Clean Coal CCS

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several variants (AN 720 says dead)

see sequestration

ccs as cover for mtr?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/west-virginia-coal-mines/

salon

on Earth Day this year, as President Biden assembled world leaders to a climate summit to focus on a "clean energy future," retired coal miner Chuck Nelson hunkered down in the green hills of West Virginia, recovering from a recent stroke and with one remaining kidney, as thousands of tons of explosives from mountaintop removal strip mining operations detonated nearby with a toxic haze of coal dust.

Yes, Greta (Thunberg), we still blow up mountains in the United States to mine deadly coal.

While coal mining has decreased dramatically in recent years, state permits for reckless mountaintop removal operations by absentee corporations, which involve only small numbers of non-union heavy equipment operators and explosives, in contrast to labor-intensive underground mines, continue to be doled out in central Appalachia in a desperate attempt to shake down the region for a final coal tattoo.

In fact, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection celebrated Earth Day by rubber-stamping a new strip-mining permitfor an out-of-state coal company, slated to destroy 1,085 acres of forested ridges and wreak havoc for neighboring communities for the next eight years, despite decades of protestby local citizens and reams of shocking health studies on heightened cancer, heart andbirth defect rates associated with mountaintop removal mining dust.

The endless war on the central Appalachian mountains continues. Needlessly, we should add.

"Millions of acres of Appalachian mountains have been permanently destroyed, and thousands of miles of streams have been permanently buried," emailed Nelson, whose wife died from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in 2019. "With a flow of permits being processed right now, thousands more acres are planned to be wiped away forever. As devastating as mountaintop removal mining is to our majestic mountains, and the people's health impacts, only 3% of it is for electrical demand — only 3%. Mountaintop removal mining goes against everything we're fighting for in trying to deal with the climate crisis. These are criminal acts carried out by criminal enterprises."

Instead of recognizing thecentury-old legacy of ruin in coal country, from Appalachia to Alaska and 20-odd states and several First Nations in between — including an enduring array of abandoned mines, dangerous coal slurry impoundments, fraudulent "reclamation" projects, polluted waterways, desperate black lung victims, and gutted and sick communities with few economic options — the Biden administration risks falling into the trap of outdated policies.

Two days after Earth Day applause, the Department of Energy quietly awarded millions of dollars "to boost the economic potential of coal and power plant communities," and subsidize "critical mineral extraction from coal and associated waste streams," as well as widely debunked carbon capture and storage schemes.

Listen here: Advocates in coal country have been calling for a Green New Deal since 2008 — and acoalfields regeneration fund for everyone in coal mining communities, not simply the out-of-state companies, and not just throwing out a few job training opportunities for the dwindling ranks of largely non-union miners.

If the Biden administration and Congress truly want to build back better, they should have passed the RECLAIM ACT years ago, simply to start the process of reclaiming and reinvesting in all mining regions. And they should now double down on the commitment and make the Appalachian region, like all extraction zones from the Illinois Basin to the Navajo Nation to the Powder River Basin, a showcase for a clean energy economy, not a backwoods of denial.

If the Biden administration and Congress want to end the war on Appalachia, they should simply pass the Appalachian Community Health Emergency (ACHE) Act,which calls for a moratorium on such devastating operations until a basic health study is completed.

This is one of the most shameless realities in regulation: One of the Trump administration's first acts was to cancel a long-term health study on the impacts of mountaintop removal mining.

The sad truth is that this humanitarian and environmental crisis has been a federally sanctioned disaster since Jimmy Carter begrudginglysignedthe Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act in 1977, complaining that it would allow "the mining companies to cut off the tops of Appalachian mountains to reach entire seams of coal."

Let's repeat that phrase, "cut off the tops of Appalachian mountains" — as in the tops of more than 500 mountains for over a half-century, literally clear-cutting deciduous forests and the region's ancient carbon sink, blowing ridges into oblivion with explosives and dumping the toxic remains and pulverized heavy metals in polluted streams, and ravaging the lives of citizens considered collateral damage, along with everything else in the way.

It doesn't have to be like this. Last month, Canadian government officials reversed their own 45-year policy for open-pit coal mining, admitting, "We didn't get this one right."

It's time for Biden and Congress to get this one right in Appalachia and all mining communities.

Just listen to Vernon Haltom, director of Coal River Mountain Watch, based in the frontline extraction zones of West Virginia, not in Washington, an organization that deserves as much support as possible:

With millions of Americans seriously ill or dead from the COVID pandemic, the stockholders and executives of Alpha Metallurgical Resources have no qualms about filling the air in Appalachian communities with carcinogenic blasting dust. Their enablers at the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection have no qualms about rubber stamping new and renewed mountaintop removal permits, "just following the law" to sentence innocent people to death and misery. People like WVDEP permit supervisor Laura Claypool face no negative consequences for their actions, apparently not even remorse, but the people face the consequences of death. How do they sleep at night? It's not as if they don't know about the dozens of peer-reviewed health studies demonstrating that mountaintop removal is a deadly public health threat. No, they sleep soundly in the comfort of a steady job doing the coal barons' bidding. The WVDEP has made it personal by approving the death of friends and family like Judy Bonds, Larry Gibson and Joanne Webb, so they shouldn't be surprised if we make it personal about their cold, inhumane decisions. But since they've proven their incapacity for basic human decency, we need the Appalachian Communities Health Emergency (ACHE) Act, H.R. 2073 in this U.S. Congress, to protect the people.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/clean-coal/

no lnx

A hilarious euphemism': US probe underway over 'clean coal' moniker that actually increases pollution

Kenny Stancil and Common Dreams March 15, 2021

Following the emergence of evidence that power plants using a chemically treated coal—purportedly designed to reduce smog—generated more smokestack pollution not less, the Government Accountability Office has reportedly launched a congressional probe of the "refined coal" tax credit program that yields at least $1 billion per year for U.S. corporations.

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With the multibillion-dollar fossil fuel subsidy set to expire at the end of 2021, the outcome of the GAO investigation could influence whether federal lawmakers vote to renew it, Reuters reported Monday.

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According to Reuters, Democratic Sens. Sherrod Brown (Ohio), Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), and Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.) called for the probe in 2019 after the news outlet's December 2018 reporting "revealed that many power plants burning the fuel, which supporters call 'clean coal,' pumped out more pollution than previously."

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A subsequent analysis conducted by the nonprofit group Resources for the Future showed that "power plants using refined coal were not cutting mercury, nitrogen oxide, and sulfur dioxide pollution to levels required by the tax credit program."

twt

As Reuters reported:

Over the past decade, a who's who of American companies have reaped at least several billion dollars in benefits from investing in refined coal operations.

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Just last year, some 150 million tons of refined coal was burned in the United States, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Producers get a tax credit of $7.30 for each ton burned.

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Beneficiaries include global insurance brokerage Arthur J. Gallagher & Co, Detroit utility DTE Energy Co, Boston-based Fidelity Investments, Goldman Sachs Group Inc, JPMorgan Chase & Co Inc, pharmaceutical giant Mylan NV and Waste Management Inc, according to disclosures reviewed by Reuters.

The Internal Revenue Service, which oversees the tax credit program, allows the companies to qualify by testing relatively small amounts of refined coal in a laboratory once a year, in lieu of real-world emissions measurements at power plants, the Reuters Special Report found.

Many wealthy beneficiaries of the "clean coal" boondoggle are hoping that Congress will vote to extend the tax credit.

Doug Howell, the chief financial officer of Arthur J. Gallagher, is one of them. His insurance firm, as Reuters noted, "has stockpiled about $1.5 billion in tax credits from investing in refined coal activities. Of that amount, about $1 billion remain to be used in future years to offset federal tax liabilities, according to the company's financial reports."

"We hope that there are some proposed legislative changes that would—that possibly could make the extension happen," he told a conference call with analysts and investors in late January.

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Even in states long associated with coal production, the plants are closing. At what was once the largest coal powered generating plant in the world, Paradise Steam Plant in western Kentucky, the last of three huge turbines has made the switch to natural gas. That switch means that Paradise will still produce greenhouse gases, but it will no longer generate millions of tons of coal ash for the surrounding communities, or throw out a plume of both mercury and uranium that reaches a thousand miles to the sea.

The declining cost of renewables also means that what coal companies once viewed as the industry’s savior—exported coal—is also in decline. Coal exports were actually down 29% in the first five months of 2020. Companies have actually dropped several of the efforts to build export facilities as overseas markets evaporate even faster than those in the United States.

The industry crash also means that the efforts to save coal through “next generation” plants has completely crumbled. It’s been almost three years since what was supposed to be the nation’s first “clean coal” plant announced that it would not burn coal at all, ending a $6 billion experiment in failure. And on Tuesday, the only remaining commercial scale clean coal project in the United States was cancelled. As Oilprice.com reports, Petra Nova, which was supposed to capture carbon dioxide from a coal-fired power plant near Houston, has been “mothballed.” There is another project out there—North Dakota’s “Project Tundra”—but it exists only on paper and is unlikely to ever move forward.

