Is Clean Coal Story Worthy?
James Fallows has a cover story on the inevitability of coal in The Atlantic magazine that is a must-read. The piece cogently lays out why coal is king and why it must be made to be clean. The story is already prompting knee-jerk annoyance in predictable places. More on that in a minute.
Here’s the the nutgraph–the premise of the story, where its purpose is explained (my emphasis):
The proposition that coal could constitute any kind of “hope” or solution, or that a major environmentalist action plan could be called “Coal Without Carbon,” as one I will describe is indeed named””this goes beyond seeming interestingly contrarian to seeming simply wrong. For the coal industry, the term “clean coal“ is an advertising slogan; for many in the environmental movement, it is an insulting oxymoron. But two ideas that underlie the term are taken with complete seriousness by businesses, scientists, and government officials in China and America, and are the basis of the most extensive cooperation now under way between the countries on climate issues. One is that coal can be used in less damaging, more sustainable ways than it is now. The other is that it must be used in those ways, because there is no plausible other way to meet what will be, absent an economic or social cataclysm, the world’s unavoidable energy demands.
Fallows goes on to make a convincing case for why coal is here to stay for the foreseeable future. He then follows with a section on what the implications of this are for climate change (bad!). The third and final section is on the carbon sequestration challenge and how this is being taken up in collaborative (but embryonic) partnerships between the U.S. and China–all below the mainstream media radar.
Somehow, David Roberts at Grist thinks the article is unfairly bearing down, like a speeding coal train, on hardcore coal critics. I suspect that this is one of the quotes from the Fallows piece that convinced Roberts the focus of the story was all wrong:
“Emotionally, we would all like to think that wind, solar, and conservation will solve the problem for us,” David Mohler of Duke Energy told me. “Nothing will change, our comfort and convenience will be the same, and we can avoid that nasty coal. Unfortunately, the math doesn’t work that way.”
I have said before that Roberts is a very smart guy, but he might want to consider his own emotional investment in an argument and whether it’s preventing him from accepting cold reality. For, according to Fallows, here’s the deal (my emphasis):
The math [Mohler] has in mind starts with the role that coal now plays around the world, and especially for the two biggest energy consumers, America and China. Overall, coal-burning power plants provide nearly half (about 46 percent this year) of the electricity consumed in the United States. For the record: natural gas supplies another 23 percent, nuclear power about 20 percent, hydroelectric power about 7 percent, and everything else the remaining 4 or 5 percent. The small size of the “everything else” total is worth noting; even if it doubles or triples, the solutions we often hear the most about won’t come close to meeting total demand. In China, coal-fired plants supply an even larger share of much faster-growing total electric demand: at least 70 percent, with the Three Gorges Dam and similar hydroelectric projects providing about 20 percent, and (in order) natural gas, nuclear power, wind, and solar energy making up the small remainder. For the world as a whole, coal-fired plants provide about half the total electric supply. On average, every American uses the electricity produced by 7,500 pounds of coal each year.
Precisely because coal already plays such a major role in world power supplies, basic math means that it will inescapably do so for a very long time.
To Roberts’ mind,
the “coal is inevitable” talk offers aid and comfort to an establishment that’s doing virtually nothing to rein in dirty coal or support clean alternatives.
Roberts is pissed that that this wasn’t addressed in the story. He also contends that the piece was framed as rebuke to critics of coal. Fallows, in a detailed and respectful rebuttal at his blog, counters:
I think [Roberts] is responding to something I didn’t write.
People should read the Fallows piece in its entirety and make up their own minds. I’ll just say that Roberts’ criticism is the latest example of environmental/climate commentators taking issue with the premise of a particular story–because it doesn’t have their preferred frame.
Roberts made some good and bad points. I think that Roberts rightly objected to Fallows conflating politico-economic “realities” (i.e. status quo) with technological ones.
I agree that coal isn’t going anywhere any time soon. But I don’t believe that Fallows has made the case that it is technologically impossible to meet global energy needs without it.
