JEFF JOHNSON, C&EN WASHINGTON
President George W. Bush has a new plan
for coal. He wants to develop a zero-emissions coal-fired power plant
that creates hydrogen and electricity and captures and injects carbon
dioxide deep into the earth. And he wants to do it within 10 years.
But even if such a lofty plan is successful, for it to
matter the President had better think of a way to get electric utilities
to try it. That may prove to be the hardest part of his plan.
Coal-fired electric utilities are powerful and conservative,
and they have a good thing going. Change for them
is expensive and risky.
But the U.S., like the rest of the world, has a coal
problem: There is a lot of it and it is cheap, but it is dirty.
The U.S. gets 52% of its electricity from coal, and coal-fired
utilities pull in some $350 billion in annual revenues. More than 75,000
miners dig 1 billion tons of coal out of the earth each year in the U.S.
Yet these miners barely tap the U.S.'s coal supply. Geologists
say the nation has enough coal to last at least another 250 years. And
U.S. coal is so cheap that even the poor efficiency of the nation's aging
power plants doesn't make much difference.
But along with the jobs, electricity, and economic advantages
of coal come huge piles of waste, destroyed landscapes, lakes of waste
sludge, and water and air pollution.
Coal-fired power plants are responsible for 60% of U.S.
sulfur dioxide emissions, 33% of U.S. mercury emissions, 25% of nitrogen
oxide emissions, and more than 33% of the nation's carbon dioxide air
emissions.
But even those who don't like coal can't get along without
it. In fact, because coal is easy to find, easy to burn, and available
nearly everywhere, any plan to address the future of energy in the U.S.
or the world has to begin with coal.
Bush is a big backer of coal. He is not alone. Chemical
companies that depend on natural gas for fuel and feedstock hope increased
coal consumption by electric utilities will ease demand for natural gas
and help counter the skyrocketing gas prices that have plagued them in
recent years.
"The future is bright for coal," National
Mining Association (NMA) President Jack N. Gerard says. The association
predicts that 2004 will be a record year in coal production, up 3.5%
to 1.156 billion tons. Nearly all of that will go to produce electricity,
NMA says, noting that electric utilities will increase their use of coal
by about 2%.
THE
INCREASE IN use comes with a significant cost
to human health. A 2001 study by the Harvard
School of Public Health looked at nine coal plants around Chicago
and attributed 400 deaths per year to the plants' emissions of particulates
of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. The study estimates that the deaths
could be cut to 100 with the installation of modern pollution control
equipment. Other Harvard studies found similar impacts from coal-fired
power plants in Massachusetts, Georgia, and Washington, D.C., says Jonathan
Levy, one of the authors of the reports.
Another health study by EPA-contractor Abt
Associates estimates that if all coal-fired power plants reduced
their emissions by 75%, a technically achievable goal that most old coal
power plants have dodged, about 20,000 premature deaths could be avoided
each year.
But these air pollution cuts are not likely to happen
for a while. The Bush Administration last year ended enforcement of the
Clean Air Act's new source review (NSR) provisions, which require that
plants install new pollution control equipment when making equipment
changes and upgrades that increase pollution.
Utilities argued that the NSR restrictions were expensive
and blocked them from adding new equipment to make their operations more
efficient. NSR regulations were part of the 1977 Clean Air Act and offered
utilities a break by letting them put off installing pollution control
equipment until they made other plant changes. Utilities did not do so.
Instead, they slowly upped production and made small
changes, and states and EPA did not
enforce NSR. That situation changed in the late 1990s, when the Clinton
Administration and several New England states began to file NSR suits.
The utilities cried foul, and the Bush Administration backed off, offering
up its Clear Skies Initiative to cut SOx, NOx,
and mercury emissions as an alternative.
The Bush initiative requires 70% reductions from plants
that lack pollution control equipment and sets an emissions cap, but
it has gone nowhere in Congress. EPA has recently proposed the initiative
as a regulation. But as a proposal, it could take years to be enacted.
Even if made a regulation today, the initiative doesn't call for full
compliance with its air pollution reductions until 2018. It also does
not address global warming by requiring any reductions in carbon dioxide
emissions.
Rather, Bush has rejuvenated a federal R&D program
for clean coal and coupled clean coal with his push for a hydrogen economy.
OVER
THE PAST 20-plus years, the federal government
has spent some $5 billion for clean-coal technology R&D programs,
split between air pollution control technologies and power systems.
In his 2005 budget, Bush is proposing to boost clean-coal
funding and shift most of it to his clean-coal-power initiative and the
"FutureGen"
program. Clean-coal R&D spending would receive $470 million for 2005
under the Administration's proposal. This works out to a 4% increase
in overall clean-coal R&D from last year's level and a huge jump
from Clinton-era spending for coal R&D.
FutureGen would get at least $287 million plus a cost
share from industry. The plan is to build a demonstration project that
will make hydrogen and electricity from coal while capturing carbon dioxide
and sequestering it underground.
The project is estimated to take 10 years and cost $1
billion. It would create the world's first zero-emissions coal-fired
power plant, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham boasted when describing
the 2005 budget proposal. A consortium of nine coal companies and electric
utilities has shown an interest in the project and would be responsible
for 25% of the costs.
