Clean coal project ‘will fail’ under emissions trading scheme.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/01/19/2468820.htm

Opposition environment spokesman Greg Hunt says a major clean coal project in central Queensland will fail unless the Federal Government changes its emissions trading scheme.

ZeroGen is working to develop a low emissions plant but says under the proposed carbon pollution reduction scheme it may be forced to buy permits.

If this “clean coal” is so clean, and actually does not have any significant emission of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, why are GHG emissions permits any significant issue at all? Any and all technologies which are truly “clean” obviously have a competitive advantage under the emissions trading scheme – so how exactly is the coal industry able to complain about a financial disadvantage faced by “clean coal”?

Of course they should be forced to buy permits – as should every power station – corresponding to their quantitative greenhouse gas emissions. If you don’t want to sink money into GHG permits, then you deploy low-emissions or zero-emissions technologies.

Even after what is basically an admission that “clean coal” is still associated with very high emissions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, more than natural gas and more than essentially any other energy generation technology with the exception of conventional coal-firing, the coal industry is still expecting even more handouts for the government for purported “clean coal” – and the government will probably give in, since “clean coal” is the only example the Australian Government has that they can try and meaningfully show as evidence of their supposed commitment to the management of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. If Big Coal threatens to walk away on the “clean coal” projects if they don’t get the additional taxpayer-funded pork they demand, the government is left with nothing to show off.

In a letter to Resources and Energy Minister Martin Ferguson the company said it should be exempted from buying carbon permits as it is a research and development project.

It has warned that if it has to buy permits the project may become unviable.

The Queensland Government has provided $100 million for the project and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has voiced his support for it.
Mr Hunt has accused the Commonwealth of “turning its back” on clean energy.

“The project will fail under Mr Rudd’s regime,” he said.

“Very clearly ZeroGen, clean coal, the future of Australian clean energy will fail under Mr Rudd’s regime.”

What a bunch of ridiculous rhetoric.
Given that we’re seeing so much government money being handed out to the coal-fired generation industry in relation to coal and emissions trading, and so many exemptions from emissions trading and the issuing of free permits, it might almost come as a surprise that there is interest in “clean coal”, when there is no real significant economic disincentive to the use of conventional coal-fired technology. The answer does indeed seem to be that these mendaciously small-scale “clean coal” projects seem to be an attractive source of easy government handouts for Big Coal.

Mr Hunt says the Government’s stance on emissions trading has already hurt the company.

“We’ve learnt that there are already job losses at ZeroGen,” he said.

The entire business development and corporate affairs section has been sacked in the last few days, the company is already winding down.”

A spokesperson for Mr Ferguson says the minister will address the issues raised in ZeroGen’s letter in “due course”.

Last year the Government allocated $100 million to the formation of the Carbon Capture and Storage Institute.

About 80 per cent of Australia’s electricity is created by coal-fired power generators.

Under the proposed carbon pollution reduction scheme, all revenue from the sale of permits will be used to compensate households for rising costs.

The Government’s climate change adviser, Professor Ross Garnaut, had urged the Government to allocate about a third of collected revenue to clean energy research and development.

The environmental footprints of coal and uranium mining.

Here’s something worth thinking about.

This is a coal mine. Specifically, it’s the Blair Athol coal mine in central Queensland, Australia, but there’s no special reason why I chose this specific example of a coal mine. The mine produces 12 megatonnes of coal per year. (This is just a satellite image taken from Google Maps, which anybody can of course easily access.)

Coal has a thermal energy content of about 25 MJ/kg, and therefore 12 megatonnes of coal corresponds to a primary energy content of about 2.9 x 10¹⁷ J.

This is the Ranger uranium mine, near Jabiru in the Northern Territory of Australia. Again, nothing special about this specific uranium mine, it’s just an example.
All these satellite images are at a consistent scale factor, or zoom level/resolution.

In 2007-2008, Ranger produced 5273 tonnes of U₃O₈.

