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About the film: DIRTY BUSINESS: "Clean Coal" and the Battle for Our Energy Future is a 90-minute documentary produced by the Center for Investigative Reporting that investigates the true cost of our dependence on coal for electricity in the age of climate change. It is the first major public media project to explain and demystify "clean coal" and to explore the extent to which increased energy efficiency and renewable energy sources such as wind and solar thermal power might make "clean coal" unnecessary and uneconomical. America burns more than a billion tons of coal a year-and coal-fired power plants are the single greatest source of the greenhouse gases. From West Virginia to China, the film reveals the true social and environmental costs of coal power and tells the stories of innovators pointing the way to an alternative energy future.
The film was written, produced and directed by Peter Bull and co-produced by Justin Weinstein, the team that produced the PBS FRONTLINE and CIR co-production, Hot Politics, about the politics of global warming. The narrator and editorial consultant on Dirty Business is Jeff Goodell, author of Big Coal, the Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future and contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine (his latest article there being the one on Massey CEO Don Blankenship that some speculate helped lead to his resignation). Alex Gibney, producer/director of the 2008 Academy Award winning documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side, is consulting producer on DIRTY BUSINESS.
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.
It's a rhetorical question. Of course he doesn't. At least not the real Pope.
Now let's ask a real question of our rhetorical Pope (depicted above). Did Rockefeller really believe that his "public option" had even half a chance? Really?
Jay certainly acted all holier-than-thou when he tore apart Dr. Howard Dean for criticizing the Senate bill the other day. Funny, but I never heard Rockefeller get fired up like that during entire time congressional Neocons were staving off the much-needed intelligence oversight of the Bush administration by Rockefeller's panel. Even when Cheney tried foisting the responsibility for torture over onto Congress, Rockefeller never got as upset as he did at Howard Dean.
There's got to be some reason for his outburst. Rockefeller certainly didn't get torqued when Obama abandoned his public option amendment. There is always the strong possibility that Rockefeller's bargaining away of real reforms for giant giveaways to the insurance industry may be connected to how the health industry stocks jumped as an immediate reaction to what his Senate Finance Committee passed. Check it out at this link.
Clem made an excellent economic argument against clean coal. But it does make me wonder: where are the fiscal conservatives?
Once upon a time you had conservatives who cared about financial issues. I mean really cared about them as opposed to those "conservatives" who cheered on George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's budget busting record deficits and then immediately jeered Barack Obama for not immediately balancing the budget after inheriting two wars and the worst economy since the Great Depression.
The support among Republicans for a massive govement subsidy for coal is proof they are not principled on conservative issues. Just as GOP Party chairman Doug McKinney and Shelley Moore Capito and other Republicans are willing to throw the social conservatives under the bus for electoral reasons, why are they not taking a stand against clean coal on fiscal conservative reasons?
They are willing to spend billions on government subsidies on an unproven technology for coal, when we are running out of the amount of coal that makes economic sense to mine. So much for believing in free market principles.
I posted a version of this diary at DailyKos on Saturday morning. Thank you to everyone who engaged in a constructive dialogue on the topic there and on Facebook over the weekend.
If you're not really sure what "Clean Coal" is, that's easily forgiven. Clean Coal has meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Many decades ago, one enterprising company sold "clean coal" that burned with less smoke in your home heating furnace. Today, the term usually refers to carbon capture and storage (CCS) or coal-to-liquid fuel (CTL).
The Obama administration and leading figures in Congress are still pushing for tens of billions of dollars of investments in "cleaner coal." With a pause in consideration on the energy and climate change legislation, it's a good time to ask... just what we would we get in return for that investment?
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For those who like to cut to the chase, here's the short answer. Carbon capture and storage is risky and expensive. Coal to liquid only makes sense if you ignore carbon emissions or if expect we'll lose access to foreign sources of oil. But, read on. There's another major challenge you probably aren't aware of.
Sadly, although it might make little economic or scientific sense, the political logic behind clean coal is overwhelming. Coal is mined in some politically potent states-Illinois, Montana, West Virginia, Wyoming-and the coal industry spends millions on lobbying. The end result of the debate is all too likely to resemble Congress's corn-based ethanol mandates: legislation that employs appealing buzzwords to justify subsidies to a politically favored constituency-while actually worsening the problem it seeks to solve.