As with many industries, coal mining employment has fallen sharply during the pandemic, but even before COVID-19 made the news, mining jobs were already in a steep decline.

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icn 320

gen z pressure

 website comes amid evidence that the clout of Heartland and other groups that have promoted skepticism about climate change may be waning. An increasing number of Republican politicians have sought to distance themselves from climate denial. Last month, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, a Republican, introduced a package of bills to promote carbon capture and sequestration technology. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), in her final year as chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has been attempting to lead a bipartisan effort to pass energy efficiency and technology investment.

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1119 desmog

New research from Stanford University professor Mark Z. Jacobson questions the climate and health benefits of carbon capture technology against simply switching to renewable energy sources like wind and solar. Carbon capture technology is premised on two possible approaches to reducing climate pollution: removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere anywhere in the world, an approach generally known as direct air capture, or removing it directly from the emissions source, such as the smoke stack of a fossil fuel power plant.

Jacobson's study, published last month in the peer-reviewed journal Energy and Environmental Science, concludes that carbon capture technologies are inefficient at pulling out carbon, from a climate perspective, and often increase local air pollution from the power required to run them, which exacerbates public health issues. Replacing a coal plant with wind turbines, on the other hand, always decreases local air pollution and doesn't come with the associated cost of running a carbon capture system, says Jacobson.

READ MORE

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619

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/cost-plunges-capturing-carbon-dioxide-air

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619 conf

Department of Energy officials came to talk about research.

They touted a plan to spend as much as $100 million on research and development of a new generation of what they call "near-zero" emission coal-fired power plants, designed to be "flexible, innovative, resilient, small and transformative."

They've dubbed that program "Coal FIRST."

"Carbon-free fossil energy is closer than you think," said Lou Hrkman, an assistant secretary for the department.

These small coal-burning plants could be assembled from modular parts that fit on a flatbed trailer and could be turned on and off quickly, meeting intermittent energy demand, and be equipped with carbon capture, he said.

Traci Rodosta, carbon storage technology manager at the Energy Department's National Energy Technology Laboratory, talked about the government's ongoing research path toward safe, underground storage of utility scale carbon dioxide. A slide in her presentation suggested it would not be ready for broad, commercial-scale adoption for 16 more years.

"Smaller, flexible coal plants? We have those. They're called natural gas plants. That's the problem," said Howard Herzog, a senior research engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in an interview before the conference.

Herzog ran an industrial consortium on carbon capture and storage at MIT from 2000 to 2016 and is an expert on the technology.

Carbon capture and storage has so far proven to be too expensive for utilities to be willing to invest in it, at least in the United States, without a federal climate policy that would put a price on carbon, he said.

That all leaves the coal industry in a precarious position.

"Coal depends more on research and development technologies now than any time in the past," said Snavely, the Kentucky regulator.

PUBLISHED UNDER:

COAL REGULATION NATURAL GAS AND FRACKING CLEAN ENERGY BUSINESS AND ACCOUNTABILITY

CLIMATE CHANGE NERN - SOUTHEAST

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maybe neglected, djt "beuatiful clean coal" is bombproof eg nat'l security

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https://www.alternet.org/environment/carbon-capture-what-we-dont-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-climate-change

The  latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report lays out a rather grim set of observations, predictions and warnings. Perhaps the biggest takeaway? That the world cannot warm more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (1.5°C) over pre-industrial levels without significant impacts.

If the world warms a mere half a degree more than that, hundreds of millions of people could face dire consequences—namely famine, disease and displacement—from things like rising sea levels and increased drought and flooding.

Time for action to stem the worst effects of climate change is quickly running out, however. If we’re to stay below or within range of that 1.5°C threshold, global carbon emissions must decrease by about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, and we must reach zero carbon output around 2050. Energy sector carbon emissions, however, are still growing, not shrinking.

What’s more, it won’t be enough to simply slash carbon emissions to zero. As the latest IPCC report points out, we’ll also need to suck up to 1 trillion metric tons of carbon from the biosphere over the 21st century.

If large-scale CO2 extraction is to be effective, many experts warn that such efforts will need to begin in earnest within the next few years. But carbon extraction is far from a primary feature of climate discussions among policymakers. Glen Peters is a climate researcher at the CICERO Center for International Climate Research in Oslo. He told Norway’s VG News:

There are media reports of images showing wind turbines and solar panels. It is well and good, but meeting the goals in the Paris agreement requires so-called negative emissions—removing much of the CO₂ that has already been released. The subject is little talked about, but politicians will eventually come to understand what a huge task it is.

The other problem is that the technologies currently capable of sucking CO2 from the air are still being developed and are too expensive to be commercially viable, which leaves experts hamstrung as to whether this is the right approach to stall global warming. In a 2016 paper published in Science, Peters and Kevin Anderson, the deputy director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester, called the assumption that these technologies and concepts will work to scale in time a “moral hazard.”

However, Roger Aines, chief scientist of the energy program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, disagrees. The “magnitude of the problem” is such, he told Truthout, that “we have to get started” with widely employing technologies capable of removing CO2 from the air. “It’s the question of how to get started,” he said, “that occupies a lot of my time.”

How to Achieve Negative Emissions

For the past few decades, talk of CO2 filtration has largely surrounded carbon capture and storage (CCS). In essence, CCS is when CO2 is removed at the source of the emission, like a power plant smokestack, before being repurposed. In most cases, the captured CO2 is piped back underground to boost oil production in wells that are drying up.

There’s a reason CCS is crucial when it comes to carbon extraction: It’s far easier to filter out CO2 at the source than it is directly from the air. That’s because the ratio of CO2 in, say, a coal power-plant exhaust flue (about 10 percent CO2) is that much higher than the ambient air (where CO2 is about 0.04 percent). The problem is that most CCS technologies are, at the very best, carbon neutral, meaning they squirrel away as much CO2 as they emit in the first place. However, if we’re to remain under that 1.5°C threshold, we’ll need to employ large-scale use of negative emission technologies—in other words, technologies that extract more CO2 from the atmosphere than they release.[img]:

The carbon capture and storage process prevents the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by separating and capturing it from the emissions of industrial processes and storing it in deep underground geologic formations. (Image: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency)

Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) receives broad support in the negative emissions arena. The overall premise behind BECCS is fairly simple: Growing trees and tall grasses for use as an energy source. As they’re growing, these plants will absorb CO2 from the air, and then, when burned for energy, the CO2 emitted will be captured and piped back underground. Therefore, the whole process would absorb and store away more CO2 than it would emit. Voila! Negative emissions.

There are, however, any number of major obstacles standing in the way of BECCS being employed on a scale large enough for it to make a significant impact. For one, the amount of land required to make BECCS feasible under the Paris agreement is staggering—as much as three times the area of India. Furthermore, as Harvard Professor David Keith warned in Carbon Brief, “[W]e must be cautious of technologies that aim to remediate the carbon problem while greatly expanding our impact on the land.”

Then there’s the potentially complicated international logistics of growing the crops in one country, shipping them to another for combustion, and then to another for permanent storage—each layer possibly adding a separate carbon footprint, while making the measuring, reporting and verification of the system a nightmare of bureaucratic red tape.

All of which explains why there is currently no commercially operable BECCS facility, explained Corinne Le Quéré, professor of climate change science and policy at the University of East Anglia. Nevertheless, it’s an exciting technology in regard to its electricity-producing potential, and is being seriously explored by the chemical industry as a power source, she added. “The fact that BECCS produces energy and an income from the process itself is a very big incentive.”

Low-Carbon Biofuels

The cost of negative emissions has always been prohibitive. An American Physical Society report from 2011 put the price of capturing CO2 directly from the air between $600 and $1,000 per metric ton. In contrast, the cost of capturing CO2 at the source can be roughly 10 times less. Nevertheless, a Canadian company called Carbon Engineering claims that its pilot plant in Calgary can extract CO2 from the air for between $94 to $232 per metric ton. To put that into perspective, carbon is currently priced in Europe at $20.03 a metric ton, and if the Paris Climate Agreement’s emissions targets are to be met, Carbon Tracker warned, the price of traded carbon allowances must rise to levels that make even efficiently run coal power plants unprofitable.

In short, Carbon Engineering’s technology works like this: When air is blown through towers containing a potassium hydroxide solution, the CO2 molecules react with the chemical mixture to make potassium carbonate, which is then processed into calcium carbonate pellets. When heated, the pellets release CO2 for capture. What then? Carbon Engineering plans to use the CO2 to make low-carbon biofuels.

Carbon Engineering is one of only a few companies seriously developing direct air capture technologies at reasonable costs. At its Iceland power plant, Climeworks built a unit that extracts CO2 directly from the ambient air and pipes it underground, where it combines with the country’s basaltic rock to create fast-forming minerals, according to a report in Quartz—part of its fantastic recent series on climate change. Earlier this year in Zurich, Climeworks launched the world’s first commercial direct air capture plant, where the filtered CO2 is supplied to a nearby greenhouse to grow vegetables.

