The false hope of "clean coal"

Simon Butler

Billions of dollars are being poured into developing Carbon capture and storage (CCS) to make it commercially viable. But it's mostly taxpayers, not the coal companies, footing the bill.

The big coal industry is loath to put much money into CCS for a very good reason. It is not so stupid as to fall for its own propaganda.

But maintaining the "clean coal" fiction is an increasingly expensive job. In Australia, the Rudd government has given A$2.4 billion (US$2 billion) for research into CCS - outstripping the A$1.5 billion (US$1.3 billion) given to build new solar power plants.

In the US, the cap-and-trade climate bill currently before the Senate gives CCS a whopping US$60 billion from the Barack Obama government.

The problems for CCS backers include: CCS is unproven; appropriate storage sites are few; leaks from underground storage are probable; and it is prohibitively expensive.

It also wastes a huge amount of energy. In a 2008 report, Greenpeace estimated CCS plants would use 10 percent to 40 percent of a coal-fired power plant's total energy output just to keep running.

In 2007, Carl Bauer, the director of the national energy technology laboratory in the US energy department, told a government committee CCS could add "from 81 percent to 86% to the cost of electricity for a new pulverized coal plant".

According to some estimates, CCS would make power from coal more expensive than solar thermal and wind power.

However, as the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) said on September 7, "it's not a reasonable comparison [...] because solar thermal and wind power actually exist". Of the handful of demonstration CCS plants built, the results are stupendously bad.

The largest pilot plant attached to an operational power station in Australia is at the Latrobe Valley's coal-fired Hazelwood power plant - the most polluting in the industrialised world.

The SMH pointed out that its A$10 million (US$8.7 million) CCS plant captures only 25 tonnes of CO2 a day - a trifling 0.05 percent of Hazelwood's emissions. Despite this, world leaders at July's G8 summit in Italy held up CCS as central to a pledge to cut global emissions by 50 percent by 2020, including 80 percent cuts for the developed nations.

Third World Network Features