Sunday, August 16, 2009
Editorial: The future of coal
Coal won't be around forever. The time is now to start weaning the U.S. from its dependence.
From the RoundTable blog
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A state judge's invalidation of a single air quality permit for the coal-fired power plant in Wise County is unlikely to convince Dominion Power to "take this ruling as a sign that it needs to leave expensive coal-fired power plants in the past and move quickly toward developing sustainable, clean energy sources for a 21st century green economy," as Cale Jaffe, senior attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, urged.
However, other developments suggest that society as a whole needs to make the development of sustainable and clean energy sources a more urgent priority.
First comes the news in "Peak Oil" guru Richard Heinberg's new book, "Blackout: Coal, Climate and the Last Energy Crisis," which lays out the case that America's coal reserves are far shallower than thought.
Coal company executives want Americans to think this nation is the Saudi Arabia of coal, with a virtually inexhaustible supply.
Heinberg looks at studies of coal reserves and comes to a vastly different conclusion: The world is less than 20 years away from "Peak Coal" -- the point at which coal production will begin an inevitable and irreversible decline. Heinberg is not alone. The U.S. Geological Service is predicting that the Appalachia region will reach peak coal even sooner, in about 10 years.
The second troubling development for coal is the growing concern that carbon capture and sequestration technology -- painted as the cure-all for continuing to burn coal and still meet greenhouse gas reduction goals -- will be far more costly and difficult to implement than proponents have claimed.
A recent story in The Washington Post, reprinted on the front page of Wednesday's Roanoke Times, discussed the many issues and complications involved. Some skeptics believe the technology will never be commercially viable.
Even proponents admit the costs are staggering. Systems could cost $100 per ton to remove carbon dioxide and divert 15 to 30 percent of a plant's power output.
Safety questions about storing hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide beneath the ground must also be addressed.
Coal proponents like to leave the impression that the technology is ready to deploy. "I've always said that we need to discover modern and more environmentally friendly ways to use the tremendous resource we have in West Virginia coal. That technology is here, today," said West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin.
However, American Electric Power officials and others actually working on the technology say it is years away from being commercially viable.
Skeptics and proponents of carbon sequestration and storage share an opinion on one thing: CSS is the only technology that could allow the widespread use of coal as a power source to continue while making any progress on limiting greenhouse gas emissions.
No matter how you look at it, coal is going to become a far more expensive energy source. If CSS can even be developed and implemented on the mammoth scale necessary to make a difference in carbon emissions, that won't happen until about the time we reach peak coal.
The U.S. is extraordinarily dependent upon coal for the energy that keeps the nation running. Clearly, the time is now to start weaning ourselves from that dependence.
