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An important article came out in Nature magazine this week, in "The end of cheap coal" authors Richard Heinberg and David Fridley note that "new forecasts suggest that coal reserves will run out faster than many believe. Energy policies relying on cheap coal have no future." (Full article requires subscription; more coverage at Bloomberg.)
Here's the key summary from the article (emphasis mine):
World energy policy is gripped by a fallacy - the idea that coal is destined to stay cheap for decades to come. This assumption supports investment in 'clean-coal' technology and trumps serious efforts to increase energy conservation and develop alternative energy sources. It is an important enough assumption about our energy future that it demands closer examination.
There are two reasons to believe that coal prices are likely to soar in the years ahead. First, a spate of recent studies suggests that available, useful coal may be less abundant than has been assumed - indeed that the peak of world coal production may be only years away. One pessimistic study published in 2010 concluded that global energy derived from coal could peak as early as 2011.
Second, global demand is growing rapidly, largely driven by China. Demand rose modestly in the 1990s (0.45% per year), but since 2000 it has been surging at 3.8% per year. China is both the world's biggest producer of coal (40% of global production) and its biggest consumer. Its influence on future coal prices should not be underestimated.
Economic shocks from rising coal prices will be felt by every sector of society. Better data on global coal supplies is long overdue and energy policies that assume a bottomless coal pit need rethinking urgently.
An article appeared in my local paper this morning that made me feel sorry for SMC for the first time that I can remember. It was short-lived though. What first passes for bravery doesn't pass the smell test on the second glance. She will be the token denier of the congressional delegation and her reception will not be good. She may have trouble getting around town and Nancy will be trying to get her uninvited to the various functions after the first one goes badly. I'm embarrassed that she is my representative in congress. Feel free to add your comments to this article.
Don't get me wrong. Senator Byrd's statement has the ring of truth, and I do believe that he truly cares about West Virginia. But the real truth behind his above statement that "Major coal-fired power plants and coal operators operating in West Virginia have wisely already embraced this reality" is at the link he provided:
The Mountaineer plant emits about 9 million tons of CO2 a year. The project will capture more than 100,000 tons of CO2 a year, or about 1.5 percent of the plant's total.
I had to read it twice to make sure I that got it. They're only capturing a lousy 1.5 percent. At that rate I'd have been too embarrassed to even mentioned it, because the same article also reveals
The company has applied for more than $300 million in federal stimulus funds to install a commercial-scale carbon dioxide capture and storage system. The total cost is estimated at more than $600 million.
In other words, they got Senator Byrd to brag about their little shill operation. Notice that in the same article AEP President Morris salivates over landing future juicy rate increases. Has the last six months with coal-financed "Democrats" really got Senator Byrd taking the bait? Because the rest of us have long been bleeding from the hook and gagging on the line. Don't be surprised when more and more real Democrats start spitting the sinker right back at those coal fired cadre of "Democrats".
What I'm getting at here is that spending stimulus money for coal-fired projects does absolutely nothing to mitigate the pollution right here where coal is being mined, puts only a few West Virginians to work during a brief construction phase, and gobbles up stimulus money which could be better spent at other far more productive "green" projects.
So the question at this point would be, why is a cadre of "coal state Democrats" spending so much of my favorite Senator's precious time helping coal operators become even more of a corporate welfare dynasty than it already is?
"Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Indiana and, at No. 50, West Virginia. All suffer from a mix of toxic waste, lots of pollution and consumption and no clear plans to do anything about it. Expect them to remain that way."
Hmm. That was back in '07. What have our coalfield Democrats done to change that problem? Or perhaps they don't see it as a problem. many of us do..
Just today President Obama hosted a national jobs forum. Vice President Biden recently said "Recovery Through Retrofit is a blueprint that will create good green jobs - jobs that can't be outsourced, and jobs that will be the cornerstones of a 21st-Century economy."