According to Graciela Chichilnisky, CEO and co-founder of carbon-capture company Global Thermostat, the company’s technology—which is powered by low-cost leftover heat—will be able to remove CO2 for between $25 and $80 per metric ton when it’s scaled up (and depending on capacity).

There are other more speculative projects in the pipeline. Back in 2007, the British billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson offered $25 million to anyone who develops a commercially viable technology capable of removing at least 1 billion tons of CO2 annually from the air for 10 years. The prize remains unclaimed, but is still up for grabs.

Klaus Lackner, director of the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions at Arizona State University, is currently working on a pilot direct air capture technology that he hopes will be, within a couple of years, capable of removing from the air about a ton of CO2 a day. Commercially speaking, these technologies as a whole are “truly interesting when below $100 a [metric] ton,” he said, “but you could imagine that, if things are really hurting, people are going to do it anyway, even if it is more expensive.”

Action Must Be Quick

Besides BECCS and direct air capture technologies, there are other proposed ways to suck CO2 from the biosphere, most of which are laid out in a recent European Union report. Afforestation—the planting of forests in treeless areas—is one method bandied around by experts. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Roger Aines has other ideas.

“The last 200 years or so, we have lost the equivalent of 500 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide from the carbon content of our agricultural soil. So, it’s reasonable to say, if we use good agricultural practices, that we can return that carbon from the air to the soil,” he said. While a variety of negative emissions technologies must be employed together to tackle climate change, better land use practices are the ones most likely to have the “biggest impact,” he added.

Nevertheless, “the reality of this is that it’s like a major war. The next 20 years are going to be pretty bad, from a climate perspective,” Aines said, mirroring the findings of the latest IPCC report: that any increase in global temperatures will only worsen the impacts from extreme weather patterns already being felt. And while Aines still believes that “we’re going to figure things out,” what’s now clear is that we only have a dozen or so years to actually do so.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute, and originally published by Truthout.

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capt 818

see ACCCE Am Coaltion for Clean Coal Electricity

this category includes various "clean coal " scams such as Nazi era gassification and spraying kerosense on coal to get tax $.

but also legit sci

Did BO get punked on clever astroturf or know importance in illinois and other swing states?

trump memebeautiful clean coal:utica NY and?

8/22 rally

https://www.alternet.org/parallel-universe-trump-fans-chant-lock-her-west-virginia-rally-two-former-aides-become-felons

Like a Parallel Universe': Trump Fans Chant 'Lock Her Up' at West Virginia Rally As Two Former Aides Become Felons

"Trump's campaign manager and personal lawyer both became felons today. And Trump supporters still thought it made sense to chant 'Lock Her Up.'"

By Jake Johnson / Common Dreams August 22, 2018, 5:25 AM GMT

President Donald Trump on Tuesday was directly implicated in a criminal conspiracy by his former personal attorney Michael Cohen and—almost simultaneously—a federal jury found his former campaign manager guilty on eight counts of financial crimes, but you wouldn't know it by watching Trump's inane campaign-style rally in West Virginia Tuesday night, where his frenzied supporters belted out chants of "lock her up" and "drain the swamp" while the president bragged about his luxury apartments and deadly new coal rules.

"It's like a parallel universe," historian Kevin Kruse noted on Twitter as the Charleston rally kicked off late Tuesday.

While Tuesday's event featured plenty of ranting and raving about the "Russia witch hunt," the president didn't once mention the fact that his former fixer admitted under oath that he was directed by then-candidate Trump to violate campaign finance laws by paying hush money to a former model and an adult film actress.

The fact that Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort was just found guilty of a slew of crimes—including tax and bank fraud—also didn't come up during the hour-long rally.

Trump supporters in attendance Tuesday night—wielding signs that ranged from "Trump Digs Coal" to "Keep America Great"—didn't seem to mind these glaring omissions, nor did they seem to appreciate the irony of chanting "lock her up" after the first mention of Hillary Clinton while two men previously very close to the president are likely headed to jail....

https://www.ecowatch.com/carbon-capture-storage-2534049853.html

Climate Friendly? Congress Passes Carbon Capture and Storage Tax Breaks

Nestled inside the U.S. budget lawmakers passed Friday morning were tax breaks for an array of energy sources, including some struggling and controversial projects and technologies.

A bipartisan coalition of lawmakers, including several Democrats from coal-producing states, pushed through extended tax breaks for carbon capture and storage technologies (CCS) in the new bill, expanding a tax credit created in 2008 for 12 years.

The CCS extenders have drawn praise from a diverse collection of fossil fuel and clean energy camps, but also skepticism from some groups who claim the credits have been used only to subsidize increased oil production. The budget also extended a credit for nuclear power plants that will primarily help the struggling Vogtle plant in Georgia.

As reported by InsideClimate News, a coalition of environmental groups including Earthjustice, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace USA opposed the credits and said they "have not delivered measurable progress toward more climate friendly uses of carbon such as permanent sequestration or utilization, and appear to only have been used to increase oil production."

In a blog post Wednesday, Elizabeth Noll, legislative director for transportation and energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, wrote, "Carbon capture can be a useful tool to reduce emissions of dirty power plants and industrial sources, but we need to strengthen accountability, not weaken it, to ensure taxpayer investments are benefiting them."

For a deeper dive:

General budget: InsideClimate News, Ars Technica, Quartz, Bloomberg. CCS: Axios, Bloomberg, Houston Chronicle, Washington Examiner, Reuters. Vogtle: Atlanta Journal-Constitution

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ref

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/09022018/congress-tax-breaks-carbon-capture-css-geothermal-solar-biodiesel

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https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/08/08/southern-company-fraud-allegations-kemper-clean-coal-project

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https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/08/08/southern-company-fraud-allegations-kemper-clean-coal-project

Southern Co. is accused of fraudulently misrepresenting the prospects for its troubled “clean coal” project in Kemper County, Mississippi in several legal filings this summer.

Southern announced in late July that it was shuttering the troubled “clean coal” part of Kemper after construction ran years behind schedule and the company spent $7.5 billion on the 582 megawatt power plant — over $5 billion more than it first projected.

In a lawsuit filed today, Brett Wingo, a former Southern Company engineer, alleges he warned the company's top executives that it would not be possible to meet key construction deadlines. Management responded by retaliating against him, the complaint asserts, and Southern continued to assure investors and the public that Kemper's schedule and budget targets would be met, then blamed unpredictable factors like the weather when those goals were missed.

Wingo’s claim that Southern misled investors by concealing construction-related problems drew national attention in a front page New York Times investigation last year. In January, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) concluded that Wingo had suffered a “continuing pattern of retaliatory treatment” and ordered Southern to reinstate Wingo, but the company has refused, according to a statement accompanying the lawsuit. (The case is “Brett Wingo v. The Southern Company, et al.,” Case No. 2:17-cv-01328-MHH in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama, Southern Division.)

A second less-noticed legal filing with Mississippi state regulators accuses Southern of misrepresenting Kemper's prospects right from the outset, before construction even began. Those claims center on Southern's projections for what it would cost to operate and maintain the plant once it was up and running, which the filing asserts were so low they were “indefensible”.

In an email to DeSmog, Wingo seconds those claims, saying that he believes management knew back in 2012 that its “operation and maintenance” (O&M) projections were off — but kept the accurate numbers under wraps for years.

“By hiding the true O& M costs for so long, apparently since 2012 and likely longer, Fanning basically ensured shareholders would be forced to absorb $6 billion in losses,” Wingo told DeSmog.

“In 2012, sunk costs on Kemper were only around $1 billion and the natural gas part of the plant substantially complete. It would have been a perfect time to stop a runaway train from running off the end of the tracks,” he added. “But history shows, that’s not what Fanning and Southern Company chose to do.”

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{{_{

a historic vote this morning, Mississippi state regulators slammed the brakes on the Kemper coal power plant, saying they will refuse to ask utility customers to pay anything for Kemper's non-functional multi-billion dollar “clean coal” gasification technology and will re-designate the plant as a natural gas facility.}}}_

In a joint press release explaining their unanimous decision, the three Mississippi Public Service commissioners said they seek a solution that “eliminates ratepayer risk for unproven technology and assures no rate increase to Mississippi Power customers,” and that they want Mississippi Power, the Southern Company subsidiary that built Kemper, to consider rolling back existing rates.

“I think it's high time we finally turn the corner on this project and also strongly protect our ratepayers, who should only have to pay for what actually delivers electricity,” said PSC chairman Brandon Presley in an interview. Presley was, until recently, the lone opponent of a bloated, runaway project that saw costs jump from $2.3 billion in 2010 when work began to $7.5 billion now. 

