The Myth of \u2018Beautiful Clean Coal\u2019 – While the U.S. president advocates for the most polluting fossil fuel, a shrinking number of power companies see a future for it.<\/p>\n
https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/features\/2018-10-29\/what-is-trump-s-clean-coal-and-does-it-even-existThick white smoke tinged with a silvery hue blows from the chimney of one of the cleanest coal plants in the world.<\/p>\n
Designed by General Electric Co. and run by the German utility Energie Baden-Wuerttemberg AG, this facility in Karlsruhe on the banks of the Rhine River is at the heart of a debate about whether coal can ever be clean enough to work in a world fighting climate change.<\/p>\n
While the unit produces enough electricity for 912,000 homes, it also devours 250 tons of coal per hour, leaving it a substantial emitter of greenhouse gases. Chancellor Angela Merkel\u2019s government is considering proposals to close Germany\u2019s remaining coal plants by 2030\u2014even the cleanest of them. Manufacturers and utilities are hitting back with more efficient technology that makes the most polluting fossil fuel a little less dirty.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you look only at CO2 emissions as a data point, then of course we should stop burning coal,\u201d said Michael Keroulle, chief commercial officer of GE Steam Power, a unit of the Boston-based conglomerate that\u2019s selling coal technology. \u201cBut the reality is that countries need access to secure, reliable energy, and renewables can\u2019t always provide that.\u201d<\/p>\n
The GE plant near EnBW\u2019s headquarters in Karlsruhe, about 90 miles south of Frankfurt, is one of more than 300 plants worldwide tagged as \u201cclean coal\u201d by the industry. They represent about 12 percent of the power produced by coal around the world, according to data from the S&P Global Market Intelligence World Electric Power Plant Database, Platts.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s raised alarm among environmental groups, who point to scientific research suggesting the world must swear off fossil fuels by the middle of the century to prevent the worst impacts of global warming.<\/p>\n
\u201cClean coal is a deliberately misleading term,\u201d said Lauri Myllyvirta, a senior analyst at Greenpeace\u2019s air pollution unit. \u201cIn the context of cutting greenhouse-gas emissions, there are two kinds of coal: far too polluting, and far too expensive.\u201d<\/p>\n
The moniker \u201cclean coal\u201d was most famously used by U.S. President Donald Trump in his State of the Union address and actually refers to a range of technologies. Some remove impurities from different grades of the fuel to make it burn more quickly, delivering greater power. Others scrub sulfur dioxide, which causes acid rain, and nitrous oxide, which harms the Earth\u2019s ozone layer and worsens respiratory conditions such as asthma.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have ended the war on American Energy\u2014and we have ended the war on clean coal. We are now an exporter of energy to the world.\u201d \u2014Donald Trump in his State of the Union address, Jan. 30, 2018<\/p>\n
Trump made reviving what he calls \u201cbeautiful clean coal\u201d a cornerstone of his legislative agenda, vowing to bring back jobs to the ailing industry. His administration has also argued that keeping coal plants provides a cheap and secure energy source that can\u2019t be matched by wind, solar or natural gas.<\/p>\n
The most promising systems essentially burn coal at super-high temperatures more quickly than conventional plants, squeezing more energy out of each ton of fuel. Their costs are about 40 percent higher than a regular plant, and their carbon dioxide emissions are 25 percent to 35 percent lower, according to the World Coal Association. On pollution, they can even rival natural gas, the cleanest fossil fuel.<\/p>\n
Some 70 percent of the energy is lost when coal is burned in a typical power plant. \u2018Clean coal\u2019 plants still lose more than half the energy content.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe best coal-fired plants are now producing emissions of NOx, SO2 and particulates that are actually lower than gas plants, which is certainly saying something,\u201d said Ian Barnes, principal associate at the IEA\u2019s Clean Coal Center. \u201cFor poorer countries like Bangladesh, the availability of affordable power will help to lift millions of people out of poverty.\u201d<\/p>\n
For the coal industry, this technology represents a better way to slow the growth in emissions while ensuring greater access to electricity.<\/p>\n
