but a coal plant in Georgia emits that much in one year.
“So do we want to be living above these giant bubbles of CO
2
? CO
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is an asphyxiate. A natural bubble of CO
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was released from a lake in Africa in 1987 and asphyxiated seventeen hundred people. Do we want to be living above this? We haven’t even begun to think about it yet.”
“I disagree,” says Lucas. “We’re in cooperation with the federal government, in several states. There are these sequestration partnerships that are being funded by Congress, being enacted through the Department of Energy, where lots of communities, lots of stakeholders are out right now studying the various applications of where you can store this, what it will mean to do this long term. I think we are very much addressing what the possibilities are of this for the future, as we go forward. It is clearly something a lot of progress is being made right now on this very issue.”
As for the delay in building those new IGCC power plants, Lucas points out that three of them were built, one in Indiana, one in Florida, and one in Nevada. But a design defect in the Reno plant and “deregulation” of the power industry is “sort of the reason why more IGCCs were not built.”
ENERGY AND POLITICS
You might think that technology is a black-and-white issue: Either you have the technology to create a new generation of coal-fired power plants or you don’t. If not, you need more time to develop it.
That’s hardly ever the case when you’re talking energy. Energy is so entwined with politics that it’s impossible to talk about one without considering the other. (Think about those secret meetings Vice President Dick Cheney convened with the major energy companies, the minutes of which the White House refuses to release. Just read the Department of Energy Web site, which says the FutureGen project “will be led by an industrial consortium representing the coal and power industries.”)
For example, when you ask Lucas whether we need to create any new technologies to create this pollution-free, coal-fired FutureGen power plant, he says, “Basically we have them.” But when you press and ask him, “Why, if the technology exists to build such plants, is the industry waiting ten years for a demonstration project?” he points to the typical engineering problems in scaling up a technology, from a small testing phase to the size where it can be employed. “You’re making a bunch of technologies that have not worked together have to work together for the first time. Since this is a first-of-its-kind project, first-of-its-kind technology, first-of-its-scale technology, let’s say they build it and it doesn’t work. Do you think the utility is going to take that $100 billion loss itself?
“The other thing is—and I don’t think people realize this—just the siting of a power plant takes sometimes five to six years. And so from that standpoint once that site selection takes place, it will take several years to get all of the permitting authorities that are necessary to move forward with that plant and then begin construction of that plant.”
Goodell says he has heard all of this before. “It’s the same story over and over. It’s always, ‘Oh, if we can just do a little more research, if we can just get a few more grants, if you can just give us a few more hundred million dollars, we’ll figure this out.’ It is not a technological problem. It is a political problem. It is a political problem because it is not a level playing field. The coal industry is one of
the most—if not the most—politically powerful industries in the United States.”
The energy industry explains delays as “uncertainty.” Energy critics call it “stalling.” “This kind of redirect is exactly what happens whenever there is any issue,” counters Goodell. “It was the same talk in the ’70s. We can’t clean it up. It’s too hard. It’s too expensive. The stuff’s not ready yet. And then they pass laws and it becomes ready and they do it far cheaper than before. It was the same debate with mercury (pollution). We can’t do it. It’s too hard. Stuff’s not ready. You know, if we passed a law, they would do it.
“It’s the same thing with IGCC. Gasification is widely deployed around the world. There have been a number of IGCC plants that are up and running all around the world. Two years ago, POWER Magazine, the sort of Vanity Fair of the power industry, said, ‘Coal Gasification: Ready for Prime Time.’ I mean, this is just a strategy well known in the industry called ‘delay and fail.’ They just want to keep doing the same thing.”
COAL AND CAPS?
No one doubts the political power of the coal industry. Goodell points out that presidential candidate George W. Bush pledged to place mandatory limits on CO
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emissions. But once elected president, Bush changed his mind, Goodell says, under pressure from coal company lobbyists.
“This is really the big, scary thing for the coal industry. Because mandatory carbon dioxide limits are going to happen. And that’s going to change the price of electricity from coal plants and make them much less competitive, because coal is by far the most carbon dioxide–intensive fossil fuel. Why so many of these plants are rushing to be built is to get them permitted and going before these regulations happen so they can be grandfathered in and produce cheap power and big profits for these companies for years to come.”