Read more

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https://www.ecowatch.com/carbon-capture-climeworks-fertilizer-2428036864.html

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http://www.ecowatch.com/carbon-capture-india-baking-soda-2177070984.html

good news?

dicaprio

...Carbon Clean Solutions is not the first company to attempt to commercialize a process to convert CO2 emissions into commercially marketable products.

In 2012, a U.S. startup named Skyonic raised $9 million from investors to build a plant to convert carbon emissions from a cement plant in San Antonio, Texas. The investors included ConocoPhilips, BP and PVS Chemicals. The facility opened in October 2014 at the Capitol Aggregates plant and became operational in January 2016. Outputs include baking soda, bleach and hydrochloric acid.

Skyonic has said that, at full capacity, the plant will be able to capture 75,000 tons annually of CO2. The company claims that its process uses 30 percent less energy than more common carbon capture technologies. The plant was financed with the aid of a $28 million award under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

California-based Blue Planet produces concrete and other building materials from sequestered CO2. The company says its concrete can be carbon neutral or carbon negative. Climate activist and actor Leonardo DiCaprio is a member of the firms' government affairs advisory board.

...

The company captures industrial carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and factories and transforms it into concrete materials. Photo credit: Blue Planet

Brent Constantz, Blue Planet’s founder and CEO, said in a statement on the formation of the advisory board: “Bringing these leaders together to advise the company will guide our important initiatives with world governments. We encourage policies that promote carbon mitigation technology on a massive scale. We welcome the expertise, passion and unique platforms that Leo, Daniel and Durwood bring to the company. I look forward to working closely with them.”

DiCaprio—who urges a "transition to a clean energy economy that does not rely on fossil fuels"—is a powerful advocate for environmental action. In September 2015, DiCaprio pledged to divest from fossil fuels as part of the Divest Invest Coalition, which encourages business leaders to divest from fossil fuels and in businesses that contribute to climate change and to invest in environmentally conscious companies instead.

Oscar-nominee and environmental philanthropist Leonardo DiCaprio has joined the newly-formed government and policy advisory board of Blue Planet, a prominent developer of carbon capture technology based in Los Gatos, California....

It's safe to say *The Revenant* star knows a thing or two about carbon capture. According to the announcement, DiCaprio made a personal investment in Blue Planet and produced last year's documentary film Biomimicry, which covered carbon capture technologies, including those developed by the company. Watch here (starts at 7:50):

http://www.globalpossibilities.org/the-worse-anti-science-nonsense-of-2016/

GOP platform declares coal is “clean”

Republicans’ devotion to coal was one of the defining environmental issues of the 2016 campaign. Trump promised to revive the struggling industry and put miners back to work by repealing “all the job-destroying Obama executive actions.” Those commitments were reflected in an early version of the GOP platform, which listed coal’s many wonderful qualities and said that Republicans would dismantle Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which limits emissions from coal-fired power plants. That didn’t go far enough for GOP activist David Barton, who convinced delegates at the party’s convention to add one additional word to the text. “I would insert the adjective ‘clean,’” said Barton. “So: ‘The Democratic Party does not understand that coal is an abundant, clean, affordable, reliable domestic energy resource.’” Barton’s wording change was approved unanimously. As Grist noted at the time, “For years the coal industry — and at one point, even President Obama — promoted the idea of ‘clean coal,’ that expensive and imperfect carbon-capture-and-storage technology could someday make coal less terrible. But there’s no way it is clean.”

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AN

http://wwwwww.alternet.org/environment/will-big-business-help-fight-trumps-anti-environment-agenda

...But environmentalists may yet have a way to fight back. Though their public protests may fall on deaf ears as long as Trump is in the White House and Republicans control Congress, environmental activists may find more of an audience in corporate boardrooms. At a time when consumers are increasingly eager for green products, services, and energy sources, corporations are seeing the value of resource conservation as a long-term investment strategy, not just good PR or a grudging response to government regulations. And it’s not just Ben & Jerry’s these days that is taking earth stewardship, especially climate change, quite seriously; sustainability is baked into the structure of more and more Fortune 500 businesses. The imperatives of profit have never been so closely intertwined with those of our finite planet.

Take Trump’s pledge to bring back coal. In economic terms, that’s a campaign promise that looks destined to fizzle. Simply put, natural gas, a significantly cleaner fuel than coal, has become a more economically viable energy source. David Victor, an energy policy expert at the University of California, San Diego, says that while the price per unit of energy for natural gas and coal are roughly the same right now, natural gas enjoys a decided market advantage, because 21st century grid operators prefer its properties as a fuel source.

“Modern power plants need to be able to be turned on and off fairly quickly, but a coal plant is the exact opposite of that,” says Victor. “You need to keep a coal plant warm; the ramp-up for a coal plant from a cold start is many hours, if not longer. Gas plants are much more responsive.”

And the “clean coal” that Trump likes to reference? It’s an idea that sounds seductive, but that doesn’t do much to reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions. Clean coal refers to the application of carbon capture and storage technologies to coal-fired power plants—a process that involves diverting carbon dioxide from the smokestack and sequestering it underground in natural geologic formations that prevent it from seeping back to the surface. In practice, this technology is outrageously expensive. The only power plant in the world that has made the numbers come even close to working—the Boundary Dam Power Station in Saskatchewan, Canada—has done so by pumping the carbon dioxide into nearby oil fields, where it has value as an aid for fossil fuel extraction—a process known as enhanced oil recovery. But that can hardly be called a clean technology. While the process itself apparently is not polluting, it produces no net gain in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions—the entire point of clean coal. Just storing the CO2 in the ground would be a net improvement. But if the only economically feasible use of carbon capture is to extract more oil, it’s a zero-sum game. That’s because any oil extracted releases enough emissions when it’s burned to cancel out the potential benefit.

Making truly clean coal a financially viable reality would require massive government incentives, whether in the form of tightened-up emission standards or a price on carbon—both approaches that run counter to Trump’s fossil fuel-friendly, roll-back-the-regulations ideology. The technology holds promise in places like China, where the coal industry is booming, and the political appetite exists for a nationwide carbon market. But in the U.S., clean coal is a non sequitur, both fiscally and environmentally, for the foreseeable future.

Even many of the coal company executives with whom Trump is trying to ingratiate himself agree that natural gas is America’s new energy king. “The basic economics of the power sector now favor gas, and that has come directly out of the hide of coal,” says Victor.

Not that Trump hasn't also promised to pump up domestic production of natural gas, which is by no means the holy grail of clean energy. It has about half the greenhouse gas emissions of coal, but the “fracking” technology used to extract much of the nation’s natural gas supply is fraught with environmental problems of its own, from air and water pollution to increased earthquakes and habitat destruction.

...

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geology works

http://www.globalpossibilities.org/hopes-rise-for-underground-carbon-storage-scheme/

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romney pro clean coal murray peabody?)

DCI Group's Andrea Saul

However, a slap from the Senate did not stop DCI Group from continuing to specialize in anti-climate science messaging. DCI Group continues to hire and train professional climate change deniers. One such DCI Group alumnus, Andrea Saul, became candidate Mitt Romney’s press secretary during the 2012 presidential election, and helped push Romney’s anti-climate science positions. While at DCI, she wrote and distributed pres releases attacking legitimate climate science.Another DCI Group alumnus, Bob Paduchik, is now a Vice President of the coal front group called Americans for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE)

http://priceofoil.org/2014/09/04/cashing-in-on-carbon-subsidy-spotlight/

The dirt roads of Penwell, Texas, criss cross overgrown lots littered with the detritus of a bygone oil boom that petered out in the 1940s. But as early as next summer, this ghost town 16 miles southwest of Odessa will become the site of a new coal power plant facility––funded in large part by taxpayers––that could play a major role in not only helping prolong the life of a dying coal industry, but in fueling an oil boom that’s just getting started in the Permian Basin region of West Texas.

The Texas Clean Energy Project (known as TCEP) is a proposed coal gasificationplant that will generate electricity while attempting to capture 90 percent of the carbon dioxide emitted in the process. That’s according to Summit Power Group, the Seattle-based company behind the project.

TCEP is one of four U.S. power plants in the planning stages that would use Carbon Capture and Sequestration technology, which comes with an unproven track record and an exorbitant price tag for taxpayers…not to mention the impacts of mining the coal in the first place. A fifth such plant is already under construction in Mississippi.

Rather than diverting CO2 emissions into permanent storage as the technology’s name implies (a risky venture in its own right), four out of the five plants would repurpose the captured gas for use in oil extraction — that is, to help extract more carbon out of the ground. Petroleum companies in Texas are lining up to buy Summit’s CO2 and inject it into declining oil fields where it will act as a lubricant and a source of pressure, forcing more oil to flow into the wells there.

The process of using CO2 to coax more oil from old wells is called Carbon Dioxide Enhanced Oil Recovery, or CO2-EOR. In other words, the Texas Clean Energy Project is a power plant that, once operational, will burn coal and then sell its emissions to allow for the extraction of hard to reach oil, which in turn will be refined and burned.