The Meigs piece is good at laying out the basics of carbon capture and storage, but an even more detailed look at the economics is provided by Richard Heinberg, writing for the Solutions Journal. (All emphasis in quotes is mine.)
The "clean coal" argument runs like this: America is brimming with cheap coal, which provides almost half our electricity and is the most carbon-intensive of the conventional fossil fuels. The nation will need an enormous amount of energy over the next few decades, but renewable sources just aren't ready to provide all-or even the bulk-of that energy. Meanwhile, preventing catastrophic climate change requires that we stop venting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It is possible to capture and store the CO2 that would otherwise be emitted from burning coal, and elements of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology are already in use on a small scale. Put all of these factors together and the case for government funding of research and development of "clean coal" seems strong.
However, several recent studies of US coal supplies suggest that much that we think we know about coal is wrong. If these studies are correct, the argument for investing in "clean coal" becomes tenuous on economic grounds alone. These studies call into question the one "fact" that both pro-coal and anti-coal lobbies have taken for granted: that the US has a virtually limitless supply of cheap coal.
Back in April, Democrat Rep. Nick Rahall (WV-03), spoke to this unpleasant truth. He noted "the state's most productive coal seams likely will be exhausted in 20 years." The backlash from in-state coal interests was strong. Rahall has not spoken about coal supplies since, and for that brief moment of truth his consequence is a coal-industry funded primary challenger.
What would it take for Rep. Rahall to say something like this? Back to the Heinberg piece for the answer...
Doubts were first raised in a book-length 2007 report by the National Academy of Sciences titled "Coal: Research and Development to Support National Energy Policy" (1), which noted that "Present estimates of coal reserves are based upon methods that have not been reviewed or revised since - 1974," and concluded that a newer and better assessment "may substantially reduce the number of years' supply."
Also in 2007, an energy analytics organization founded by a member of the German Parliament, Energy Watch Group (2), released a study of US and world coal supplies concluding that global coal production will reach a peak and begin to decline sometime around 2025, and that US coal production will peak only slightly later-perhaps by 2030 or 2035.
Last December the USGS issued a report (3) on the nation's largest and most productive coalfield, in Wyoming, finding that, at current prices, only about six percent of the coal can be profitably mined; if coal prices soared, then more of the coal would be recoverable-but then coal wouldn't be economically competitive with other energy sources.
But I keep hearing we have hundreds of years of coal left in the United States. That has to be correct doesn't it?
America's coal resources are indeed vast-none of the studies claims otherwise. However, during the past century, coal reserves (the portion of total coal resources that can be mined profitably with existing technologies) shrank much faster than could be accounted for by the depletion of those resources through mining. That is because geologists are doing a better job now of taking into account "restrictions" that make most coal impractical to mine-factors having to do with location, depth, seam thickness, and coal quality. In recent years, some nations have reduced their booked coal reserves by 90 percent or more on the basis of new, more realistic surveys. The National Academy of Sciences report mentioned above is essentially a plea for an updated US national survey, and it offers abundant reasons for thinking that such a survey would almost certainly reveal a much smaller reserve base than the one on which current supply forecasts are founded.
Moreover, when it comes to forecasting future coal supplies the official agencies seem to have been asking the wrong question, namely, "When will the nation run out of coal?" The customary answer is, "Not for a couple of hundred years or more"-which is a sufficiently long period for current energy planning. But more relevant questions are, "When will it no longer be possible to increase the rate at which coal is being extracted?", and "When will coal cease to be an economically competitive energy source?" These are addressed in the Energy Watch Group study, which reasons that, long before the nation runs out of coal, production will peak and start to decline due to the depletion of easily accessible, high-quality deposits. Already some of America's most important coal regions are long past their glory days, and recent field surveys by the USGS (including the one cited above) suggest that the capacities of even the most abundant coalfields in the nation have been over-estimated.
So what? As long as we've got coal to mine, shouldn't we try to burn it as cleanly as possible?
A 2007 MIT study, "The Future of Coal" (4), found that if just 60 percent of the CO2 from US coal-fired power plants were to be captured and compressed to a liquid, its daily volume would equal the amount of oil Americans consume each day (about 20 million barrels). The study also concluded that a huge increase in investment in industrial-scale demonstration plants would be required now even to know in 10 or 15 years if the technology can work at a meaningful scale. All of this underscores the basic fact that carbon capture and storage is going to be very expensive-if it is even possible to accomplish on the scale that is being proposed.