A conventional, relatively inefficient low-enriched uranium fuelled LWR with a thermal (primary energy) power output of about 3 GW requires approximately 200 tonnes of U₃O₈ to be mined to fuel it for one year, assuming that newly mined uranium is used for all its fuel.

Therefore, the annual uranium output from Ranger corresponds to about 2.5 x 10¹⁸ J of primary energy, or about 8.6 times the primary energy content supplied by the coal mine.

That is, that one uranium mine supplies the same amount of energy content as nine of the coal mines – one seemingly quite small uranium mine, which is about a third of the size of the coal mine, supplies the same amount of primary energy content as this. (I won’t embed that image in the post, since it will probably completely destroy the formatting of the page.)

The Australian Government’s domestic solar PV subsidy…

The federal government has recently announced it will scrap the unpopular means test for the federal subsidy for domestic solar PV arrays, which restricted the rebate to households earning less than $100,000.

The size of the rebate was, formerly, $8 per watt of installed nameplate capacity, up to a maximum of $8000. The rebate will now be smaller; $5/W, up to a maximum of $7500.

Sounds good, right? But it’s horrendously expensive – the government is in effect paying $5/W for the cheapest, nastiest polycrystalline silicon PVs on the market.

There are scores of companies jumping on the bandwagon to sell these little 1-1.5 kW rooftop PV systems, advertising and promoting and installing them – because they’re making a fortune from the increase in business resulting from the subsidy.

The government rebate does not cover the full cost of such a system – therefore, in order to get as much interest as possible, the vendors are trying to keep the costs of such systems as low as absolutely possible, so that the cost that the customer pays is as small as possible. Therefore, all such systems are exclusively cheap, inefficient, basic polysilicon devices. After all, an advanced solar-concentrating collector with a high-efficiency CdTe cell or stacked heterojunction cell or sliver cell or whatever does not attract any higher subsidy than the basic polycrystalline Si device.

Advocates such as the Australian Greens say that such a scheme “supports the solar industry” – but all it does is supports the environmentally-damaging low-cost manufacturing of polycrystalline silicon in China, and doesn’t support innovation in advanced PV technology or anything like that.

What if the same amount of subsidy might be better spent elsewhere? Here’s a hypothetical idea to think about.

1. Go and find a suburb or a city or a community which has about 31,000 households. I’m certain there are 31,000 households in this country who support what I’m about to elucidate.

2. Get each household to put up AUD $1200 or so, temporarily.

3. Take that 25 million US dollars and purchase a 25 MWe Hyperion Power Module, or something similar.

4. At 25 MWe divided between 31,000 households, that’s a little over 25 GJ per year, which is a little more than Australia’s present average household electricity consumption. This doesn’t just generate a fraction of your household electricity needs – it generates 100% of it, and there will be no more electricity bills.

5. That corresponds to a nameplate capacity of 807 watts per household. Since the government hands out a subsidy of $5/W for solar photovoltaics with a 20% capacity factor, they should hand out $22.50/W for nuclear energy with a 90% capacity factor, right?

6. Collect your $18,157.50 rebate from the government. Less the $1200 investment, that’s $16,957.50 immediate profit in your pocket. This is exactly the same rate of payment per energy produced that presently exists in the form of the PV subsidy.

7. Go to the pub. Got to stimulate that economy, you know.

I wonder how many ordinary Australian households would support nuclear energy if you paid them $17,000 for doing so?

To replace one Loy Yang type coal-fired power station* with solar cells, we would need 6,082,342 homes equipped with 1.5 kW solar photovoltaic arrays.
With an $7500 rebate for each one, that would cost the government 45.6 billion dollars per each large coal-fired power station.

* (Loy Yang generated 15,995 GWh in 2006.)

Solar photovoltaics typically have a capacity factor of about 20%, and we’ll suppose the panels have a lifetime of, say, 30 years.
Therefore, this scheme costs the government 9.5 cents per kWh generated.