This paradoxical strategy of capturing carbon emissions only to unearth more fossil fuels has made its way to the forefront of the federal government’s plans for tackling climate change, thanks in part to support from a plethora of industries whose pollutive practices would be threatened by a widespread shift to renewable energy.

But the biggest financial supporters of CO2-EOR are taxpayers. Since 2008, Congress has allocated $6 billion to research and development of Carbon Capture and Sequestration technologies. And yet its taxpayers who are impacted by the continued mining of coal, the effects of burning more oil, and the dangers posed by extreme fossil fuel extraction methods, like fracking, with which CO2-EOR is interconnected.

Through grants, tax breaks, and loan guarantees, the public is paying the financial costs––while shouldering the consequences––of re-shaping the carbon cycle to justify the continued use of dirty fuels and dangerous methods under the auspices of mitigating climate change.

Cashing in on carbon

There are several ways that taxpayers foot the bills for a project like the Texas Clean Energy Project, according to a report by Oil Change International, *Cashing in on All of the Above: U.S. Fossil Fuel Production Subsidies Under Obama*.

In 2011, $587 million in federal funding was allocated to research and development for projects that included enhanced oil recovery, carbon capture and sequestration, and coal fuels. In 2013, companies took advantage of $400 million in tax credits for investment in so-called “clean coal” facilities (of course, the “clean coal” moniker is one that’s been debunkedtime and again). That same year, $60 million went towards CO2-EOR, and oil companies were allowed $7 million in deductions for the costs of “fluids, gases and other chemicals used for enhanced oil recovery.”

For its part, Summit has received a $450 million grant from the Department of Energy and $600 million in tax breaks, mostly in the name of the still unproven carbon sequestration. But because that proposed sequestration goes hand-in-hand with enhanced oil recovery, some 47 percent of the CO2 injected into the ground by the project will likely be released when the petroleum it helps to extract is burned for fuel, according to the Energy Justice Network.

Summit will be among the first to sell industrially produced CO2 for the purpose of enhance oil recovery. The company is poised to meet a high demand; the market for CO2 has ballooned as the result of a recent oil boom spurred by the All of the Above Energy policy and the increased use of hydraulic fracturing technology, or fracking.

Since 2007, oil production in the region has doubled from roughly 800,000 barrels per day to over 1.6 million. It’s currently the highest producer in the country, just ahead of the Bakken oil field in North Dakota and Eagle Ford in East Texas––both hotbeds of fracking activity.

A pumpjack on every block and a flare every half mile

...

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legit?

http://ecowatch.com/2016/01/22/carbon-capture-investment-needed/

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http://www.alternet.org/print/environment/why-big-coal-pretending-be-savior-developing-world

9/14

Environmental Protection Agency for the first time on Tuesday issued permits to allow a coal-fired power plant to capture its carbon dioxide emissions and inject them deep underground, a process that many hope could help control climate change if it is ultimately successful.

FutureGen Industrial Alliance Inc. received four identical permits to use the process, called carbon capture and storage (CCS), at its long-planned FutureGen 2.0 coal plant in Meredosia, Illinois. The company’s goal is to capture and inject 1.1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions every year for the next 20 years, the yearly equivalent of 232,000 cars, according to EPA.

“The issuance of the permit is a major milestone that will allow FutureGen 2.0 to stay on track to develop the first ever commercial-scale, near-zero emissions coal-fueled power plant with integrated carbon capture and storage,” FutureGen Alliance CEO Ken Humphreys said in a statement.

The permits mean the FutureGen project is one step closer to beginning its long-awaited process of refitting the existing coal-fired power plant in Meredosia, and drilling four, 4,000-foot deep underground wells to inject liquefied carbon dioxide and store it long-term. Drilling those wells could start as soon as October, the EPA said.

The concept of using CCS to achieve a low-emission “clean” coal plant has been talked about for years now, but not without skepticism. On the one hand, U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz has purported that CCS can help control climate change by allowing the country “to use our abundant fossil fuel resources as cleanly as possible.” According to the DOE, CCS is a “next-generation” clean coal technology, an “all-of-the-above approach to develop clean and affordable sources of American energy.”

On the other hand, as ClimateProgress’ Joe Romm has argued, there is no way to know yet whether CCS will be successful as a strategy to mitigate climate change. He warns against looking at the process as a be-all and end-all to fix the climate problem. The technology requires a “staggering” amount of CO2 injection to make a difference as a climate solution, Romm has said, citing a Businessweek report claiming the emissions from just one coal-fired plant would require an underground storage space the size of a major oil field.

“Pretty much every major CCS project relevant to large-scale deployment at coal plants has been scaled back, delayed, or cancelled entirely,” Romm has written, noting that the NextGen project itself has faced numerous setbacks since it was first announced by President George W. Bush more than a decade ago. The original plan from President Bush — the FutureGen 1.0 project — was scrapped because of massive cost increases, according to Midwest Energy News.

Some have raised issues with the safety of the process. A Duke University study found that if injected CO2 were to begin leaking from the underground wells, it could “bubble up into drinking water aquifers near the surface, driving up levels of contaminants in the water tenfold or more in some places.” In addition, a 2009 Stanford University report warned that the process could “trigger small earthquakes that might breach the storage system, allowing the gas back into the atmosphere.”

Romm notes that none of this is to say we shouldn’t try using CCS. It’s just that as of now, he says, there are too many uncertainties regarding how well it would work and how safe it would be to deem it a “major climate solution.”

Still, CCS could become extremely important in the wake of the EPA’s proposed regulations on greenhouse gas emissions from new and existing coal plants. If the technology is successful, it could become a way for coal plants to keep operating with strict limits on how much carbon they can emit into the atmosphere.

Until a coal plant in the U.S. is actually CCS-functioning, though, there is no way of knowing if the technology could work. To see all the hurdles FutureGen 2.0 still faces, Bloomberg BNA has a good rundown here.

Tags:

• carbon
• Carbon Capture and Sequestration
• Carbon Emissions
• Climate Change
• Coal

==

grist

The Obama administration will soon require new coal-fired power plants to capture the carbon dioxide they produce and store it underground. Coal companies that had long touted “clean coal” turned on the idea, arguing that carbon sequestration isn’t commercially viable.

But don’t you worry about the poor coal industry. The fossil fuel guys have a trick up their sleeve. Here is the AP, reporting on an approach adopted at a new coal power plant in Mississippi:

At first, the idea behind “carbon-capture” technology was to make coal plants cleaner by burying the carbon dioxide deep underground that they typically pump out of smokestacks.

But that green vision proved too expensive and complicated, so the administration accepted a trade-off.

To help the environment, the government allows power companies to sell the carbon dioxide to oil companies, which pump it into old oil fields to force more crude to the surface. A side benefit is that the carbon gets permanently stuck underground.

The program shows the ingenuity of the oil industry, which is using government green-energy money to subsidize oil production. But it also showcases the environmental trade-offs Obama is willing to make, but rarely talks about, in his fight against global warming. …

Four power plants in the U.S. and Canada … intend to sell their carbon waste for oil recovery.

So say goodbye to carbon dioxide, and hello to oil that will be burned to produce more carbon dioxide.

As if it weren’t bad enough that this approach undermines the whole intent of carbon capture, scientists recently linked the practice of injecting carbon dioxide into oil fields to a major flurry of earthquakes in Texas in 2009 and 2010.

Source

• To clean up coal, Obama pushes more oil production, The Associated Press

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Southern Company has built and begun operating the world’s largest carbon capture demonstration facility for a pulverized coal-fired generating plant. The facility receives flue gas from a 25-MW equivalent slipstream ducted from Plant Barry, near Mobile, Alabama. To date, the demonstration facility has passed the major milestone of successfully capturing 100,000 tons of CO2. In August 2012, a separate demonstration project, operated by DOE’s Southeast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership (SECARB), began to inject and store the captured CO2 in a deep saline geologic formation some 12 miles from the carbon capture demonstration site. epri

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Ernest Moniz, Considered Fracking Shill By Some Environmentalists, Sparks Concern Amid Energy Department Nomination

Posted: 03/04/2013 10:35 am EST  |  Updated: 03/04/2013 10:45 am EST

In a Monday morning announcement that was long anticipated but not widely welcomed by environmentalists, President Barack Obama tapped Ernest Moniz, director of the Energy Initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as the nominee for the next secretary of energy.

“Ernie knows that we can produce more energy and grow our economy while still taking care of our air, our water and our climate," Obama said during a press conference on Monday morning announcing Moniz's nomination, along with his other picks, including Gina McCarthy to lead the Environmental Protection Agency.

While some environmental groups cheered the pending nomination, others have expressed deep concern over Moniz due to his outspoken support of hydraulic fracturing for shale gas, better known as fracking. Some critics have gone as far as to call him a "shill" for the shale gas industry.