Yet there is a subtler but possibly even more decisive price tag for "clean coal": the energy cost. According to the most recent estimate (from Harvard University's Belfer Center (5), at least 30 percent of the energy produced by burning coal will be needed to run the system for capturing, compressing, pumping, and burying CO2. Therefore any efficiency benefit from gasifying coal at IGCC power plants would be canceled out.
But already the average quality of coal being mined is declining-that is, we get less energy for each ton of coal burned today than we did ten years ago. This is a natural consequence of the "low-hanging-fruit" principle of resource extraction, in which we tend to consume the highest-quality, most easily accessed resources first.
So as time goes on, the US will need to burn more coal, while the coal itself will be more scarce and costly. And the technology used will be far more expensive and complex, both to build and to operate, than the system of power plants we have today. Taken together, these factors read like a recipe for cost overruns and spiraling electricity rates.
That doesn't sound good. Wait... did he just say "spiraling electricity rates?" You mean, you and me and me and you are the ones who are going to be paying higher rates if this coal carbon-capture-storage stuff doesn't work out quite right?
Imagine a scenario in which the US goes ahead with the attempt to develop "clean coal" technologies. During the coming decade tens of billions of dollars (mostly from government) would likely need to be invested in research and the construction of demonstration projects. By 2020, the price of coal will already have begun to rise, as supply problems multiply, yet "clean coal" technology won't be ready to deploy widely (the most ambitious proposals don't see that happening until after 2025). Even if renewable energy doesn't get cheaper due to technological advances (and most analysts assume it will), at some point along this timeline the "clean coal" bandwagon will almost certainly grind to a stop because it is simply too expensive to keep going.
That's a rather ugly and all too plausible scenario. West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller insists "that efforts to address greenhouse gas emissions give our economy and our industries the time that's needed to develop and implement these new technologies."
If Rockefeller is right that CCS needs decades and these studies are right that we're fast running out of coal, then we're talking about one massively expensive boondoogle in "clean coal" that will do nothing to clean up our atmosphere, do nothing to secure our economic future, and do nothing to prepare us for a post-carbon future.
I don't agree with the premise that it is okay to waste billions of dollars just to provide political cover to win a vote for energy and climate change legislation. Those Senators and Representatives who say that "cleaner coal" technology is essential to win their vote need to prove how it could ever be an economically viable option.
Some environmentalists say it is an oxymoron, while others feel it is a viable option for using abundant coal reserves wisely. The debate is complicated by the fact that clean coal is not well-defined.
"It's an abused term that people use to justify whatever they are doing," said John Thompson, director of the Clean Air Task Force's Coal Transition Project.
Unfortunately, no one has discovered a new form of coal -- the black rock composed of carbon or hydrocarbons that is intensively mined throughout the world. The dangerous misnomers "clean coal" or "clean coal technology" are not about finding a cleaner form of fuel, instead they describe the reduction of air pollution from coal-burning power plants. For instance, some "clean coal technology" works to boost power plant efficiency in converting coal to energy, others physically filter emissions before release, and others are being developed to capture emissions upon release from the plants.
One of the most amazing shams I have seen in my life is the alleged 'clean coal' campaign by so-called King Coal...the notion of carbon sequestration -- which has no potential for feasibility within the next 10 years, if ever -- has become gospel in Washington.
Simply put, despite all the glowing ads that you've seen and bipartisan romancing of clean coal, "clean coal" remains not much more than powerpoint slides and technological dreams that might (MIGHT) work in 20 years or so, at a very high cost.
The trouble with "clean coal," however, is that it's just an advertising slogan. The industry's front group touts the fact that some pollutants from typical coal plants have fallen by two-thirds since 1970, even while the use of coal to generate electricity has tripled. What they don't tell you is that the industry fought the laws that mandated many of those reductions - and that a big coal plant emits as much carbon pollution each year as a million SUVs.
A month of negative news for the Tennessee Valley Authority could lead to positive changes in national policy, including federal regulation of toxic coal wastes and new legal constraints on coal-fired power plants. More broadly, the authority's recent travails may help persuade the public that coal is nowhere near as "clean" as a high-priced industry advertising campaign makes it out to be.