If the government purchases nuclear power plants, they will cost, say, 10 billion dollars (let’s be conservative) for a nuclear power plant with two 1100 MW nuclear power reactors which will operate with a 90% capacity factor and a lifetime of 50 years. The capital cost of plant dominates the overall cost of nuclear energy.

Therefore, the nuclear power plants would cost the government 1.15 cents per kWh – 12% percent of the cost of the solar rebate scheme. That’s the government’s rebate alone – without the rest of the price of these systems.

All this solar rebate is is another mendacious political enterprise involving renewable energy which can’t be scaled up, which hands out free money to the public, makes a bunch of money for the solar panel vendors (including many dangerous fossil fuel vendors such as British Petroleum), and mendaciously makes the government look like they’re actively getting the country running on clean energy.

ASIDE: I’m going to start cross-posting some blog content on the Daily Kos. I think it’s a nice site to engage with many, many readers – many of whom perhaps aren’t already so convinced of the virtue of nuclear energy – so, there’s plenty of engaging, active discussion, and the opportunity to maybe convince some people – even if that’s just a few people it’s still a very positive thing.

A Question, dear readers…

I’m currently interested in trying to find an example of any kind of scholarly paper or article published by Helen Caldicott, which has been published in a peer-reviewed journal, which is not just the usual “nuclear power bad” stuff we’ve all heard before. For example, any example of an article dealing with research into or treatment of cystic fibrosis, which was her area of professional expertise. Given that Caldicott was “Researcher in Cystic Fibrosis, Boston Clinic; formerly Director of Cystic Fibrosis Research, Adelaide Children’s Hospital, Adelaide. Australia.”, or at least so I’m reading, I’m surprised to find that despite running a few search queries through Elsevier, Medline, Web of Science and so forth, I’ve not been able to find any such example of any published works. I’d like to see a kind of baseline example of what her grasp of critical thinking, science and scholarly research was like, before it was swamped by this fervent dogma and drowned out.

That seems strange. Can anybody else find any such articles, or published works?

The footprints of coal and nuclear fuels.

In 2007, coal consumption in the United States – just for electric power generation – was 1.046 billion tons (1,046 million tons).

That’s a lot of coal.

Crushed bituminous coal has a bulk density of about 833 kg/m³, so therefore, that coal occupies a total volume of one cubic kilometer.
(1.046 billion tons / 833 kg/m³)^1/3 = 1.04 km.)

Combustion of coal produces carbon dioxide at a rate of about 1.83 kg CO₂ per kg coal.
Of course, CO₂ is just one particular component of the stream of dangerous waste output from coal combustion – there’s the particulate matter, the SO₂, the NO₂, the fly ash, the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and so forth.

So, each year, the use of coal for electricity generation in the United States generates 1.91 billion tons of CO₂ output to the atmosphere.

Applying the ideal gas equation, we can find the volume that this CO₂ occupies, assuming that it’s at a temperature of 300 K and a pressure of one atmosphere.

(T = 300 K is very frequently used as the value of “room temperature” or “ambient temperature” when performing scientific or engineering calculations in the Kelvin scale, since it’s a nice round number.)

(1.91 x 10⁹ tons * R * 300 K / (44 g/mol * 1 atm))^(1/3) = 9.90 km.)

The volume of CO₂ produced each year from coal-fired generators in the United States corresponds to a cube of CO₂ with a dimension of just under 10 kilometers on a side. Over the course of a decade, that adds up to a column of CO₂ which is 9.90 km on a side and occupies the entire thickness of Earth’s atmosphere.

But what about nuclear fuels?

Coal yields an output of thermal energy when it is combusted of about 24 MJ/kg – therefore, 1.046 gigatons of coal corresponds to about 2.28 x 10¹⁹ J of energy.

One atom of fissile nuclear fuel like uranium-235 generates about 200 MeV of energy in a nuclear fission – and of course, that atom of ²³⁵U has a mass of 235 u (atomic mass units).