He writes that as-of-yet-unrealized cleaner coal is “the only way to meet the world’s energy needs, and to arrest climate change before it produces irreversible cataclysm” and “there is no plausible other way [than coal] to meet what will be, absent an economic or social cataclysm, the world’s unavoidable energy demands. ”
But he does basically nothing to back this up. Yes, the current infrastructure is heavily tilted towards coal dependence. That’s not alone sufficient to support the claims that he’s making (which I acknowledge from the outset may in fact turn out to be true).
If coal is literally the only way forward, Fallows should have done a better job demonstrating this rather than asserting it. I realize that this might be beyond his expertise, but that’s no reason to let the assertions pass unchallenged. I didn’t see a single line dedicated to IFR nukes, for example. I didn’t see a word about solar thermal.
Being resigned to something because changing is perceived to be hard is not the same as saying that an alternative is literally impossible. Fallows has made a case for the former but in no way has done so for the latter.
Supporters of the clean coal concept are fond of saying that wind and solar just aren’t there, the numbers don’t add up. Well, however close or far they are from being able to do what is needed, truly clean coal is much farther.
The article spent very little time on the sequestration process. It’s worth noting that in most processes to capture pollutants, the pollutant is a trace amount. Think of catalytic converters. But the carbon in coal is, depending on the coal, likely 2/3 of the coal by weight. So for every three train carloads of coal you ship to the plant, you’ve got two to ship back somewhere else. We’re talking an industrial infrastructure whose scale is on the same order as the infrastructure that produces our energy that needs to be built and powered.
What affect will this have on costs? Can we transport and bury millions of tons of carbon in ways that do not emit a large part of the savings that comes from the capture? Because an overall savings of just half of what a dirty plant emits is not adequate, it really needs to be most of it.
I understand why people think that we have no choice but to figure out a way. Fine – try. But it is just another part of the picture that leads me to think that we don’t have a realistic way to avoid 750-1000ppm, and that if there is a way, it is by somehow figuring out how to leave that coal in the ground, as unlikely as that may be. As hard as it will be to make wind and solar do the trick, it seems easy compared with burying millions and millions of tons of sequestered material and making sure it stays there.
Norway delays Mongstad Carbon Capture and Storage project
“(Reuters) – Norway said it would delay the decision to finance a top carbon capture project to 2014, after the life of the present parliament, in a major setback for a technology seen as key to mitigate climate change.”
One of many problems was the chemicals used to dissolve the CO2 were highly carcinogenic and kept leaking out of the test rig. Yes C-A-N-C-E-R.
Dean is right to say that the war on carbon cannot rely on coal.
“James Fallows has a cover story on the inevitability of coal in The Atlantic magazine that is a must-read.”
Hardly a must-read for scientists. Perhaps for the Anthony Wattses of this world it is a must-read, because I note that at least it states unequivocally that the earth is warming and CO2 emissions are to blame. But not news for science.
Coal is NOT the way forward. There is no way to use coal as an energy source without converting it to CO2. Moreover at present consumption, there is only a few decades left of it. We will run out. Coal is therefore the way backward. Articles like Fallows’ are misleading the public.
Even sequestration is only a temporary stopgap measure.
The way forward is to curb energy appetites, and to use nuclear, solar, wind, and other non-carbon sources.
Fracking is essentially decarbonizing (to a large extent) coal. A large fraction of the heating value of coal is tied up in volatiles but these are lost in the way it is currently mined.
Fallows is right. You may argue on the why part but coal burning will increase in the next 20 years.
The math, in simple terms, is this: developing countries need huge amounts of cheapest possible energy to lift people out of poverty. For example, 400 million people in India do not have access to electricity. They will use coal. Indonesia, with 240 million people, will more than double its coal use by 2020. Etc., etc.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Indonesia_and_coal
Just to keep the emissions on the current level, the the OECD countries (the US, EU, Japan etc.) would have to cut down their total co2 emissions to zero.
Under the current and future (20-30 years) political, economic and technological conditions, I do not see it happening.
@rab, I’m with you most of the way, but I can’t see “curbing energy appetites” as being a significant part of any solution. Too difficult politically.
One of the things that hasn’t yet received the recognition it should: nuclear power could actually be cheaper than coal in the US, with a more sensible regulatory regime (for new generation power plants, which are orders of magnitude safer) and streamlining of the approval processes. If nuclear is cheaper, the argument for burning coal looks pretty thin.