Senator Byrd obviously understands that coal operators and coal-fired power plants will never voluntarily help West Virginia move towards energy independence. Simply because it is against their corporate interest to do so. Instead, they're compelled by their nature to see to it that nothing will replace coal. So they will always lobby to gobble up all of the state and federal subsidies, while playing like they're earnest in helping to develop a replacement.
It goes without saying that large corporations will always make as much money as possible, and they'll always try to do it as efficiently as they can. Since their biggest obstacle lies in leveraging political leaders to mitigate environmental regulations, and judicial leaders to ignore laws, no sense of civic duty ever completely halts the corporate machine's never ending grind towards capital. But it is up to our justice system, our regulators, and our political leaders to keep them from killing people. Which is exactly what they're doing, make no mistake.
So I applaud Senator Byrd's effort to give public notice that we should all demand truth and justice from our system.
He's lived here long enough to have witnessed West Virginia slide from a rich, diversified economy with a broad manufacturing base towards what essentially looks more and more like a mono-economy. During that same period, West Virginia's political system has devolved from what was basically a plutocracy into a well-greased dystopian coalocracy.
For example, prior to the last election, the coal industry spent $35 million in a campaign outreach effort in primary and caucus states to rally public support for coal-fired electricity. On top of that, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity lobbyists spent a whoppin' $10,465,276. source.
Now, suddenly, my Senator informs me that he just spent six months listening to coal state Democrats tell him that the only way to "progress" is to go backwards. So forgive me if I'm skeptical about anything any member of either party tries to sell when it comes to justifying the giveaway of millions to help the coal industry continue to poison my water, screw up my roads, and underfund my kid's education.
Senator Byrd didn't have to be a "treehugger" to have noticed the dire cost of coal pollution here. But he stopped shot of mentioning that cleaning up the hundreds of toxic coal slurry impoundments strewn across WV offers great potential for shovel-ready jobs. Yett it's pretty obvious what's going on when none of the coal-fired "Democrats" ever publicly mentions how "green" it is to retrofit the infrastructures of each of their communities by using stimulus funds for remediation.
Now I don't mind that stimulus funds are now being used to supply water to coalfield communities whose aquifer has been poisoned by coal industry, although it is sort of suspicious when the Governor's website hides it. No, my tax dollars are fine helping those folks out, even though it was Manchin's DEP that let Massey get by with killing their aquifer in the first place. But it gets pretty hard to swallow that Federal Coal, one of three companies responsible for screwing up Boone County's well water, is now blocking the right-of-way for that water project. Could that be an attempt to stall whilst forcing a settlement in the ongoing lawsuit. Yet apparently one coal-state Democrat in particular (Governor Joe Manhin) in particular isn't willing to persuade the coal slurry impoundment operator that what Federal Coal operates qualifies as a fullout toxic dump site.
Speaking of infrastructure, according to the WV Department of Commerce, WV exports more (coal fired) electricity than any other state. Why isn't the state rolling in cash? Why have we cut back on state highway workers? Why are our coalpatch public school districts always those seized by the state -due to lack of funding? Before you ask what does education have to do with the coal industry being unwilling to embrace the future, you need to understand that far too many of our political leaders mistakenly believe that coal is our most precious natural resource otherwise West Virginia wouldn't be ranked dead last in educational services for our students.
It's bad enough that the coal industry is forever morphing the meaning of "clean coal." (One hundred years ago, "clean coal" merely meant coal that burned with less smoke.) It's even worse when a public official catapults the propaganda.
Manchin was in Germany last week talking coal. He got to tour a state of the art coal burning facility.
"I saw some things, as far as the Oxyfuel plant. It's the only one working in the world, 30-megawatt of a coal-fired plant that you could eat off the floor. You could eat off everything around it. It's unbelievable."
The Oxyfuel plant is the first CO2 free operation of its kind. It emits no greenhouse gases. It burns coal into pure oxygen while the CO2 is turned into a flue gas, collected and sequestered.
I'd like Gov. Manchin to explain how many dead fish from Dunkard Creek we could eat off the floor of that clean room in a Oxyfuel plant in Germany. (I'd also like him to tell me where all the dirty coal ash from that plant goes, too.)