“If Jeff is right that we are going to have mandatory carbon restrictions here in this country, that’s truly unfortunate,” says Lucas. “Because we know two things about mandatory carbon emission standards. They’re hugely expensive and they’re ineffective. They’re hugely expensive in that it will cost the United States economy hundreds of billions of dollars.” As for being ineffective, Lucas sounds the same criticism voiced against America signing the Kyoto Protocol: If large, rapidly growing countries such as China and India do little to curb their own greenhouse gas emissions, why should the United States curb its own?
“These are places which have huge indigenous reserves of coal, must bring the power of electricity to their economy and to their people, and they’re going to use that coal either with advanced technologies or without advanced technologies,” says Lucas. “And that’s why I’m saying [that] if you want to address the issue of climate change, you’re actually bailing out a bathtub with a thimble with the water still running full blast.”
“Let me say two things about that,” counters Goodell. “First of all, I have eight-year-old twins, and when one of them makes a big mess in their bedroom, we have a simple rule. You make the mess, you clean it up. In a certain way, that’s what’s going on in the atmosphere here. The reason that the global warming, the carbon dioxide levels are so high is because of the industrialized West. So we, first of all, have a moral obligation just for having made this mess and caused this problem, to deal with it.
“Second of all, one of the best ways to help China—and I’ve been to China a number of times—move away from coal is for ourselves” to make the first moves. “We are the entrepreneurial power of the world. We are the innovators. We’re the people who can solve this problem. And if we adopt new technologies, clean-energy technologies, they will adopt them in China also. The quickest way to drive improved technology there is for us to do it here.
“And you know what? People are figuring this out. There was $1.4 billion spent on venture capital into clean technology. We have venture capitalists who say that the economic opportunities in clean technology, clean energy, figuring out new ways to generate power are going to make the kind of prosperity in Silicon Valley in the ’90s look like a bake sale.”
Texas, Kansas and North Dakota together could generate enough electricity by wind to power the entire United States.
—U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
With all the talk about energy independence and global warming, the high cost of building nuclear power plants, and the problems of storing the greenhouse gas CO
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so it doesn’t leak back into the atmosphere (see, I told you it would make your hair hurt), there is, after all is said and done, a way to create all the energy we would ever need, cleanly and efficiently.
That way, that solution, is to change our society, change our economy, into one that depends on the wind and the sun to produce much of our energy. We’ve touched on it briefly in the other sections on producing ethanol or installing wind turbines. But all of those solutions foresaw the sun and the wind not as primary sources of electric power but rather as add-ons, adjuncts to nuclear or coal or ethanol. There are some people studying our energy problems who
view wind and solar power as the solution. But it is a solution that would require staunch political leadership and many years of development.
WIND: GETTING OUT OF DODGE
Kermit Froetschner is a farmer in Spearville, Kansas, twenty miles from Dodge City. Froetschner has 16 spinning wind turbines on his farm north of town, producing such a spectacular view that it stops traffic. But what interests farmers and local residents more is that over the next 30 years, the local electrical utility, Kansas City Power & Light, will pay the county and the farmers almost $10 million for the use of their land. So while Froetschner pumps out electricity, the utility pumps much-needed hard currency back into the economy.
As for which would please him more, grain farming or wind farming? “I’ll take the turbines,” says Froetschner. His wind turbines are just a few of the 67 turbines that make up the Spearville Wind Energy Facility, a 100.5-megawatt wind energy–generating grid that went online in late 2006. The turbines generate enough electricity to power 33,000 homes, and the facility isn’t even the largest system in the state. “It’s a good supplement to keep the farm,” he says proudly.
Kansas is not alone. States all across the country are discovering
the power and profit of the wind, says Matt Steuerwalt, energy policy advisor to Governor Christine Gregoire of the state of Washington. “We’re seeing a lot of the same thing that Kermit is describing for our farmers. We’ve got folks out in eastern Washington who are growing wheat right under the towers. It’s a second cash crop for them.”
While their crops grow and cattle graze among towering windmills, the typical farmer can expect to receive $2,000 to $5,000 per turbine per year in leasing fees. Virtually every farm in America (94 percent) depends on outside income to survive. When you take into account that a typical lease could last 25 years, no wonder farmers are waiting in line to sign up. There’s even a Web site for a nonprofit group called Windustry touting its slogan to farmers and other landowners: “…learn how to harvest the wind.”