The End of the Long Summer by Dianne Dumanoski

Author:Dianne Dumanoski [Dumanoski, Dianne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-45222-1
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2009-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

“Burying” global warming by sequestering carbon dioxide is the most mainstream of the proposed technological fixes. The idea is to capture carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels before it escapes into the atmosphere, compress it, and then find a way to store it securely. Scientists have focused first on coal-fired power plants, which now account for 38 percent of the world’s CO2 emissions, and, with a thousand new coal plants on the drawing boards worldwide, their contribution to the climate problem will possibly double in coming decades. By the end of the century, energy analysts forecast that coal will account for half of the world’s energy supply. “The climate problem,” says Daniel Schrag, who directs Harvard University’s Center for the Environment, “is a coal problem.”

Researchers say the basic technology, often referred to as “clean coal,” already exists to burn coal without releasing carbon dioxide, but most U.S. power companies have shown little interest in carbon capture and storage because, depending on the method, it could increase the cost of electricity by as much 90 percent. The biggest emitter of carbon dioxide in the U.S. power industry, American Electric Power, is the notable exception. It is in the process of planning and building two new coal plants, in Ohio and West Virginia, designed to be ready for carbon capture and storage technology—a move that will make it far easier and cheaper to retrofit the plant if limits are placed on CO2 emissions. AEP is aiming to complete the first of these in 2010.

The method used to capture the carbon dioxide depends on the design of the coal plant. In the traditional coal-fired steam power plant, the gases from combustion would go into an absorption tower rather than up a smokestack. There chemicals would absorb the CO2 and proceed to a stripper tower, where the chemical mixture would be heated to release the concentrated CO2. There had been high hopes that a new way of burning coal, the integrated gas combined cycle, would make carbon capture far less expensive, but the FutureGen project to demonstrate the new method’s feasibility on a commercial scale stalled in 2008, when the Bush adminstration scrapped this public-private venture because of cost overruns. (The Obama administration may, however, resurrect it.) Nor has there been significant progress elsewhere, because governments and the private sector have been similarly reluctant to come up with the necessary funds. For all the talk of carbon capture, there is only one power plant in the world retrofitted to do so, a gas-fired boiler at Lacq in the south of France that went into operation in April 2009. The 60,000 tons of carbon dioxide captured each year will be stored nearby in a depleted gas field.

Climate campaigners in the United States, meanwhile, are demanding that carbon capture and storage begin immediately and that no new plant be built unless it is ready for retrofit. Without technology to capture the carbon dioxide, a new 1,000-megawatt coal plant releases 6 million tons of carbon dioxide a year and will do so for its life span of half a century.

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