A 2011 MIT study led by Moniz hailed natural gas as the "bridge to a low-carbon future." The research, as The Huffington Post reported last week, received financial support from oil and gas companies.

Anthony Ingraffea, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell University, said that the controversial report was just one example of what he calls "frackademia" -- pro-fracking studies coming out of institutions like SUNY Buffalo and the University of Texas at Austin that are later found to have been supported by industry. But MIT, being "the best tech institute in the country and the wellspring of many fantastic people," he said, seems to "get a pass."

Ingraffea's own fracking research comes to a starkly different conclusion -- that natural gas could be a bigger climate-changer than coal. It was largely funded by a foundation that has supported anti-fracking groups.

"No one is alleging that Moniz has personally financially gained directly from moneys from the oil and gas industry for fracking studies," said Ingraffea. However, he added, the study does raise concerns over whether or not any actions were taken that "benefited the people paying, despite knowing those actions were not in the best interest of the public, students, his university or the country."

"It's difficult," he added. "How do you determine that?"

Bill Snape of the Center for Biological Diversity shared similar disapproval with the possibility of a a Moniz-led Energy Department in a February statement.

"We're concerned that, as energy secretary, Ernest Moniz may take a politically expedient view of harmful fracking and divert resources from solar, geothermal and other renewable energy sources vital to avoiding climate disaster," said Snape. "We're also concerned that Moniz would be in a position to delay research into the dangers fracking poses to our air, water and climate."

"His appointment to the DOE could set renewable energy development back years," said a statement released by Food and Water Watch, which also circulated a petition opposing Moniz's nomination.

In addition to fracking, Moniz is also an ardent proponent of nuclear power -- another sticking point among some environmentalists.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) plans to question Moniz on the polluted Hanford nuclear site in Washington State, where waste tanks may be leaking 1,000 gallons of waste per year, reported The Hill. Moniz wrote in November 2011 that "it would be a mistake" to let "Fukushima cause governments to abandon nuclear power and its benefits."

"Nuclear power's track record of providing clean and reliable electricity compares favorably with other energy sources," Moniz wrote.

Still, many environmental experts and advocates have also highlighted Moniz's track record of concern for climate change and emphasis on renewable energy and innovation, and some were hopeful that the nominee's experience and track record would help him accomplish more in the secretary of energy position.

As Obama said on Monday, Moniz "already knows his way around the Department of Energy."

The physicist, well-known for his over-the-ears hairstyle, served as an undersecretary of energy during the Clinton administration. For the past four years, he has served on the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).

"Ernie is really a big-picture guy," Rosina Bierbaum, a fellow PCAST member and an environmental-policy expert at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, recently told Nature. "He can talk the details of science far better than most of us, but he never ever gets lost in the weeds."

The Natural Resource Defense Council also welcomed the nomination to replace Steven Chu, who plans to return to Stanford, as "good news."

"Professor Moniz has the hands-on experience and the expertise needed to help further the climate and energy goals our country urgently needs," Frances Beinecke, president of the group, said in a statement on Monday.

Moniz's hands may very well be full, and the pressure on him high, as the U.S. faces a series of important decisions that could affect the country's -- and the world's -- future economic, environmental and energy landscapes.

"I have a set of adjectives and nouns to describe the energy business -- it's a highly capitalized, multi-trillion dollar per year commodity business in the sense that when we flick the switch on, we don't see whether it came from a coal plant or solar panel," Moniz told the Switch Energy Project last year. "It serves every activity in society. It therefore does, and always will, invite extensive regulation and very complex politics."

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Clean_Coal

This article provides an overview of both the political and the marketing dimensions of clean coal, and the technologies for using coal that have variously been touted as "clean." Each topic is explored in greater depth in separate articles, as are several related topics:

• Clean Coal Technology - This article assesses progress to date in creating technologies that aimed at eliminating various environmental and health impacts of coal.

• Clean Coal Marketing Campaign - This article describes the public relations efforts of the coal industry to promote the concept that future coal usage will be safe to the environment and harmless to human health.

• Clean Coal Subsidies describes federal research and development programs aimed at advancing new coal technologies, as well as subsidies provided to commercial coal operations that meet certain official "clean" criteria even though they may continue to generate major pollution streams.

• America's Power, American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, Families Organized to Represent the Coal Economy, and Kansans for Affordable Energy describe coal industry front groups that have advanced in the marketing of "clean coal." The article Bob Henrie describes one of the leading public relations strategists behind the coal industry's "clean coal" campaign.

• Fly Ash, Coal Waste, and Bottom Ash - These articles describe the kinds of secondary waste streams produced by attempts to create "clean coal."

[edit] Introduction

The term "clean coal" is both controversial and complex. Controversy arises out of the coal industry's use of the term in its high-profile marketing campaign aimed at convincing the public and politicians that the goal of using coal without damaging the environment and public health is either a current or a foreseeable reality. Coal opponents assert that such usage is not factually based and that its main purpose is to provide public support and political cover for continued expansion of coal use.

Three factors combine to cause additional complexity in the debate:

• A history of shifting terminology: Over time, the meaning of the term "clean coal" has repeatedly changed, leading to frequent confusion. A hundred years ago the term appeared in newspapers as a synonym for "smokeless" anthracite coal. Today it is frequently used as a shorthand for processes that could allow coal to be used with near-zero greenhouse gas emissions. In the interim it has referred to measures that would reduce various pollutants such as sulfur dioxide and particulates.

• Gap between old plants, new plants, and next-generation plants: By any measure, the bulk of existing coal plants remain highly polluting. Recently built plants include equipment that reduces most of the sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide emissions, but they continue to emit large amounts mercury and other toxins, and they do not capture any carbon dioxide. The timeframe for commercial implementation of carbon capture and storage is hotly debated, with estimates ranging from 10 to 30 years in the future.

• The "whack-a-mole" problem: While the term "clean coal" focuses attention on efforts to reduce to coal's atmospheric impacts, measures to tap down the air impacts of coal often cause other environmental impacts of coal to actually worsen. One example of this perverse phenomenon is the large quantity of toxin-laden sludge produced by sulfur scrubbers. Another is the fact that carbon capture and storage, if implemented, will increase mountaintop removal and other surface mining techniques due to the fact that the energy required by such processes will consume approximately 20-25% of a plant's output.

[edit] Shifting terminology

Click here for an archive of clean coal industry advertisements (1921-2012).

[edit] Early 20th century: "clean coal" meant "smokeless coal"

Prior to World War II, "clean coal" or "smokeless coal" was a marketing term used to describe anthracite and high-grade bituminous coal used for cooking and home heating.^[1]

[edit] Late 20th century: "clean coal" meant "coal with lower regulated emissions"

With the arrival of the environmental movement in the late 1960s, the coal industry came under increasing pressure to clean up the myriad of pollutants produced by its mines and plants. Visibility (particulates and nitrous oxides) and acid rain (sulfur dioxide) dominated in the formation of policy established via the 1970 Clean Air Act and subsequent Clean Air Act Amendments in 1977 and 1990, while global warming gases remained unregulated. In response to the new legislation, the coal industry responded with a wide spectrum of technology fixes aimed at lowering "criteria emissions." These included replacement of high-sulfur coal with low-sulfur coal, scrubbers, electrostatic precipitators, coal cleaning techniques, and development of higher efficiency combustion techniques that allowed more electricity to be generated per ton of emissions. By the 1980s, these technologies came to be referred to under the rubric of "clean coal technology," and the term received official recognition in the Department of Energy's Clean Coal Technology Program (1986-1993).^[2]

[edit] After 2000: "clean coal" starts to mean "zero-emissions coal"

With the arrival of the new millenium and the heightened attention to global warming, the previous usage of "clean coal" to refer to coal with lower regulated emissions was joined by a futuristic new vision, that of "zero-emissions" or "near-zero-emissions coal use. In 2007, President George W. Bush explained the vision as follows:

"One promising solution is advanced clean coal technology. The future of this technology will allow us to trap and store carbon emissions and air pollutants produced by burning coal. Since 2001 the United States has invested more than $2.5 billion to research and develop clean coal. And in partnership with other nations and the private sector we're moving closer to a historic achievement -- producing energy from the world's first zero-emissions coal-fired plant."^[3]

[edit] Gap between old plants, new plants, and next-generation plants

[edit] Older coal plants: highly polluting

• Fine particles: The fleet of existing coal plants produces large quanitities of fine particles, also known as PM2.5, formed from soot, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and metals. These fine particles are estimated to result in 24,000 premature deaths in the United States, averaging 14 lost life-years per person.^[4]
• Sulfur dioxide: Because most existing coal plants pre-date current air pollution laws, current plants emit about 13 million tons per year of sulfur dioxide, approximately a 40% reduction from 1990 levels.^[5]
• Mercury: Coal-fired power plants are the largest source of mercury in the United States, accounting for about 41 percent (48 tons in 1999) of industrial releases.^[6][7] According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, eight percent of American women of childbearing age had unsafe levels of mercury in their blood, putting approximately 322,000 newborns at risk of neurological deficits.^[7] Mercury exposure also can lead to increase cardiovascular risk in adults.^[7]