[snip]
But coal remains an inherently dirty fuel, and a huge contributor to not only ground-level pollution - including acid rain and smog - but also global warming. The sooner the country understands that, the closer it will be to mitigating the damage.
Two decades. Twenty years. 2028. Which makes you wonder what all those "clean" coal commercials are doing on TV now -- the ones which show the orange extension cord plugged into a lump of -- um -- dirty coal.
The Americans for Balanced Energy Choices (ABEC), a very poorly concealed coal industry front group, has a $35 million war chest to spend on its ad campaign.
Jumping the gun a wee bit, don't you think? It's probably the first instance of something being marketed 20 years before its time.
Companies running coal plants face a significant challenge: with more regulation likely on the way, what will they do with the tons of carbon dioxide created during the coal-burning process?
That's where the disputed term "clean coal" comes in. The coal industry tends to consider anything that reduces pollutants from burning coal as a clean coal technology. In 1990, the federal Clean Air Act forced coal plants to reduce emissions of sulfur and other pollutants, so they installed "scrubbers" to remove them before they reach the atmosphere.
The current debate over clean coal technology centers on carbon capture and storage technology, or CCS, which is sometimes interchanged with the term "clean coal," as a way to comply with carbon regulation.
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.
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.)
Remarks by U.S. Representative Nick J. Rahall, II on The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009
The Congress would be unwise to sit by and simply allow the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, as the agency has been mandated to do by the Supreme Court. Similarly, it would be a mistake to sit back and allow other countries to devise international rules that will affect America's economic and energy interests.
I do not agree with those who advocate for sitting on our hands and just saying NO to everything, sight unseen. The international community has no interest in protecting American businesses, and the Environmental Protection Agency is not required by the Supreme Court to consider the views of our constituents or the economic consequences to our communities.
I believe America is the one nation best equipped to lead such a multinational effort and, in doing so, to strike a balance between environmental preservation and the preservation of jobs. The hands-off approach of recent years did nothing to help promote new energy technologies, or to advance carbon capture and sequestration, or to protect American jobs.
It is evident that wishing that this complex issue would simply go away will not lead to better results for our Nation or the people we represent. And "just saying no" to any and all proposals, sight unseen, is unrealistic and irresponsible.
For those reasons, I chose to work with my colleagues and with numerous stakeholders -- including the coal industry, manufacturers, and labor -- to positively influence this bill and America's climate change strategies. And for those reasons our coal miners and responsible industry members have been at the table, too, rather than on the sidelines.
I thank Chairman Waxman, who has made many concessions in this bill, and I thank Leadership for listening to my concerns about this legislation and moving to help address them.
As well, I commend my colleague Rick Boucher, from southwestern Virginia, who serves on the Energy and Commerce Committee and worked in determined fashion to make improvements to the bill that we both sought. I am grateful that he has been so welcoming of my views and supportive of our interests -- such as ensuring the availability of $10 billion to advance carbon capture and sequestration technologies and other changes that are beneficial to the people of our neighboring districts.
While this bill is greatly improved from the discussion draft that was first circulated in March of this year - and opponents were saying no even before that draft was written - more improvements are needed to gain my support.
Coal does much more than keep the lights on in big cities across America. In southern West Virginia, it covers the mortgage, puts food on the family dinner table, and keeps open the doors of small businesses. While the emissions target in the early years of this program has been lowered from the 20% cap initially contained in this bill, there remains widespread concern that even the reduced cap -- 17% in 2020 -- is still too high and too soon to incentivize rapid development and deployment of carbon capture and sequestration technologies, so as to ensure coal mining jobs for the future. We must allow time for expensive clean coal technologies to come on line.
These technologies are critical to lowering emissions across multiple sectors of our economy. And they are necessary for keeping hardworking coal miners in the jobs they want, providing power for the country they love.
For these reasons, I cannot cast my vote for this bill.
I'll give them both credit for playing the politics in as saavy a manner as possible--they've been working all along to extract as many concessions as possible that benefit the coal industry, to the point that Greenpeace now opposes the bill as too weak. Talk about a payday for King Coal, one report says:
among many, many other things, the 1,200-page bill would also devote $60 billion to making sure clean coal isn't a loser.
I haven't decided yet whether I'm for or against this bill (at this moment, I'm leaning slightly for). I'd like to see a much stronger bill--something that is guided more by science and less by politics. Still, I hold out slim hope this bill will get better before it is signed and equally slim hope it provides a framework for making difficult political decisions ahead. The reality of the "facts on the ground" will force our hand--physics cannot be bargained away, no matter how deeply we bury our heads in coal ash.
