Business-Managed Environment

Clean Coal or Climatewash?

The coal industry has been desperately pushing the idea of clean coal as a way of heading off moves to phase out coal burning because of its carbon dioxide emissions. Clean coal is not a present day reality but refers to the hope that one day the carbon from burning coal will be able to be captured and stored underground — carbon capture and storage (CCS).

However even the most optimistic analysts, for example the MIT authors of the report The Future of Coal, admit that such technology would not be available on a commercial scale before 2030. In 2007 the association for electric power generators, the Edison Electric Institute, told a House Select Committee that CCS on a commercial scale would take 25 years of research and $20 billion in funding.

Even then it is unlikely the technology could be retrofitted to existing coal-fired power plants without enormous expense and so a whole new generation of carbon capturing coal-fired power plants would have to be built. In the meantime, coal would be emitting massive amounts of carbon dioxide for decades.

Even if carbon could be captured there is no sure way to store it permanently without possibility of leakage, which would defeat the purpose. Moreover it would take a signifcant amount of energy to acheive CCS (up to 40% of the power generated by the power plant) and the cost of CCS would make coal more expensive than other fuel sources including renewables.

"The most detailed published assessment, by Peter Viebahn of the German Aerospace Center in Stuttgart, estimates that at best CCS will reduce greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power stations by little more than two-thirds. That compares with life-cycle emissions for most renewable energy technologies that are 1 to 4 per cent of those from burning coal."

In 2007 the US government gave up on its research and development for a demonstration project of CCS, FutureGen, because it was too costly and lacked industry support.

The Australian Coal Association is spending $1.5 million on advertisements and $1 million on a New Generation Coal website to promote the idea of clean coal which it claims will be commercially viable by 2017. It claims a "$1 billion+ commitment to safe, sustainable energy technologies" through its COAL21 Fund but it only spent $36.4 million between 2006 and 2009.

By the end of 2011 there was still no coal-fired power plant with industrial scale CCS anywhere in the world and several projects to develop it had been cancelled or had stalled, including Australia's largest project, ZeroGen. According to Robert Milbourne of Norton Rose, "Global sentiment is shifting away from CCS investments. I've seen estimates in the trillions of dollars for the cost for retro-fitting most of the world's coal-fired power generation."

It should be remembered that even if the carbon could be captured and stored, coal would remain a polluting form of energy. For example coal ash contains "contains significant levels of carcinogens", according to a report by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and "the concentration of arsenic in ash, should it contaminate drinking water, could increase cancer risks by several hundred times." Also it puts sulphur dioxide and mercury into the air.

However by promoting 'clean coal' as if it is just around the corner, the industry is ensuring that it can continue to thrive and expand.

In the US a number of coal industry front groups have been promoting coal as 'clean' and 'green'.

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