Dean Says:
November 11th, 2010 at 4:20 pm
…
<blockquote>The article spent very little time on the sequestration process. It’s worth noting that in most processes to capture pollutants, the pollutant is a trace amount. Think of catalytic converters. But the carbon in coal is, depending on the coal, likely 2/3 of the coal by weight. So for every three train carloads of coal you ship to the plant, you’ve got two to ship back somewhere else. We’re talking an industrial infrastructure whose scale is on the same order as the infrastructure that produces our energy that needs to be built and powered.</blockquote>
It’s actually worse than this, Dean. You actually have to ship out CO2. For every carbon atom, you have two oxygen.
Take this with a grain of salt because it comes from Atlantic blogger Joshua Green, who is lavishing praise on his colleague. Green writes that the Fallows story on coal “is a classic of the [magazine] genre.” He continues: “Before reading it, I thought I knew what I needed to know about coal and especially the possibility that it could serve as a “clean” source of energy: I thought it was bunk, an expensive fiction propagated to buy the support of coal-state lawmakers for true clean energy programs. After reading the story, I don’t think that anymore.”
I think that this is exactly what Roberts is seeking to head off with his own criticism of the Fallows piece, which he admits is quite good in many respects and should be read. He just doesn’t want people walking away with the same impression as Green.
Coal is going to be with us for a long time.
In the bulk of the environmental/energy debate folks talk about electricity. Electricity is the simple problem.
Transportation fuel is the hard problem. A breakthru in battery technology has been ‘just around the corner’ for at least 100 years. A breakthru in Hydrogen fuel cell costs has been ‘just around the corner’ for 40 years.
saying that coal will be around for a while because of sunk investments is one thing. saying that clean coal will ever become a reality on a meaningful scale is quite another.
The objection that most reasonable people have to clean coal as a matter of policy is that efforts spent on it necessarily divert limited resources away from more promising alternatives.
In essence, proponents of clean coal would have you believe that the enormous breakthroughs required for their technology succeed (economically) are more likely to occur than comparatively smaller breakthroughs in a myriad of other competing technologies (e.g. solar thermal, intermittent renewables with storage, biomass power plants, etc.).
In some ways it’s analogous to the debate between battery research vs fuel cells in the transporattion sector, where the money right now is clearly in batteries because the obstacles are comparatively speaking much, much smaller than fuel cell technology adoption. Doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t spend money on fuel cell R&D, just that some kind of prioritization about allocation between deployment of lower risk tech vs R&D into high risk tech is required.
Marlowe,
I’m going to presume you read the piece, including these passages from the first section:
This is not an argument against all-out effort on all other fronts, from conservation and efficiency to improved battery technology to wind- and solar-power systems to improved nuclear facilities. Amory Lovins, of the Rocky Mountain Institute, has argued for years that designing buildings and transportation systems to waste less energy from the start is by far the cheapest way to reduce damaging emissions (a position reinforced by influential studies from McKinsey & Company). “Good ideas about climate change are not in competition with one another,” Roger Aines, a climate scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, told me when I visited this summer. “We need every possible solution, and then we need more.”
This is an argument for recognizing that China has faced reality, in launching an all-out effort to “decarbonize” coal””and for recognizing America’s difficulty in doing the same.
“This is not an argument against all-out effort on all other fronts, from conservation and efficiency to improved battery technology to wind- and solar-power systems to improved nuclear facilities.”
In a perfect world the military would hold bake sales and energy R&D would account for 90% of research budgets.
Of course we don’t live in that world, so there trade offs have to be made. $10 billion spent on clean coal means $10 billion not spent on better batteries, better CSP, etc. There are opportunity costs, and the article completely sidesteps this fundamental objection to clean coal research.
Why not spend the money on cold fusion? It has about the same chance at succeeding…
Marlowe #14
Of course we don’t live in that world, so there trade offs have to be made. $10 billion spent on clean coal means $10 billion not spent on better batteries, better CSP, etc. There are opportunity costs, and the article completely sidesteps this fundamental objection to clean coal research.