[edit] New plants: cleaner but no carbon controls

As the gas most heavily implicated in global warming, carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from coal plants are a particular concern. Coal is a much more intensive emitter of CO₂ than other fossil fuels. Although coal produces about half of U.S. electricity, it produces about 80 percent of CO₂ emissions in the electricity sector and about of overall U.S. CO₂ emissions, about the same amount as all transportation sources -- cars, SUVs, trucks, buses, planes, ships, and trains -- combined.^[8][9] A 1000 megawatt (MW) coal-fired power plant produces approximately the same amount of global warming as 1.2 million cars.^[10] Although new power plants, when equipped with state-of-the-art pollution controls, have significantly less of the type of pollutants that cause acid rain, fine particulate pollution, and mercury toxicity, no currently proposed plants include any equipment to capture emissions of carbon dioxide. Coal-to-liquids technology will have particularly intensive climate effects. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, using liquefied coal as a fuel source would produce 119 percent greater greenhouse gas emissions than using petroleum-based fuel.^[11]

[edit] Next-generation plants: debating claims of "near-zero-emissions" or "zero-emissions coal"

Climate scientists and environmentalists have criticized carbon capture and storage (CCS), the main enabling technology for zero-emissions coal, as a "pipe dream" that distracted attention and resources from already existing solutions. Dan Becker, director of the Sierra Club's Global Warming and Energy Program, argues that the term clean coal is misleading: "There is no such thing as 'clean coal' and there never will be. It's an oxymoron".^[12] The most comprehensive set of arguments in opposition to CCS was advanced by the study "False Hopes: Why Carbon Capture and Storage Won't Save the Climate, published by Greenpeace in May, 2008. "False Hopes" argued as follows:CCS cannot deliver in time to avoid dangerous climate change. The earliest possibility for deployment of CCS at utility scale is not expected before 2030. To avoid the worst impacts of climate change, global greehouse gas emissions have to start falling after 2015, just seven years away.CCS wastes energy. The technology uses between 10 and 40% of the energy produced by a power station. Wide scale adoption of CCS is expected to erase the efficiency gains of the last 50 years, and increase resource consumpton by one third.Storing carbon undedrground is risky. Safe and permanent storage of CO₂ cannot be guaranteed. Even very low leakage rates could undermine any climate mitigation efforts.CCS is expensive. It could lead to a doubling of plant costs, and an electricity price increase of 21-91%. Money spent on CCS will divert investments away from sustainable solutions to climate change.CCS carries significant liability risks. It poses a threat to health, ecosystems and the climate. It is unclear how severe these risks will be.

Other objections to the notion of "zero-emissions" or "near-zero emissions" coal include the following:

• Slow penetration. Because CCS cannot be economically retrofitted onto existing power plants, the technology will only be adopted as new power plants are built and old power plants retired. Since coal plants typically last for about 50 years, only about 2% of the fleet is ready for retirement in a given year. Even if CCS did become commercially available between 2020 (Electric Power Research Institute estimate) and 2030 (Greenpeace estimate), it would take several more decades--after 2050--for even half the coal fleet to capture its carbon. But James Hansen and other scientists have said that a phase-out of coal plants that do not sequester their carbon needs to take place by 2030, a full generation earlier.^[13]
• Geographic limitations. The actual degree of penetration of the technology will be further restricted by geographic limitations, since not all power station locations are close enough to geologically suitable storage locations. For example, power producing regions of New South Wales and South Australia that produce about 39% of Australia's CO₂ emissions are over 500 km from identified storage locations.^[14]
• CCS fails a life-cycle analysis. Because of their high energy requirements, CCS requires large amounts of additional coal to be mined, and the mining, transport, and usage of the additional coal increases emissions of global warming gases, thereby undermine the benefit of CCS. One study estimated a CCS system that removed 85% to 98% of carbon emissions would actually only reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 67% to 78% due to these additional emissions.^[15]
• Fig leaf. By providing an illusion of safe use, CCS creates an excuse for allowing continued expansion of coal.
• Diversion of resources. By diverting scare R&D resources, CCS holds up development of cleaner energy sources.

[edit] Increased mountaintop removal

The concept of "clean coal" focuses on reducing air pollution. But the increased energy requirements of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) mean more mining to provide the 10% to 40% energy penalty created by the carbon capture and sequestration process.

[edit] Carbon capture and storage makes coal more expensive than wind and solar

Adding carbon and capture technology to new coal plants makes electricity from coal more expensive than energy from solar thermal and wind power, even when "firming costs" are included for alternatives (see table).

Capturing and compressing CO₂ requires much energy, significantly raising the running costs of CCS-equipped power plants. In addition there are added investment or capital costs. The process would increase the energy needs of a plant with CCS by about 10 to 40 percent. The costs of storage and other system costs are estimated to increase the costs of energy from a power plant with CCS by 30 to 60 percent, depending on the specific circumstances.

The following table shows cost comparisons published by the California Energy Commission in 2008 for various power-generation technologies, including integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) with CCS.

Costs of electricity with and without carbon capture and storage (US cents per kWh - 2008)

The cost of CCS depends on the cost of capture and storage which vary according to the method used. Geological storage in saline formations or depleted oil or gas fields typically cost US$0.50–8.00 per tonne of CO₂ injected, plus an additional US$0.10–0.30 for monitoring costs. When storage is combined with enhanced oil recovery to extract extra oil from an oil field, the storage could yield net benefits of US$10–16 per tonne of CO₂ injected (based on 2003 oil prices). However, as the table above shows, the benefits do not outweigh the extra costs of capture.

[edit] Support for development of CCS

The main argument in favor of CCS is the "critical path" argument. Ceding that CCS is not currently able to achieve the "zero-emissions" objective, some environmentalists argue that the emitting plants should be built if they provide partial steps toward enabling CCS technology to move toward commercial maturity. A prominent exponent of this position is John Thompson, director of the Coal Transition Program for the Clean Air Task Force, which has intervened in favor of at least one power plant even though that plant would only capture and store only a fraction of its carbon dioxide emissions. Thompson said,

"Look, we need to move forward and get the infrastructure for carbon capture and sequestration in place now. And we can't look at this from a U.S. perspective only. The largest coal company in the world isn't Peabody Coal any longer; by the end of next year [China's] Shenhua will probably be the world's largest coal producer. We have to get CCS working in this country so that we have a technology that we can provide to China and India. If environmentalists at the grassroots simply want to fight and stop every single coal plant, then IGCC technology will never develop to a workable level."^[17]

Clean Coal has been mentioned by George W. Bush on several occasions, including his 2007 State of the Union Address. Bush's position is that clean coal technologies should be encouraged as one means to reduce the country's dependence on foreign oil. Senator Hillary Clinton has also recently said that "we should strive to have new electricity generation come from other sources, such as clean coal and renewables."^[18]

In Australia, clean coal is often referred to by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd as a possible way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.^[19] However, in 2009 a government adviser anonymously told a journalist that "Clean coal has become an invitation for ridicule."^[20] The previous Prime Minister, John Howard, stated that nuclear power is a better alternative, as clean coal technology may not prove to be economically favorable.^[21]

This usage was featured in the literature for such projects as the now defunct FutureGen in the U.S. and the ongoing GreenGen project in China. Zero-emission technology most typically involved the vision of coal gasification, in which pollutants would be separated out of the emissions stream prior to combustion, together with carbon capture and sequestration, in which carbon dioxide would be liquified and stored permanently underground. Although the coal industry employed advertising that focused on this new of clean coal in support of current-generation plants, the Department of Energy's timeline for its Carbon Sequestration Technology Roadmap indicated that even under optimistic assumptions, carbon sequestration would remain primarily in the demonstration stage for at least the coming decade.^[22]

[edit] Problems with CCS

According to a peer-reviewed study published in the journal of Society of Petroleum Engineers, titled "Sequestering Carbon Dioxide in a Close Underground Volume" the authors argue that past calculations of CCS were widely off, rendering the technology impractical. Writing for Casper, Wyoming's Star-Tribune, report author Prof. Michael Economides explains,