Deceit and Lies
Just because one small part of the coal extraction and consumption process is made a bit cleaner, that does nothing to undo all the damage done by the rest of the process.
Right now, Manchin says the EPA and the Obama Administration are dead set on a cap and trade bill that leaves no room for innovative clean coal technology.
Either Gov. Manchin was gravely misquoted or he is out-and-out lying.
Talk with Rep. Boucher. Talk to Sen. Byrd. The "cap and trade bill" passed by the House and the bill under consideration by the Senate provide massive subsidies for "innovative clean coal technology."
Problems and Solutions
Next, Gov. Manchin is directly quoted:
"All I ask this federal government to do is try to help us find the solutions. Don't continue to create problems.
Gov. Manchin, don't insult West Virginians. The EPA does not create problems. The EPA discovers them when they are sitting around waiting to be found.
To have any credibility in asking for hand outs for "innovative clean coal technology" support, it would really help to be an honest broker about existing climate change legislation. Even more so, it would help to demonstrate a commitment to existing environmental laws.
Why should anyone trust the coal industry and state regulators to be partners in the development and implementation of risky complex technology like carbon capture and storage when they can't even get today's simple technology right?
Gov. Manchin, you need to show that West Virginia is serious about recognizing the importance of existing regulations before asking Congress to develop the new regulatory framework for carbon storage.
Blaming the EPA for doing its job is an insult to West Virginians who can no longer draw safe drinking water from their wells. Blaming the EPA is an insult to West Virginians who can no longer find fish in the nearest stream.
The EPA is part of the solution here. It's a novel and refreshing idea, really, to see a government regulatory agency that is interested in doing the job it is required by law to do.
American Electric Power thinks so. They have asked the Federal government for stimulus funds to help them buy the additional coal they need to burn once they start carbon capture and storage (CCS) in September at Mountainer Power Plant in New Haven, W.Va.
Unless AEP pledges to buy coal only from companies who mine underground, those Federal stimulus dollars will be going to perpetuate mountain top removal.
Back in April 2008, I wrote one of my first long diaries debunking clean coal myths: How Toxic is Clean Coal? A key point I wanted to get across then is "clean coal" technology only addresses problems with green house gases. It doesn't do anything to make all the other toxins in coal disappear. It concentrates them, making them potentially easier to responsibly treat or store. "Clean coal" technology only deals with one small part of the coal extraction, transport, and energy production process.
This month, a new study came out showing there's another reason why "clean coal" technology is anything but. We've always known it requires a whole more lot of energy as input to generate the same amount of energy as conventional coal technology. (The technical term for this is energy returned on energy invested: EROEI.) This new study is one of the first to quantify the impact of that additional energy production and consumption.
How clean is the energy required to generate "clean coal"?
Unfortunately, the energy required to generate coal-to-liquid fuels and then capture green house gases and then sequester the green house gases, creates a whole new set of problems.
Patrick Berry has the details in Science News:
As pollution bad guys go, carbon dioxide may be the media darling, but trying to capture it and lock it away could allow other repeat offenders to go free.
Power plant emissions that cause acid rain, water pollution and destruction of the ozone layer may actually be made worse by capturing the CO2 and pumping it deep underground, a new study reported online and in an upcoming International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control suggests.
This increase of other emissions is largely because collecting and burying CO2 - a process called carbon sequestration - requires additional energy, new equipment and new chemical reactions at the plants. And using current technology, meeting all of these requirements releases extra pollutants.
"Other studies mostly just look at one aspect, the carbon capture," says study coauthor Joris Koornneef, an environmental scientist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. "This is a first step in trying to quantify the [environmental] trade-offs."
Major infrastructure requirements are necessary to change this trade-off:
If the mining, transportation and other supporting technologies become greener in the future, the pollution penalty for carbon sequestration would be reduced, the researchers note.
Of course, those infrastructure investments further reduce the cost-effectiveness of "clean coal" compared to alternative fuels.