The World Coal Association estimates it would cost $31 billion to upgrade 400 gigawatts of coal stations to use the best technologies. That\u2019s a fraction of the $2.4 trillion-a-year investment in clean energy that\u2019s needed to avoid a dangerous warming of the planet, according to a panel of scientists convened by the United Nations.<\/p>\n
The most efficient plants operating now, like EnBW\u2019s so-called RDK8 unit in Karlsruhe, are dubbed \u201cultra-supercritical,\u201d or USC for short.<\/p>\n
The name comes from the method of heating water to make steam, operating at a temperature of 600 degrees Celsius (1,100 Fahrenheit)\u2014a third hotter than an oven set to the self-clean cycle. Under intense heat and pressure, water enters a \u201csupercritical\u201d phase where it\u2019s neither a liquid nor a gas but has properties of both. That steam hits the 50-ton power-generation turbine at Karlsruhe with the force of a bullet, rotating it 50 times a second.<\/p>\n
Manufacturers including GE, IHI Corp. and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. in Japan, Siemens AG in Germany and Doosan Corp. in South Korea are promoting these USC plants as a way to make coal cleaner for places that need cheap energy. They\u2019re vying for orders in Asia, especially China, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Indonesia, which have fewer alternatives than rich industrial countries.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we stop coal-power plants all of a sudden, that will leave the world in disarray,\u201d said Hiroshi Ide, executive officer and vice president of resources, energy and environment at IHI in Tokyo. \u201cThe dangerous thing is if customers choose coal power and pick the cheap and inefficient equipment, which emits a lot of carbon dioxide.\u201d<\/p>\n
Environmental lobbyists are the most obvious threat to these ambitions. Groups like the Sierra Club, backed by Michael Bloomberg, who owns Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg News, along with the Natural Resources Defense Council have focused attention on the harm done by coal pollution. They note that even the best coal plants contaminate groundwater and put mercury and dust into the air\u2014in addition to their greenhouse-gas footprint.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is an honest concern among many in government around the world to modernize their economies and remedy energy poverty,\u201d said David Schlissel, director of resource and planning at the Institute for Economics and Financial Analysis, an environment-focused research group based in Cleveland, Ohio. \u201cFor more than a century, burning coal was an accepted and economical way to do this. This is no longer the case.\u201d<\/p>\n
The clean-coal industry\u2019s bigger hurdle may be finance, which is drying up quickly in Europe and the U.S., mainly because the projects are so costly and complex.<\/p>\n
In the U.S., the only large clean-coal plant is NRG Energy Inc.\u2019s W.A. Parish Unit 8 in Texas, which has a carbon-capture system added to it using Mitsubishi technology. It captures 90 percent of the CO2 in the processed flue gas and also has systems that reduce emissions of sulfur, mercury, nitrogen oxide and particulates. Southern Co. abandoned the clean-coal section of its $7.5 billion Kemper plant in Mississippi after cost overruns and problems building structures that could withstand temperatures above 900 degrees.<\/p>\n
At AES Corp., a utility based in Arlington, Virginia, that operates power plants of all kinds in 15 countries, Chief Executive Officer Andres Gluski has been winding down his company\u2019s commitment to coal mainly because of cost. In the past year, he\u2019s sold or closed 4.5 gigawatts of coal plants and built 3 gigawatts of renewable-energy capacity. A gigawatt is about as much as a single nuclear reactor produces.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou need 20 years just to pay off the debt,\u201d Gluski said. \u201cWhere do you think that makes sense? We don\u2019t see any new coal in the U.S. That\u2019s the bottom line.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even in Asia, where the IEA expects dozens of new coal plants to be built in the coming years, it\u2019s becoming more difficult to get loans. Development banks are shifting more of their support to green-energy projects, backing the goals of governments to rein in pollution.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s really no such thing as clean coal,\u201d said Woochong Um, director-general of the sustainable development and climate-change department at the Asian Development Bank, which is based in Manila. \u201cIn the last five years, we haven\u2019t found the type of coal project we would do.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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