So, to generate 2.28 x 10¹⁹ J of thermal energy, we need to fission about 277.7 tonnes of ²³⁵U.

((2.28 x 10¹⁹ J / 200 MeV) x 235 u = 277.7 tonnes.)

(By the way, did I ever mention that I really like Google calculator?)

Uranium is quite a dense material – metallic U has a density of 19.1 g/cm³.

Therefore, the amount of uranium required to replace that billion tonnes of coal is only a volume of uranium metal corresponding to a cube measuring about 2.44 meters, eight feet, on a side.

(((2.28 x 10¹⁹ J / 200 MeV) x 235 u / 19.1 g/cm³)^1/3 = 2.44 m.)

Now, I know what you’re probably thinking. That assumes that we’re using pure ²³⁵U as a nuclear fuel, and that it’s consumed in fission with 100% efficiency, and that is not the case with real, practical nuclear fuels in existing nuclear power reactors.

OK, so let’s revise the calculation a little to reflect the characteristics of a typical, existing light-water reactor more realistically.

A light-water reactor typically uses low-enriched uranium dioxide (UO₂) fuel, and a modern power reactor typically achieves a burnup of something like 50 GWd (thermal energy) per tonne U.

Therefore, the generation of 2.28 x 10¹⁹ J of thermal energy from a conventional, once-through, inefficient LEU fuel cycle in a light-water reactor requires the use of 5987.4 tonnes of low-enriched UO₂ fuel.

((2.28 x 10¹⁹ J / (50 GW days/tonne)) x (270/238) = 5987.4 tonnes.)

UO₂ has a density of 10.97 g/cm³.

Therefore, the amount of LEU uranium oxide fuel required to replace that billion tonnes of coal is a volume corresponding to a cube measuring about 8.17 meters, 27 feet, on a side. The used, irradiated fuel – even before any recycling or recovery of unused uranium and actinides is performed – occupies about the same volume. Yes, you can put it in a garage, or put it in a basement, or something.

(((2.28 x 10¹⁹ J / (50 GW days/tonne)) x (270/238) / 10.97 g/cm³)^1/3 = 8.17 m.)

Perhaps soon I certainly shall download SketchUp and have a play around with it in order to make some visualisations of these quantities.

Finally, a hat tip to Jason at Pro Nuclear Democrats for an interesting and very educational post which was my inspiration in creating this post.

Fischer-Tropsch fuels and carbon dioxide mitigation.

“The good news is that there is no need to build new nuclear power plants to provide for the projected energy needs of the future. Indeed, it would be possible, using other forms of electricity generation, to close down most of the existing nuclear reactors within a decade. Many kinds of alternative solutions are currently on the drawing board because of the extreme urgency of countering global warming. For instance, the conversion of coal to a synthetic fuel, which can be used for transportation and which would contribute much less to global warming than petroleum, is actively being championed by Governor Brian Schweitzer of Montana.”

That’s a quote from the perhaps infamous Nuclear Power is Not the Answer. However, this post isn’t really a criticism directed at Caldicott, specifically. The bold is mine.

The production of synthetic of petroleum-like liquid hydrocarbon fuels through Fischer-Tropsch synthesis using coal as a feedstock is not environmentally sound at all, it is not an efficient use of energy resources and it is not at all a useful technology in the slightest degree to contribute towards the mitigation of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions from energy systems.

The first step in Fischer-Tropsch synthesis of liquid fuel from coal is the reaction of coal, which is mostly carbon, with steam under elevated temperatures and pressures, to yield a mixture of gaseous carbon monoxide and hydrogen, known as synthesis gas. This requires mining the coal, adding water, and supplying a significant input of thermal energy, intrinsically reducing the efficiency with which the energy content of the coal can be utilised – where does the thermal energy come from?
From burning more coal?

C(s) + H₂O(g) –> CO(g) + H₂(g)

We may wish to consider the small amount of hydrogen, about 4% by mass in typical bituminous coal, giving the coal an empirical chemical formula of something like C₂H. However, the presence of this small amount of hydrogen in the coal makes essentially negligible difference, other than to marginally increase the H₂:CO ratio in the synthesis gas mixture.