But the presentation by Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute struck me as really little more than a pep talk, urging coal industry officials to continue to deny that global warming is real and keep fighting any effort at all to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
"This is about a lot more than defending your industry and your state," Ebell told a couple dozen coal operators, utility representatives and other industry officials. "This is about the future of the American economy. You're fighting for every American here."
The coal folks, of course, ate this up. It's exactly what they want to hear. This is what they tell themselves. This is what they want the rest of us to believe.
But that's not all that Ebell said that the coal folks loved... he also made it clear that there's one other key point that the forces fighting any action on climate change rely on: Their insistence that the very notion that human pollution is heating up the planet is, as he put it, "a speculative theory that appears to have very little evidence in fact."
So what's Ebell got to back this up? Well, not very much, apparently. He said he has a more detailed presentation on "the science," but didn't bring it with him because he only wanted to spend "about two minutes" on that part of his talk.
Basically, Ebell stuck to one piece of information he said supports his view: That average global temperatures have not gone up since 1997, when the Kyoto treaty was negotiated. Specifically, he said:
It was no warmer in 2008 than it was in 1997.
OK ... can't we be done with this kind of cherry-picking of data? I mean come on. This is all too important for that.
We're all in big trouble if the science used to build coal mines and coal ash impoundments is on as shaky ground as their understanding of global climate change.
It's not a ringing endorsement for putting billions of dollars into any kind of research and development (like carbon capture and sequestration) to benefit such an anti-science crowd. This is one more argument to invest money in more promising alternative energy options--the coal industry should not be rewarded for behavior like this.
If they can't agree with an overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, how will they ever responsibly run the operations required to monitor the storage of captured carbon safely for decades (or centuries)?
Until they get past the self-delusion, these new technologies may be just beyond their intellectual capacity.
Bad news for clean coal advocates today. A new study from Harvard projects that carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) will be just as expensive as alternative energy sources.
Even worse, that's the cost projection for CCS 20 years from now. Until then, if your utility bets on CCS instead of alternative energy, you'll be paying even higher electricity bills. (Someone has to pay for those new coal burning plants that can capture CO2.)
One of the reasons for inaction on addressing global climate change is the hope that technological developments will somehow save the day. More optimistically, a big reason for setting up carbon cap-and-trade is to create market incentives for such technological developments.
Craig Venter, the controversial American scientist who helped decode the human genome, has announced the discovery of ancient bacteria that can turn coal into methane...
[snip]
Venter even suggested the discovery could open up the world's coalfields to an entirely new form of mining, where coal is infected with the bacteria, allowing methane to be harvested "without even digging up the coal".
[snip]
He added: "We and BP think we can scale this up substantially to provide a huge increase in the amount of natural gas available without even digging up the coal."
Such ideas need to be treated with caution. The biotech industry is renowned for making claims that later turn out to have been excessive. This is often driven by the need to attract investors.
Venter does have a good track record, as shown by his lead role in the race to decode the human genome, but his discovery would need far more research and investment before it could be deployed on an industrial scale.
If this discovery could be scaled up to an industrial scale it would replace the very expensive (and unproven) carbon-capture and sequestration technology. It would also allow for mining of coal that is currently inaccessible, though probably employing far fewer miners.
Still, it would provide no relief to our dependence on fossil fuels for the transportation sector. And, it would merely postpone the inevitable day we run out of stored carbon energy (coal).
West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin was recently one of the headline speakers at the 2009 World Coal to Liquids Conference last week; he was joined by Wyoming Gov. Fruedenthal. In the March Coal to Liquid Fuels Update (rec'd via email), they report on these speeches:
West Virginia, Wyoming governors tout domestic fuels at world CTL conference
Leading coal, energy and project developers from around the world gathered in Washington, D.C, this month for the World CTL 2009 Conference.
The conference, held March 25-27, explored the latest developments in coal-to-liquid (CTL) fuel technology, including new environmental improvement techniques and the status of CTL plant construction around the world.
West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin (D) and Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal (D) headlined the distinguished roster of public and private sector representatives who spoke at the conference.