Earlier published reports on the potential for sequestration fail to address the necessity of storing CO2 in a closed system. Our calculations suggest that the volume of liquid or supercritical CO2 to be disposed cannot exceed more than about 1 percent of pore space. This will require from 5 to 20 times more underground reservoir volume than has been envisioned by many, including federal government laboratories, and it renders geologic sequestration of CO2 a profoundly non-feasible option for the management of CO2 emissions.Injection rates, based on displacement mechanisms from enhanced oil recovery experiences, assuming open aquifer conditions, are totally erroneous because they fail to reconcile the fundamental difference between steady state, where the injection rate is constant, and pseudo-steady state, where the injection rate will undergo exponential decline if the injection pressure exceeds an allowable value.The implications of our work are profound. They show that models that assume a constant pressure outer boundary for reservoirs intended for CO2 sequestration are missing the critical point that the reservoir pressure will build up under injection at constant rate. Instead of the 1-4 percent of bulk volume storability factor indicated prominently in the literature, which is based on erroneous steady-state modeling, our finding is that CO2 can occupy no more than 1 percent of the pore volume and likely as much as 100 times less.We related the volume of the reservoir that would be adequate to store CO2 with the need to sustain injectivity. The two are intimately connected. The United States has installed over 800 gigawatts (GW) of CO2 emitting coal and natural gas power plants. In applying this to a commercial power plant of just 500 MW, which by the way produces about 3 million tons per year relentlessly, the findings suggest that for a small number of wells the areal extent of the reservoir would be enormous, the size of a small U.S. state. Conversely, for more moderate size reservoirs, still the size of the U.S.'s largest, Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay reservoir, and with moderate permeability there would be a need for hundreds of wells. Neither of these bode well for geological CO2 sequestration and the work clearly suggests that it is not a practical means to provide any substantive reduction in CO2 emissions.^[23]

[edit] Opposition to "clean coal"

Complaints focus on the environmental impacts of mountaintop removal mining, the projected high costs of carbon capture and storage, the human health dangers of large, rapid releases of carbon dioxide, the global warming risk posed by small levels leakage over long periods, increases in coal mining needed to run scrubbers as well as carbon capture and storage systems.

Critics of "clean coal" contend that there is no such thing as "clean coal," since even technology projected by 2020 will still release large amounts of pollutants compared to renewable energy sources such as wind, concentrated solar power, photovoltaic power, hydropower, and geothermal power. They also point out that there can be a large amount of energy required and pollution emitted in transporting the coal to the power plants. Opponents note that carbon capture and storage technology has yet to be used or proven on such a large scale and that it may not be successful. There are also concerns that pumping sequestered CO2 into oil and gas wells to help make the fuels easier to pump out of the ground will lead to further consumption of fossil fuels, and CO2 emissions, thus adding to global warming.^[24]

[edit] Front group launches "Clean Coal Information Campaign"

In 2010, the front group America's Power Army launched a **Clean Coal Technology. It Works.** campaign aimed at "educating people" at state fairs, festivals, baseball and football games, college campuses, diner and town squares about "clean coal." In September 2010, as part of the campaign, the group announced that mobile classrooms will be added as well. Called “classrooms on wheels,” the goal is to "help educate the public about clean coal technology and its role in providing affordable, reliable electricity, well-paying jobs and a cleaner environment. In the each classroom, visitors will see interactive displays explaining the history and future of clean coal technology. They will learn how clean coal technology has reduced emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and particulate matter, how utility mercury emissions will be cut, and how carbon capture and storage will reduce emissions of carbon dioxide."

[edit] Clean coal in Australian Politics

[edit] WWF Australia on clean coal

Australian Greens Senator Christine Milne accused the Climate Institute Australia and WWF Australia of abandoning "any remaining pretence of being part of the mainstream environment movement", by supporting "clean coal" in an alliance with mining companies and unions.^{[25] [26]}

[edit] HRL Limited challenged over "clean coal" claims

In July, 2007, the Australian Climate Justice Program, with the support of Greenpeace, lodged a complaint with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) over HRL Limited’s use of the term "clean coal" in relation to its proposed new brown coal-fired power plant in Victoria.^[27]

[edit] Clean coal project in China

[edit] Peabody and Chinese companies to pursue clean coal project

In January 2011 it was announced the U.S. based Peabody Coal, China Huaneng Group and Calera Corporation agreed to pursue the development of a clean coal project in the Xilinguole Region of Mongolia. The energy project would include a 1200 MW coal-fired power plant. The proposed plant would seek to capture a portion of carbon dioxide (CO2) and convert it into green building materials, advancing carbon capture technology. The plant would be fueled by a 12 million tonne per year surface mine operated by Peabody Coal.

It was stated that China Huaneng would serve as the power plant operator. Calera would use its technology to convert CO2 into solids that can be used as cement building materials. As of 2011, engineering plans were underway, with more announcements to come later in the year.^[28]

[edit] Articles and resources

[edit] Related SourceWatch articles

• Coal
• Clean coal - quotable quotes
• American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity
• America's Power
• Families Organized to Represent the Coal Economy
• Kansans for Affordable Energy

[edit] References

1. ↑ "Smokeless Coal," WVa-USA.com, accessed May 2008.
2. ↑ The 1986-93 Clean Coal Technology Program, Department of Energy website, accessed May 2008
3. ↑ "Bush Addresses Energy Policy, Climate Change," Washington Post, 9/28/07
4. ↑ Dirty Air, Dirty Power: Mortality and Health Damage Due to Air Pollution from Power Plants, Conrad G. Schneider, Abt Associates, June 2004, sponsored by Clean Air Task Force; Synopsis
5. ↑ Sulfur dioxide and coal
6. ↑ Mercury and coal
7. ↑ ^{7.0 7.1 7.2} “Mercury Emissions from Coal-Fired Power Plants: The Case for Regulatory Action,” Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management, October 2003. (PDF File)
8. ↑ Climate impacts of coal plants
9. ↑ U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), “Inventory of US Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks: 1990-2004,” April 2006.
10. ↑ Barbara Freese and Steve Clemmer, "Gambling with Coal: How New Climate Laws Will Make Future Coal Plants More Expensive," Union of Concerned Scientists, September 2006, page 2.
11. ↑ Testimony of Joseph Romm before Congress, September 5, 2007.
12. ↑ Grist.org - Coal Position
13. ↑ "Clock running out on irreversible climate change - Part I," James Hansen, Yale Global, April 16, 2008.
14. ↑ Sadler, H, et al., "Geosequestration: What is it and how much can it contribute to a sustainable energy policy for Australia?" The Australia Institute, Anu, 2004, quoted in False Hope: Why carbon capture and storage won't save the climate, Emily Rochon, Greenpeace, May 2008
15. ↑ Peter Viebahn et al, "Comparison of carbon capture and storage with renewable energy technologies regarding structural, economic, and ecological aspects in Germany," International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control, 2007
16. ↑ E3 Selected Client List accessed 6/08
17. ↑ Ted Nace, "Stopping Coal In Its Tracks," Orion Magazine, Jan/Feb 2008
18. ↑ Remarks of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to the Cleantech Venture Forum VIII
19. ↑ Sue Dunlevy, "Rudd's clean coal pledge", The Daily Telegraph, February 26, 2007.
20. ↑ Adam Morton, "Coming clean", The Age, November 4, 2009.
21. ↑ NineMSN.com.au - Interview: John Howard February 11, 2007.
22. ↑ David Sasoon, "DOE Timelines Show "Clean" Coal Will Be a Long Time Comin'," Solve Climate, 2/1/08
23. ↑ "CO2 sequestration isn't practical" Michael Economides, Casper Star-Tribune, February 20, 2010.
24. ↑ ‘Clean coal’ push concerns environmental activists
25. ↑ Abandoning the polluter pays principle, Christine Milne, Greensblog, Tuesday 15 April, 2008
26. ↑ WWF joins world's leading environment proponents in CCS call, WWF Australia press release, Tuesday, 15 April 2008
27. ↑ "HRL Challenged Over 'Clean Coal' Claims," Climate Justice, July 20, 2007.
28. ↑ "China Huaneng, Peabody and Calera to Pursue Clean Coal Project" Marcel Dröttboom Bulk Solids Handling, January 24, 2011.

[edit] External resources

• "COMICS WITH PROBLEMS #41: Strip Mining and Surface Mining is Awesome for the Earth" 1960s comic on greenwashing of coal
• Dirty Business (film about carbon capture and storage)
• "A last chance for coal: Making carbon capture and storage work," Green Alliance (supported by BP), August 10, 2008.
• Daniel J. Weiss, Nick Kong, Sam Schiller, Alexandra Kougentakis, "The Clean Coal Smoke Screen," Center for America Progress, December 22, 2008.
• David Roberts, "The essential 'clean coal' scam: Politico lets shill get away with the basic dodge at the center of the 'clean coal' campaign," Gristmill blog, December 23, 2008.
• Viveca Novak, "A Clean Coal Confrontation," Factcheck.org, 1/23/09
• Joshua Frank, "The Myth of Clean Coal: Foes of Mountaintop Removal Have No Ally in the White House", Counterpunch, February 13 - 15, 2009.
• Tara Lohan, "Don't Get Duped Like Obama: Here're the Top 5 Myths About Coal," AlterNet, February 14, 2009.
• Kent Garber, "Why Clean Coal Is Years Away," US News and World Report, 3/17/09

Wikipedia also has an article on Clean Coal. This article may use content from the Wikipedia article under the terms of the GFDL.

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