2 C₂H(s) + 4 H₂O –> 4 CO(g) + 5 H₂(g)

It’s essentially the same as the previous reaction, above.

For the sake of simplicity, we might ignore, for now, the presence of sulfur, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, metals and heavier elements in the coal, and focus on the carbon content. One notable advantage of Fischer-Tropsch fuels, however, is that the sulfur content of the fuel can be removed altogether, resulting in a fuel, such as diesel fuel, with negligible sulfur content, and hence with negligible emissions of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere when the fuel is burned.

At the heart of the Fischer-Tropsch process is the use of an appropriately engineered catalyst and reaction conditions to convert the synthesis gas mixture back into a mixture of liquid hydrocarbons with an average molecular weight and composition which is usable as a fuel for vehicles. Suppose, for example, that we’re interested in the production of petrol for passenger cars – however, you could apply the same analysis equally to diesel fuel, for example, or any other particular kind of liquid petroleum fuel that you’re interested in.

Typical liquid hydrocarbon fuels, such as petrol or diesel fuel, contain about 13-15% hydrogen by mass – significantly greater than any possible abundance of hydrogen in the coal. As such, the addition of additional hydrogen into the reaction is necessary. Suppose that we’re interested in the production of petrol for passenger cars. For the sake of simplicity we can say that octane, C₈H₁₈, is representative of the overall chemical composition of the petrol.

When the coal is reacted with water to form synthesis gas, the synthesis gas is then reacted with more steam in order to increase the H₂:CO ratio in the gas mixture, using water as the source of hydrogen, and producing carbon dioxide. This gas mixture can then be used to form the desired heavier hydrocarbons, using a Fischer-Tropsch catalyst.

25 C(s) + 25 H₂O(g) –> 25 CO(g) + 25 H₂(g)

9 CO(g) + 9 H₂O(g) –> 9 CO₂(g) + 9 H₂(g)

16 CO(g) + 34 H₂(g) –> 2 C₈H₁₈(g) + 16 H₂O(g)

Hence, we have an overall chemical reaction which is equivalent to this:

25 C(s) + 18 H₂O(g) –> 2 C₈H₁₈(g) + 9 CO₂(g)

Traditionally, we extract crude oil from the ground, fractionate and refine the oil into products like petrol, and run our cars on the petrol. If we combust 2 mol of octane in an engine, we’ve emitted 16 mol of fossil-fuel-derived carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. However, if that 2 mol of octane is produced from coal via a Fischer-Tropsch process like we’ve elucidated above, then 25 mol of fossil-fuel-derived carbon dioxide is emitted into the atmosphere, for the same amount of energy output in the car’s engine. Does this “contribute much less to global warming than petroleum”?

Absolutely not – quite the opposite, in fact.

Even if all the carbon dioxide created during the synthesis was captured at the Fischer-Tropsch plant, liquefied, and sent to geological sequestration – which assumes that geological sequestration of the enormous quantities of carbon dioxide associated with fossil fuel energy systems is practical, which is extremely doubtful indeed and is at best completely unproven – then, at best, assuming that none of the additional energy inputs into the process come from fossil fuels, then the combustion of the synthetic fuel is associated with exactly the same quantity of carbon dioxide emissions as the
combustion of fuel derived from petroleum.

Synthetic fuel production, as exemplified by the Fischer-Tropsch process, is not advocated for reasons of the mitigation of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions – it is advocated by people including but not limited to Brian Schweitzer as a means to contribute to a secure domestic supply of liquid petroleum for the United States – helping to end the United States’ present dependence on foreign oil.

Fischer-Tropsch chemistry provides a particularly attractive means to keep our petroleum-fuelled vehicles in operation, using abundant, ubiquitous and secure domestic supplies of coal, where the security of foreign oil supplies are threatened by strategic or geopolitical considerations – as was the case in Nazi Germany and in South Africa under Apartheid, where Fischer-Tropsch fuel production was first well developed on a large, industrial scale.

