Image source: Scientific American (courtesy of American Electric Power).

Two pieces of news provide evidence of a fightback by coal. American Electric Power’s Mountaineer plant in West Virginia is reporting significant success for its small scale carbon capture project. And the UK has just licensed exploratory boreholes for offshore Underground Coal Gasification (UCG), a woefully under-researched technology that may make CO2 sequestration easier. The scale of the challenge facing the globe’s coal users is enormous but with determined research and development, the fuel may remain usable for power generation in a low-carbon world.

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Mountaineer
Vattenfall’s Schwarze Pumpe coal plant has been separating CO2 for a year or so. It hasn’t been putting the gas back into the ground because of resistance from citizens not wanting CO2 under their back yards. AEP started collecting and storing some of the CO2 from its Mountaineer electric power plant in early autumn 2009 using Alstom’s chilled ammonia process and injected the gas into permeable rocks 2.5km underneath the plant. Today’s process captures the CO2 from just 20 MW of the plant’s output. An upscaling of the plant will multiply this ten-fold by 2015.

Today (Wednesday 9 December 2009), the Wall Street Journal reports that the plant’s operators are pleased with the early success. AEP says that the energy penalty from operating the carbon dioxide separation and sequestering process is less than expected. (The Alstom process uses energy to heat the ammonia to separate the CO2 after it has been captured.) AEP’s CEO is reported as saying that the cost increase is no more than 4 US cents a kilowatt hour. Even this, however, would approximately double the cost of electricity produced at the plant. The optimism at AEP matches Vattenfall’s cautiously upbeat projections for the long-run cost of CCS when capturing the CO2 from a large power station’s entire output.

Clean Coal Ltd
Underground Coal Gasification (UGC) drives off useful combustible gases from coal seams. The gases are then burnt to produce electricity in a conventional gas power station. The technology has been known about for a century or more but technological advances have been slow. In recent years, the level of interest around the world has increased, partly as a result of concerns about climate change but also because of worries over the long-term availability of natural gas.

UGC is a ‘clean’ process in that it avoids the need for mining and burning coal and extracting sulphur and other pollutants. But it does face real environmental challenges in, for example, avoiding the pollution of local water supplies around the gasification sites. UGC is also not truly ‘clean’ in that it offers only a marginal improvement on conventional coal power stations in the amount of CO2 it produces. (This fact tends not to be mentioned by UGC proponents.) The world leader in UGC, Linc Energy of Australia, puts CO2 output per kWh of electricity at around 750 grams, compared to 400 grams for a combined cycle gas-fired power station.

The advantage of UGC is that it may offer cheaper sequestration of CO2 than a conventional coal station as well as much lower capital costs to build than a surface coal gasification plant. The gas coming up from the coal seam will be largely hydrogen, carbon monoxide, methane, and carbon dioxide. CO2 can be stripped from the combustible gases relatively easily because it is at high pressure. The remaining gases are then burnt in a gas turbine, producing water and nearly pure CO2. It may – only may – be possible to re-inject the gas into the coal seam for permanent storage. Some industry proponents think that this technique will eventually offer the lowest cost carbon capture and storage from coal.

The UK government has just licensed some experimental wells to be drilled by Clean Coal Ltd, a US/UK company run by industry pioneers. The wells will be in thin seams of offshore coal that would never be economical to exploit by conventional mining techniques. Offshore drilling also avoids some of the problems of subsidence that may occur when the coal is gasified underground in onshore locations.

The company’s press release says:

The UK Coal Authority has awarded Clean Coal Ltd licences to investigate the potential for underground coal gasification at 5 sites in the UK.  If the investigations over the next 12-18 months prove to be successful, commercial operations could start by 2014/15 and could lead to underground coal gasification producing 3-5% of the UK’s total energy requirement by that date.

This statement is over-ambitious. Other UCG projects around the world have taken much longer and gas production from underground coal is still something of an art. Although the Soviet Union ran UCG plants, only one of these remains open today. One of the leading scientists in the field, Dr Julio Friedmann of the US Lawrence Livermore lab, says, ‘A large number of basic science questions remain in the field of UCG.’[1]

Importantly, the Clean Coal press release is very vague about carbon capture and storage at its UK sites. Powerfuel, which is intending to use mined coal for surface gasification in Yorkshire, has been more specific and recently achieved EU funding for its plans. Without CO2 capture, Clean Coal Ltd is unlikely to be able to move forward in the UK or elsewhere, but the quickening worldwide pace of interest in UCG is a good sign.

The UK’s huge reserves of coal make it particularly important that the country invests in the research and development necessary to take the technology forward. Unfortunately, as ever, we are late to the game. China has graduated over 100 PhDs in UCG from one mining university and Linc in Australia is far more advanced with its plans for onshore gasification. As with several other technologies, the arguments for investing hundreds of millions in UK research and development over the next five years are overwhelmingly strong.

Footnote
[1] S. Julio Friedmann, ‘Accelerating Development of Underground Coal Gasification: Priorities and Challenges for U.S. Research and Development’, Coal Without Carbon: An Investment Plan for Federal Action (Clean Air Task Force report, September 2009), p. 8; available here in PDF format.