Finally, for those who are--quite understandably--upset with Rep. Rahall and Mollohan on this vote, what did you expect? In politics, your allies will not be with you on every vote. It is unreasonable to expect that any climate change bill Rahall (in particular) and Mollohan (almost as much) would support is a bill that is going to meaningfully address the magnitude of the environmental issues facing us.
When our Democratic delegation in Congress stops voting the progressive way on Democratic budget priorities, ending our presence in Iraq, and moving toward universal health care, that's when there's ample room to start talking about primaries from the left.
Meanwhile, there's no news here. King Coal still reigns.
Julian Drix of Rising Tide opened the panel with a critical insight: before we know if we're taking a step on the right path, we need to know where we're going. And if we don't have a destination in mind, we're going to get mighty lost.
Some options are clearly wrong while others may appear promising; we need to think clearly of all of the costs involved in a given technology or strategy before embracing it. We can smell out these "false solutions" with five criteria, according to Drix; solutions that appear to be move us forward might be:
* Environmentally and racially unjust
* Disguised corporate strategies
* Not actually effective in reducing carbon emissions
* Not scalable
* Encouraging of destructive behavior
This is one of the great challenges of the moment. Entrenched industries--like nuclear, coal, and fossil fuels--already have huge resources available for Public Relations budgets. They can flood the public with promises of false solutions.
Clean coal is a more obvious myth, as Rebecca Tarboton of Rainforest Action Network disclosed with no great surprise but great emotional appeal. The coal industry is in a fight for it's life, and its pretty clear why: clean coal is a meme, an invention, a term lacking in any content. The entire notion depends on the technology of carbon capture and sequestration, which is not only undeveloped but prohibitively expensive. Even if the technology was in place, it would be completely impossible to actually sequester the carbon-if we sequestered 60% of the carbon emissions, it would exceed in volume all of the oil we extract and burn in the United States each year. We might be able to meet these technological challenges, Rebecca noted (this is America, after all!), but the impact of coal extraction itself makes the entire industry downright criminal (check out www.appalachianvoices.org).
Clean coal and nuclear energy are insidious in their simple appeal-we already do it, and we can just do it better, industry experts assure a nervous public. This nervous public wants to go green in the easiest ways possible, and this provides ample ground for corporations to step in and profit.
Unfortunately, it is not just "industry experts" busily assure the nervous public. Too many of West Virginia's elected politicians are aiding and abetting the clean coal greenwash, also.
- Rockefeller says, "that there are already at work in this country at least two power plants producing electricity from coal that come in at a carbon reduction rate which is right in the middle of where nuclear power is now - that nuclear power doesn't produce carbon dioxide but in other words the emission rate, global warming rate is the same."
As the Wonk Room notes, "There are no coal-fired power plants in the United States that store any significant carbon emissions using carbon capture and sequestration technology (CCS), let alone nearly all carbon emissions. Clean coal does not exist."
Note: Can Sen. Rockefeller please name the two plants he's thinking of? Either we're all misinterpreting his comments or he's counting greenhouse gasses in a much different way than the rest of us.
- The Wonk Room also notes:
Rockefeller repeatedly says that nuclear energy is "considered clean," which is true only if you ask nuclear industry lobbyists.
- More from the Wonk Room:
Rockefeller asked Geithner "why is that we are not talking" about putting CCS research in the economic recovery package. This question is odd, because the package allocates $2.4 billion to carbon capture and sequestration research - more than the $2 billion allocated to all other non-automotive energy efficiency and renewable energy research projects combined.
- Another line from his testimony:
We have a 400 year supply in this country of coal and it doesn't make much sense to me not to try to use American ingenuity, international ingenuity to try to reduce the carbon emissions to approximately where nuclear power is, whatever that is. It's considered clean, so therefore it's got to be pretty good, five, 6%, whatever.
Talking about upping the ante. Not even the coal companies try to sell a 400 year pipe dream. Eighteen months ago a government report said we were down to 100 year supply, not the then often touted 250 year supply. Even then, the report was criticized as unrealistically assuming no growth in coal consumption.
More likely, we are down to 20-40 years of coal reserves, if that.
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