Of course, perhaps it’s also possible Schweitzer also wants to see Montana’s abundant lignite coal utilised for the production of these synthetic fuels – bringing income into the state, and perhaps helping to keep the coal extraction industry in business in a society where it is increasingly widely accepted that coal is our number-one environmental enemy. That’s no secret.

Thought for the day.

Of all the G20 nations, there are only a few without nuclear power. There is only one nation among the G20 which has no nuclear power reactors, and has no active interest in implementing them.

Western Australia lifts uranium mining ban.

Western Australia has lifted the previous Labor government’s effective ban on uranium mining, with immediate effect. The Government’s decision, which has been fully expected ever since the change of government in WA, makes way for the potential exploitation of dozens of uranium deposits across the state.

“It is now open to the mining industry in this state, if they wish to proceed with plans to develop the uranium industry,” Premier Colin Barnett said today.

“It’s significant that Australia has the largest reserves of uranium of any country in the world and is second only to Canada as the major producer and exporter.”

The move would not require legislation because Labor’s previous ban on uranium mining was only administrative, he said. “Both Geoff Gallop and Alan Carpenter talked about a ban on uranium and the like but never introduced any legislation to do it”.

“They simply put in place that administrative caveat on a mining lease; now we are removing that.

“The one practical difficulty we face is that 1475 mining leases have been issued since June 2002 which exclude uranium mining, so the department is now seeking some legal advice.”

Uranium prices have fluctuated over recent years, with a spot price of $US135.00 per pound in June 2007 to $US46 last Friday.

Australia produced and exported just 20 per cent of the world market and demand would continue to rise strongly, Mr Barnett said.

West Australian Mines and Petroleum Minister Norman Moore said he had met with uranium producers since the state election but would not say which companies had shown an interest in mining.

He said proper processes needed to be put in place first.

“The department (of minerals and energy) has met with … counterparts from South Australia and the Northern Territory and the commonwealth and we will put in place quickly the regulatory regime for the mining and transport of uranium,” Mr Moore said.

“There’s a lot of benefits to be had for Western Australia if we have a uranium industry and I’d like to see it happen sooner rather than later.”

“He sounds like Yogi Bear!”

I was browsing a used-books store today, (one of my favorite pastimes) when I came across a delightful surprise: The Feynman Lectures on Physics… on audiotape.

Yes, it’s a set of those cassettes of magnetic tape, that I’m just barely old enough to remember, and some kids these days have probably never seen

I’m not sure if there’s much point in me buying them, though, because I don’t have a cassette tape player…
Now I know how NASA feels.

The post title is a reference to how a colleague of mine once described Feynman’s distinctive New York (?) accent, after listening to a recording of Feynman giving an interview or lecture.

The fallacy of currently operating “clean coal”: Part 2

Next up we might look at what the coal industry calls “a world-leading low-emissions coal power plant for Queensland” – the ZeroGen project.

Through a staged deployment program, the project will first develop a demonstration-scale 120 IGCC power plant with CCS, with a gross electrical power output of 120 MW. Again – only a gross electrical output of 120 MW, and a net electricity output to the grid which will be significantly less than that – it’s a tiny demonstration-scale plant, which is feebly small by the standards of most coal-fired power stations.

“The facility is due to begin operations in late 2012 and will capture up to 75% of its carbon dioxide emissions. Some of the CO₂ will be transported by road tankers for partial geosequestration in deep underground reservoirs in the Northern Denison Trough, approximately 220 km west of the plant.”

(Quoted straight from the NewGenCoal website.)

Again, only some of the CO₂ is captured, and only some of that CO₂ which is captured is transported, for partial geosequestration.