Why not spend the money on cold fusion? It has about the same chance at succeeding”¦
This pseudo-morality of the Green Movement is very frustrating. Coal is currently a widely-used, cheap power source. If the name of the game is curtailing global warming by mitigating co2 emissions what exactly is wrong with clean coal? Is it just too icky? One of those nasty fossil fuels? Is the mining industry just too “big corporate” for your tastes?
The first article I read on C-a-S was Keith’s interview with Lucia and Bart. What stuck in my head was Bart insisting that we not only need to reduce our carbon footprint, it had to be for the “right reason” or it wouldn’t count. (I’m paraphrasing). Basically, winning the debate with the skeptics going belly-up and admitting total defeat was the goal. If we must advert disaster, who cares?
Littering acres of pristine land with wind farms and miles of solar panels, not to mention the massive intrusion of high power lines to carry the power to the city where it is used, are pretty darn ugly, too. Of course, the enviro’s won’t stand for these unsightly monstrosities to visibly deteriorate the view from their own backyard. At least the coal infrastructure is already in place and there is no question about it’s ability to produce energy. We don’t need to import it, either.
It’s very difficult to believe that CAGW is a fact when those sounding the alarm bell get fussy about how or why we must act.
I was really pleased to hear Obama express openness to new ideas and solutions regardless of who came up with them. Solving the problem is ultimately the goal. Now I could criticize him for stating the obvious. After all, my heart had been set on McCain being our next president way before I heard of Obama. But he is my president now, and I support his leadership for now. He was discussing the economy, but he’s made similar statements about environmental and energy policy.
Better batteries sounds good. But just what are we going to do with all these batteries when they no longer can be recharged? I’ve got a shoe box filled with AAA’s, AA’s, etc that I’m not supposed to throw into the trash because of the cadium (or nickel, whatever they use to make rechargeable batteries). These are tiny! Where are all the Priuses going to be disposed of in 10 years?
I’m not saying we shouldn’t invest in developing the technologies that you approve. Just that all of these sources come with problems. Anything that requires manufacturing will wind up being made in China, too.
Are you ok with nuclear? What about natural gas? If clean coal is feasible, why not?
What is wrong with clean coal is that it a politically expedient oxymoron, a pipe dream at best. Try and understand what Marlowe is saying
Exploring the thesis that we “use a lot of coal now, and there is lots of coal, thus, clean coal for the future” without explicitly pointing out, first thing, that Clean Coal is totally different from Coal makes the article less than credible. The technologies, prices, logistics, are all completely different.
And only a naive shallow thinker could glibly write “Nuclear plants are expensive and obviously create waste-disposal problems” in an article exploring the potential for a massive future for clean coal.
This is another article in a long list by people who, by training and experience, have done nothing to suggest they know what they are talking about.
Coal is inevitable until something cheaper comes along. Fusion is a pipe dream. Thorium power has real potential and could supplant coal in 20 years if the resources being wasted on wind and solar were directed to development of LFTR and other fourth generation reactors burning thorium. Why does the left continue to ignore technology which could actually solve the CO2 problem without ruining western economies and keeping the underdeveloped world in poverty? Is it just mental laziness? Would you have desert habitats paved over with solar arrays and natural vistas despoiled by wind turbines than have a thorium mine in the Lemhi Pass? Do you prefer coal ash piles and mountain top removal to a nuclear waste repository where thorium waste degrades in a few hundred years instead of the hundreds of thousands for uranium and plutonium? Do you know who Ned Ludd was?
The idea of gasifying coal in situ, underground, is appealing and interesting. Keith, do you (or any other readers) have pointers or links to ongoing work on this?
Fallows is an outstanding journalist & writer, imo. I always learn something new about China in his Atlantic pieces.
Thanks, Pete Tillman
Consulting Geologist, Arizona and New Mexico (USA)
I read this issue of the Atlantic this past weekend…and I’m surprised Keith didn’t mention the *other* climate-related article in that issue — the article about Freeman Dyson’s shakily-founded climate contrarianism.
The Danger of Cosmic Genius
by Kenneth Brower
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/12/the-danger-of-cosmic-genius/8306/