News & Views item - March 2007

 

 

MIT Calls the Shots as it Sees Them, Coalwise. (March 16, 2007)

    In 189 pages (xv + 174) the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) yesterday published The Future of Coal -- An MIT Interdisciplinary Study.

 

The study's participants were 11 MIT professors representing political science, chemical engineering, chemistry, business management, physics and environmental studies and a visitor from the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.

 

 

 

 

In their Forward the participants tell us:

 

In 2004 the group undertook the  study, “The Future of Coal.” The purpose of the study is to examine the role of coal in a world where constraints on carbon emissions are adopted to mitigate global warming. The study’s particular emphasis is to compare the performance and cost of different coal combustion technologies when combined with an integrated system for CO2 capture and sequestration.
 

...the interrelated set of technical, economic, environmental, and political issues... must be addressed in seeking to limit and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to mitigate the effects of climate change. Coal is likely to remain an important source of energy in any conceivable future energy scenario. Accordingly, our study focuses on identifying the priority actions needed to reduce the CO2 emissions that coal use produces.

 

And the key points:

This MIT study examines the role of coal as an energy source in a world where constraints on carbon emissions are adopted to mitigate global warming.

 

Our purpose is to identify the measures that should be taken to assure the availability of demonstrated technologies that would facilitate the achievement of carbon emission reduction goals,

 

We believe that coal use will increase under any foreseeable scenario because it is cheap and abundant.

 

We conclude that CO2 capture and sequestration (CCS) is the critical enabling technology that would reduce CO2 emissions significantly while also allowing coal to meet the world’s pressing energy needs.

 

...the priority objective with respect to coal should be the successful large-scale demonstration of the technical, economic, and environmental performance of the technologies that make up all of the major components of a large-scale integrated CCS system — capture, transportation and storage. (TFW emphasis)

 

Successful implementation of CCS will inevitably add cost for coal combustion and conversion.

 

What is needed is to demonstrate an integrated system of capture, transportation, and storage of CO2, at scale. (TFW emphasis)

 

An explicit and rigorous regulatory process that has public and political support is prerequisite for implementation of carbon sequestration on a large scale.

 

protocols need to be defined for sequestration projects including site selection, injection operation, and eventual transfer of custody to public authorities after a period of successful operation.

 

At present government and private sector programs to implement on a timely basis the required large-scale integrated demonstrations to confirm the suitability of carbon sequestration are completely inadequate. (TFW emphasis)

 

Thus, we believe high priority should be given to a program that will demonstrate CO2 sequestration at a scale of 1 million tonnes COper year in several geologies.

 

A second high-priority requirement is to demonstrate CO2 capture for several alternative coal combustion and conversion technologies.

It is critical that the government RD&D [research, development, and demonstration] program not fall into the trap of picking a technology “winner”...

Government support will be needed for these demonstration projects as well as for the supporting R&D program.

Moreover, retrofitting an existing coal-fired plant originally designed to operate without carbon capture will require major technical modification...

pre-investment in “capture ready” features for IGCC [Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle] or pulverized coal combustion plants designed to operate initially without CCS is unlikely to be economically attractive.

There is the possibility of a perverse incentive for increased early investment in coal-fired power plants without capture, whether SCPC [super critical pulverized coal] or IGCC, in the expectation that the emissions from these plants would potentially be “grandfathered” by the grant of free CO2 allowances as part of future carbon emissions regulations...
 

[Note: Pulverised coal plants grab CO2 just before emissions travel to the smokestack; IGCC plants remove the gas after the coal is gasified but before it is burned.]
 

Success at capping CO2 emissions ultimately depends upon adherence to CO2 mitigation policies by large developed and developing economies.
 


The central message of our study is that demonstration of technical, economic, and institutional features of carbon capture and sequestration at commercial scale coal combustion and conversion plants, will (1) give policymakers and the public confidence that a practical carbon mitigation control option exists, (2) shorten the deployment time and reduce the cost for carbon capture and sequestration should a carbon emission control policy be adopted, and (3) maintain opportunities for the lowest cost and most widely available energy form to be used to meet the world’s pressing energy needs in an environmentally acceptable manner.

The MIT report says the US government should earmark US$500 million per year to fund demonstration projects it must undertake with industry partners but criticises the DOE in that the FutureGen project, the current DOE initiative to set up a carbon-capturing IGCC facility by 2012, lacks "clarity of purpose", and its assessment of U.S. geologic sequestration sites as "not uniform".

 

And the journal Science reports:

Experts praise the report's support for demonstration projects but criticize its technology-neutral stance on the competing technologies. Joseph Chaisson of the Clean Air Task Force in Boston says the report uses "out-of-date" data that blunt the comparative advantage for IGCC, adding that utilities are actively exploring new industrial gasifiers. Geologist Susan Havorka of the University of Texas, Austin, questions the report's emphasis on giant injection sites as test beds, saying that ongoing "small tests" can give important clues in tracking CO2 behavior.

Moniz says the group accounted for recent industry progress, but that there are too many unknowns to favor one technology. A plant built now with one capture technology would be hard to retrofit for a different one. "It's not as simple as just dropping in" a sequestration module, he says. Meanwhile, some companies are moving forward. Last week, a group of investors and Dallas-based TXU announced plans to build two IGCC demonstration plants.

 

So our Coalition government and the Labor wannabes can think on that if they're serious about clean coal.

 

The ABC might even consider a 4-Corners program to see how the local pollies and boffins come at MIT's stipulation as to what's really required if you're gonna do clean coal and how long it would take us to develop/obtain the technology to arrive at useful CO2 emissions mitigation.