To facilitate more rapid uptake of the technology at commercial scale, ZeroGen will concurrently develop a “large-scale” 400 megawatt IGCC power plant with CCS. Due for deployment in 2017, the facility will be “one of the first of its kind in the world” and will capture up to 90% of its CO₂ emissions. It will be located at a site in Queensland as yet to be determined by a feasibility study. Of course, capturing 90% of CO₂ emissions does not mean geosequestration of 90% of CO₂ emissions, and in any case, 400 MW of electrical power output is not really a “large-scale” power station at all.

There’s an interesting paper here which provides a realistic analysis of the implementation of retrofitted CO₂ capture for an existing pulverised coal power station. Of course, this is a pulverised-coal system under consideration, and not IGCC as the ZeroGen plant(s) are proposed to use, but it is very interesting material nonetheless.

This paper examines the retrofit of a 400 MWe pulverized-coal fired plant, emitting 368 t/h of CO₂, to enable CO₂ capture while maintaining 400 MWe output, where 90% of the CO₂ emitted from the coal plant is captured and sequestered. To do so, the extra energy input required for capturing CO₂ was supplied by natural gas-fired gas turbines.

I’ve quoted the key points from the paper below. I’ve applied some minor editing and collation, but most of the material is straight from the paper cited.

Even when CO₂ emitted from the gas turbines is not captured, the overall process still have some impact in reducing CO₂ emissions, corresponding to an overall reduction in carbon dioxide output to the atmosphere of between 60-70%, with atmospheric CO₂ emissions of between 110 and 138 t/h, compared to 368 t/h for the original coal combustion plant, at the cost of a natural gas requirement of about 1350 GJ/h.

When CO₂ from the gas turbines is captured, the reduction in CO₂ emission is between 68 and 77%, or CO₂ emission to the atmosphere of 86-113 t/h. However, a considerably large amount of natural gas is required (around 3140 GJ/h), which is certainly not reasonable.

The total amount of natural gas required is between 3100 and 3300 GJ/h. To put this number into perspective, this amount of natural gas would generate about 460 MWe when used in a combined-cycle gas turbine plant without CO₂ capture. The relative emissions are between 23% and 32% of the original coal power plant, which has a significant impact on the reduction of CO₂ emissions.

The current industrial price for natural gas, as of August 2008, is USD $9.95 per thousand cubic feet, according to the EIA’s natural gas market page. One thousand cubic feet of natural gas corresponds to a heating value of about 1.09 GJ.

If a plant consumes 1350 GJ/h of natural gas at full output, then that is a fuel cost of 108 million dollars per year – leading to a significant increase in the operational cost of the plant.

For a nameplate capacity of 400 MW, and a capacity factor which we may assume to be, say, 85%, carbon dioxide emissions of between 86 and 138 t/h correspond to CO₂ emissions to the atmosphere of between 253 to 406 gCO₂/kWh_e generated.

The results from this study certainly paint a less optimistic assessment of the carbon dioxide emissions intensity of “clean coal” than the 80-90% reductions estimated by the IPCC. It is not at all “clean coal”.

Indeed, such levels of carbon dioxide emissions intensity are not much better than existing high efficiency combined-cycle natural gas fired gas turbine power plants. Given that the carbon dioxide emissions aren’t grossly worse, and given that gas turbine plants are already established, mature technology which is likely to remain far more economically competitive with this expensive, immature, unproven future technology, it is easy to envision that natural gas will be the main focus of the fossil fuel combustion energy industry over coming years, as opposed to the development of CCS technology, even where emissions trading is introduced.

The exception to this, of course, is where there is a vested interest in keeping the existing coal-fired power plants, and enormous coal-mining infrastructure, even if it is a less than sensible choice on many different levels. Natural gas turbines are of course, along with nuclear power, by far one of the biggest “threats” to the coal mining and coal-combustion electricity generation industry.

Additionally, that’s only considering greenhouse gas emissions from combustion at the power plant – without any consideration of whole-of-life-cycle analysis of coal mining and natural gas production – the enormous scale on which coal is mined, along with the fugitive emissions of methane associated with the production and handling of coal and natural gas, and so forth.