Manchin opened the conference by telling delegates that he had recently met with senior White House and Obama Administration staff to discuss a number of key coal issues, including stressing how domestic CTL fuels can boost U.S. energy security.
Noting that the U.S. is home to a quarter of the world's coal reserves, Manchin highlighted the energy security and economic benefits of coal-based transportation fuels, adding that "turning our back on coal would be catastrophic."
Manchin also stressed that new technologies are coming online that can further improve the environmental performance of CTL plants and fuels.
Fruedenthal, in a March 26 luncheon address, also touted the environmental benefits of CTL fuels, noting that such fuels can emit far less carbon dioxide than the imported fuels they would replace.
In addition, Freudenthal also detailed efforts his state has undertaken to implement ground-breaking rules regulating the underground storage of carbon dioxide.
Not part of his formal comments--but still part of his overall message to the CTL conference--there's also Gov. Manchin's biography provided for World CTL conference attendees. In part, it reads:
Governor Manchin has set the year 2030 as the state's goal for independence from foreign energy sources. He is helping to steer the state in that direction, encouraging the expansion of new technology to make better use of the state's massive coal reserves. He also is an advocate for conservation, and for harnessing the state's other energy resources, including natural gas and the renewable sources of wind, solar, hydro and biomass.
In late-2007, Gov. Manchin traveled to China to explore that country's growing coal-related industries and to learn more about coal-to-liquids development in Asia. The governor is committed to seeing modern CTL technology developed in his home state.
Background
Coal to liquid (CTL) is the most prominent "clean coal" technology under development. Wikipedia offers a good summary of CTL technology. It ends thus:
All of these liquid fuel production methods release carbon dioxide (CO2) in the conversion process, far more than is released in the extraction and refinement of liquid fuel production from petroleum. If these methods were adopted to replace declining petroleum supplies, carbon dioxide emissions would be greatly increased on a global scale.
For future liquefaction projects, Carbon dioxide sequestration is proposed to avoid releasing it into the atmosphere, though no pilot projects have confirmed the feasibility of this approach on a wide scale. As CO2 is one of the process streams, sequestration is easier than from flue gases produced in combustion of coal with air, where CO2 is diluted by nitrogen and other gases.
Sequestration will, however, add to the cost.
The FutureGen project canceled by the Bush administration was a high-profile DOE funded project testing both CTL and CCS technologies. While in Congress, Obama had been a strong proponent of CTL fuels, including serving as the Democratic leader of the Senate CTL Fuel Caucus.
***Tonight, January 20th 6:00 PM at the DEP Headquarters at 601 57th Street In Kanawha City, WV***
Sorry for the late notice. The DEP will be holding an informal hearing on the Mason County Underground Injection Control (UIC) Permit that would allow AEP to inject up to 165000 Metric Tons of Carbon Dioxide (that's around 1% of the plant's CO2 output) underground on the West Virginia - Ohio Border.
As you know, this is a bad idea for so many reasons, ranging from the uncertainty of where and how the Carbon Dioxide will migrate over the tens of thousands of years it will remain mobile to the 30% - 40% increase in energy required per plant to sequester all of its Carbon Dioxide leading to more mining and everything that goes along with it.
So come out and tell the DEP that we want clean renewable energy and not this distraction that will never make a meaningful contribution to fighting Global Climate Change. CCS is taking valuable time and money away from research and implementation of energy efficiency and renewable energy programs.
If you are concerned about the wisdom, safety, or efficacy of carbon capture and sequestration technology, here is your chance to learn more and share your concerns with the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection.
As coal industry commentator and author Jeff Goodell puts it best:
"Clean coal" is not an actual invention, a physical thing - it is an advertising slogan. Like "fat-free donuts" or "interest-free loans."
In other words, coal remains more in the realm of illusion than reality and the UCS report highlights the major outstanding questions around the holy grail of the coal industry - carbon capture and storage technology (CCS).
The report found that carbon-capture-and-storage technology, while promising, is saddled with many unanswered questions about scale, safety and cost:
Click-through to the post for more details and a link to the report.
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