Renault’s Zoom concept electric car. Image source: Auto Express.

Most major countries in Europe have decided to focus on one or two technologies to reduce carbon emissions. By making concentrated investments in one or two promising areas these countries are likely to achieve substantial cost reductions and rapid increases in deployment. By contrast, the UK is dabbling ineffectually in several areas and achieving little. Despite having large resources of renewable energy sources, the UK’s effort is diffuse, trivial in scope and clearly insufficient. We have almost the lowest percentage of our energy coming from low-carbon sources in the EU.

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Here is a brief list of just some of the main programmes in other European countries. In each case, the nation is likely to acquire a world-leading position in a technology which can be expanded to save tens of percent of national emissions, provide large numbers of jobs and stimulate a successful export industry. (More details of each of these can be found in Ten Technologies to Save the Planet, just published by Profile Books.)

Portugal – electric cars and wind power
Portugal has just announced a programme to install charging points for electric vehicles across the country. In a deal with Renault-Nissan, it will encourage the transition to battery vehicles by reducing taxation on electric cars and giving income tax breaks to the purchasers of Renault’s new cars. This is a world first.

Portugal’s subsidies for wave technology meant that the world’s first commercial wave farm was installed on the Atlantic Coast. It also has a large and growing percentage of its electricity from wind.

Germany – a major push into eco-renovation of all older buildings
Many people know about Germany’s feed-in tariffs for small-scale renewables. This has substantial disadvantages, but has kick-started the world’s solar PV industries. It has also made parts of Germany self-sufficient in electricity through the rapid growth of wind turbines.

Fewer people understand the vital importance of Germany’s active support of eco-renovation. Three hundred thousand housing units (flats and houses) will benefit this year from improved insulation and climate control. Soft loans and other subsidies are proving hugely popular and help cut the emissions from older buildings by up to 85%. This is a systematic, coordinated programme that will eventually upgrade all Germany’s older residential buildings to better insulation standards than are currently being demanded for new housing in the UK.

Spain – massive investment in wind and in new solar power technologies
On some nights in February 2008, 40% of Spain’s electricity came from wind. Active support for wind farms has meant that Spain was the fastest growing market for turbines in the world.

It is not just wind. Spain is also the world leader in using the power of the sun to create electricity. Installations such as the Seville solar tower and the Andasol concentrated solar power farm are outstanding innovations that enable Spanish companies to sell their technology to the US and to North Africa.

Denmark – low-carbon district heating and enzymes for making fuels from agricultural wastes
Denmark has built a world-leading industry through its sustained and intelligent support for wind turbine manufacturing. Two of the world’s biggest manufacturers, Vestas and Siemens, build their products there and India’s fast-growing Suzlon does its European marketing from there.

Less well known is that Denmark is also ahead in the use of large-scale shared heating plants powered by wood and other biomass. Increasingly these plants also produce carbon-neutral electricity. Denmark’s enzyme industry, which controls over half of world production, is also in a leadership position in the production of chemicals for making usable liquid fuels by cracking the complex molecules in wood and agricultural wastes.

Sweden – a real commitment to a low-carbon economy and a vital role in carbon capture
Sweden’s resources of wood and its access to the electricity from Norway’s huge hydro-electric power plants make it likely that it will be the first country to become a genuinely low-carbon economy. And state-owned energy company, Vattenfall, is leading the world in research into carbon capture at large coal-fired power stations. Its new installation at Schwarze Pumpe in eastern Germany is the only large-scale example of the implementation of this critical technology anywhere in the world.

Where is the UK in all of this? Despite having 40% of Europe’s wind power, its record in installing turbines is way behind many other countries with much lower average wind speeds. Many wind farms with planning permission cannot obtain connections from the National Grid. Small knots of inventors and entrepreneurs are scrabbling for the tiny amounts of available capital to develop the UK’s vast tidal power reserves. But, once again, it may prove impossible to connect tidal power farms to the Grid.

In Smith Electric Vehicles and Modec we have two of the world leaders in electric vans and small lorries but the government has given almost no support. It doesn’t even use its vast purchasing power effectively. Efforts to help electricity generators develop biomass sources for power have been halting and inconsistent. As a result, most biomass burned in power stations today is being imported from Asia. Plans for a single trial carbon capture plant are proceeding painfully slowly and the finance does not even appear as a line in government budget projections. Research into low-carbon liquid fuels is not supported with consistency or substantial amounts of cash.

To an extent simply not understood in this country, the world now has the technological capability to rid itself of the dependency on fossil fuels. UK government policy has been woefully slow and halting towards those industries which could give Britain a world lead in ten or twenty years’ time. As the national unemployment figures begin their long rise upward to three million and perhaps beyond, now is the time to start an active programme of support for the technologies in which the UK has the potential for the creation of real, important and durable jobs.

Ten Technologies to Save the Planet was listed as one of the Financial Times Science Books of the Year 2008.