At the Munmorah Power Station in New South Wales, a research-scale pilot plant will capture up to 3000 tonnes of CO₂.

“It is hoped the Munmorah project will provide the foundation for a $150 million post-combustion capture and storage demonstration project in NSW, planned for operation by 2013, capturing up to 100,000 tonnes of CO₂ each year.“

The CO2CRC (the Cooperative Research Centre for Greenhouse Gas Technologies) Otway Project is Australia’s most advanced carbon dioxide storage project. Launched in April 2008, the project involves the extraction, compression and transport and storage of 100,000 tonnes of naturally occurring CO₂. The CO₂ is being stored in a depleted natural gas reservoir two kilometres below the earth’s surface.

3000 tonnes of CO₂? 100,000 tonnes of CO₂? That’s nothing. It is just not enough to make any difference to anything. The Munmorah power station emitted 2.1 million tonnes of CO₂ to the atmosphere in 2007. Even if 100,000 tonnes of CO₂ was captured and sent to geological sequestration, the remaining 95.24% of the CO₂ is still going into the atmosphere as usual. Capture and geological sequestration of this 4.76% of CO₂ is probably indistinguishable from normal variance in the plant’s total energy output and total CO₂ emissions from year to year. You wouldn’t even notice any quantitative difference in the emissions.

In 2007, Eraring power station in New South Wales emitted 13.8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, and in 2006, Loy Yang Power in Victoria emitted 19.3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. For there to be any chance of “clean coal” to become a reality in any honest, meaningful way, these are the kinds of quantities of carbon dioxide which must be practically, safely and economically sent to geological sequestration, in their entirety.

There are at least two Cooperative Research Centers in Australia dealing with coal-based energy technology – the CRC for Coal in Sustainable Development, and the CRC for Greenhouse Gas Technologies (The “CO2CRC”.)

As far as I’m aware, there is not one CRC dealing with solar energy, wind energy, nuclear energy, or geothermal energy. There is not one, dealing with any such technologies. We do have industries who want to invest in these technologies as commercial enterprises in Australia, and we do have plenty of good scientists and academics who believe in all these different technologies, and yet, astonishingly, surprisingly, it is only the coal industry which has a showing in the CRC program.

The large energy requirements of capturing and compressing CO₂ significantly raise the fuel costs and operating costs of CCS-equipped fossil fuel power plants, with the fuel requirement of a plant with CCS being increased by about 25% for a coal-fired plant, and about 15% for a gas-fired plant.

Additionally, increasing the overall greenhouse gas emissions intensity is increased well above what it’s claimed to be, since the gas is not captured with 100% efficiency. In addition, there are significant increases in capital costs for the plant.

The IPCC Special Report on Carbon Capture and Storage reports that:

“Available technology captures about 85–95% of the CO₂ processed in a capture plant. A power plant equipped with a CCS system (with access to geological or ocean storage) would need roughly 10–40% more energy than a plant of equivalent output without CCS, of which most is for capture and compression. For secure storage, the net result is that a power plant with CCS could reduce CO₂ emissions to the atmosphere by approximately 80–90% compared to a plant without CCS.”

Since 1996, the Sleipner gas field in the North Sea, the industry’s poster child for large-scale, established, operational geosequestration, has stored about one million tonnes of CO₂ per year. A second project in the Snøhvit gas field in the Barents Sea stores about 700,000 tonnes per year.

The Weyburn project is currently the world’s largest carbon capture and storage project.
Started in 2000, Weyburn is located on an oil reservoir discovered in 1954 in Weyburn, southeastern Saskatchewan, Canada. The CO₂ injected at Weyburn is mainly used for enhanced oil recovery with an injection rate of about 1.5 million tonnes per year.

These projects are by far the largest operational CO₂ geological injection/geological sequestration projects in the world – and there are only a few such facilities in the world. Each such facility does not have nearly enough capacity for carbon dioxide geosequestration to handle the output from even just one large coal-fired power station.