Carbon capture a myth or possibility?
By Asher Price
In a four-story test plant just behind a warehouselike research building in North Austin, University of Texas researchers are hoping for a revolutionary breakthrough to the question of how to continue to burn coal without contributing to global warming.
The mini power plant, only big enough to theoretically power a few homes, pipes carbon dioxide in and captures it with the aid of some fancy stack filters and a variety of solvents. The aim is to capture about 90 percent of the carbon dioxide emitted by the minifacility and then to scale up the project in a half-dozen years to a commercial plant.
The technology could "keep a (coal plant) going for another 30 years," said Gary Rochelle, the UT scientist heading the project.
The success or failure of this experiment, along with several others by UT researchers, could help spell the future of coal policy in the United States. Playing a prominent role in paying for and organizing the projects are coal-burning utilities, who have a lot to win or lose if the researchers can show that carbon emissions can be captured and piped underground for storage.
Though carbon limits have stalled in Congress, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is setting up rules to limit carbon emissions from refineries and power plants.
The Obama administration has pumped millions of dollars into carbon capture demonstration projects, sprinkling money around a handful of research universities. Over the past five years, the Department of Energy has invested more than $4 billion in carbon capture and storage projects nationally and about $765 million into projects in Texas.
A clean-burning plant, or at least its promise, is key to the future of coal as the government grapples with how to regulate carbon emissions from coal plants, which scientists have linked to global warming. For all the cost of retrofitting an existing coal plant — as much as $500 million — it would produce much more power, more reliably than all sorts of current renewable setups.
Texas, the researchers say, could be a national repository for carbon dioxide, which can be buried in underground salt domes and below the Gulf of Mexico. As a bonus, the carbon storage method could be used to push out hard-to-reach deposits of oil, like floss pressing up against teeth.
So far, no such capture and storage project has been built on a commercial scale.
Critics say the projects are part of an expensive fantasy promulgated by coal companies to stave off stricter federal legislation and to entice government subsidies for new coal-burning projects. Clean coal, they say, is a kind of unattainable holy grail of energy.
"The rush to throw up an old coal plant, bolt on some new scrubbers, and sell it as 'clean coal technology' is a transparently cynical attempt to cash in before the economic hurricane of global warming hits," Jeff Goodell writes in "Big Coal," his 2006 book. "The executives who are building these plants know that once they are constructed, no one is going to tear them down, giving the companies fifty years of steady profits."
Industry sponsors
"The scale of my activity is not approached elsewhere in the U.S.," said Rochelle, a chatty, precise and candid man.
At its most basic, Rochelle's group examines how a solvent called piperazine and packing alternatives that look like space-age air-conditioning filters can be used to capture carbon dioxide molecules before they escape into the atmosphere.
The money for their work is largely paid for by the Luminant Carbon Management Program, named for the Texas generator Luminant , which donated another $500,000 to Rochelle's group in mid-January. The check came during a semiannual get-together in which Rochelle and his students gave presentations about project progress.
"The carbon dioxide issue is extremely complex, and it takes all of us in this room and many others to resolve," Steve Horn, Luminant's vice president of engineering and technology, told a crowd of graduate students and company scientists.
Sponsors like Luminant and other utilities can participate in the talks and comment on drafts of research articles. In addition to the Luminant money, Rochelle's group will get $800,000 this year from a consortium of 32 companies, including more than a half-dozen power-generating companies (among them, LS Power, Southern Company and NRG) and a handful of oil companies, including blue-chip companies Exxon, BP, Chevron and ConocoPhillips.
NUTSHELL:
In my opinion, clean coal technology is worth pursuing. There are the obvious negative externalities caused by the carbon emission as a by-product of coal-fired plants. Clean coal technology gives economies which are majorly coal-dependent a chance to reduce their carbon emissions. Another positive is the fact that the stored carbon can be channeled flushing out oil wells which have difficult to reach plays. Clean coal technology may be conceived as a way for coal utility companies to elongate corporate life but it is an impactful technology. In an article written by Granita Layungasri, we find that the whole of the ASEAN ( Association of South East Asia Nations) acknowledges that their economies are dependent on coal. Clean coal technology has thus been adopted as a realistic and sustainable source of energy. Coal is cheap; if you stop using coal today, how does your economy deal with the transition? However, in the US where the society may have various polarized views on the subject, it is perfectly concievable to assume that indeed clean coal technology offers a clean getaway for the coal utilities- away from the carbon emission legislative noose; and that is not such a bad thing to contemplate.
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