The FutureGen program is based on integrated gasification
combined-cycle technology (IGCC). Officials representing organizations
as diverse as American Electric Power,
the U.S.'s biggest coal-based electric utility, and the Natural
Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, like IGCC and
think it can work. No one, however, believes utilities will easily adopt
it.
An IGCC power plant is more like a chemical plant than
a coal-fired power plant, and that is part of the problem it faces.
DOE estimates that more than 400 commercial gasifiers
are running in the world at some 160 commercial operations, generating
chemicals for production and electricity. Most use refinery residues
as a feedstock for the synthetic gas.
IN
IGCC'S GASIFIER, carbon-based raw material reacts
with steam and oxygen at high temperature and pressure. Mostly hydrogen
is produced in the gasifier, along with carbon monoxide, methane, and
carbon dioxide. The gasifier's high temperature vitrifies inorganic materials
into a course, sandlike material, or slag.
The synthetic fuel leaves the gasifier and is further
cleaned of impurities. It is used in the system to run primary and secondary
gas and steam turbines, similar to a natural gas combined-cycle generating
system.
The primary environmental benefit is increased efficiency
and nearly zero air pollution. Most pollutants are removed before combustion
and are not created when the fuel is burned. Or, in the case of sulfur,
it is collected in a form that can be used. This is a big change for
coal plants, where even clean ones produce a lake-sized impoundment of
sulfuric slurry by pulling sulfur compounds from the stack flue gas.
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CLEAN
COAL Integrated gasification combined cycle technologies
like this one turn coal into hydrogen into electricity with low emissions
of greenhouse gases
(view
full-size image) |
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DOE
HAS HAD two IGCC plants in operation for several
years: a 250-MW unit in Florida at Tampa
Electric Power's facility and a refurbished 300-MW unit at Cinergy's
Wabash River coal-fired power plant in Indiana. The Wabash plant is a
rebuilt 50-year-old facility that now reports an 82% reduction in NOx
emissions and 97% fewer sulfur dioxide emissions. DOE also has two other
plants in the works, according to department officials.
However, Bush plans to do more--he wants to create pure
hydrogen for use in combustion and in fuel cells, and he wants to capture
and sequester CO2. It is an ambitious goal, but why would
any utility chief executive officer adopt it?
George Rudins, DOE deputy assistant secretary for coal,
has 30 years' experience in the federal coal program. IGCC is the most
revolutionary advance ever in the clean-coal technology program, he says.
"It is a huge leap to zero emissions." The driver, he says, will be a
combination of high natural gas prices and concerns about global warming.
IGCC is more efficient, Rudins notes, creating more electricity
per unit of coal and less CO2. "Efficiency will be increased
from about 33% from a traditional coal-fired plant to 38% at a plant
like Tampa to 50 to 60% with FutureGen," he says. But the biggest climate-change
benefit will be from reductions in the release of carbon dioxide.
It works like this, he says: At conventional pulverized-coal
plants, CO2 makes up about 10% of the flue gases. But with
IGCC, the CO2 concentration will be 90%, making it easier
and 10 times cheaper to collect. The plan would be to then inject it
and hold it forever deep underground.
FutureGen would test technology for the separation of
hydrogen and CO2 as well as CO2 sequestration.
Conventional IGCC is already more costly than conventional coal units,
and it is unclear what FutureGen units would cost.
Construction costs for IGCC are expected to be about
$1,200 to $1,400 per kW, compared with $1,000 per kW to build a conventional
plant, Rudins estimates. However, a highly efficient natural gas combined-cycle
plant can be as inexpensive as $500 per kW. But Rudins points out that
coal is much cheaper than gas and is much more plentiful in the U.S.
However, no utility has built an IGCC plant, Rudins acknowledges.
He says technological uncertainties have really hurt, and they lead to
higher financing costs, longer construction times, and other problems.
"Right now, there is not a single company producing a
turnkey IGCC power plant, so you have components sold by different companies,
and that increases the challenge," he says. "If you could somehow wrap
up IGCC in a single component, it would be a no-brainer to get it into
the marketplace."
WHAT
RUDINS WANTS is a tax incentive to help construction
for the first half-dozen or so IGCC commercial plants. The energy bill
had these provisions, he notes, but it became stuck in the Senate, partly
as a result of opposition from the Administration and members of Congress
because of some $30 billion in tax breaks for a host of energy providers,
including coal.
Rudins puts his faith in financial breaks as the way
to spur acceptance and downplays the importance of regulatory drivers
to lead to adoption of a new IGCC technology. Still, he believes that
utilities see some sort of mandated carbon emissions cap or tax coming
in the future, and using IGCC technology will allow them to be positioned
to take advantage of its carbon-collecting potential down the line.
Neville Holt, a technical fellow with the Electric
Power Research Institute, echoes Rudins' description of the benefits
of IGCC and notes that EPRI, the R&D arm for electric utilities,
has a half-dozen related R&D studies going on.
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Rudins
PHOTO
BY JEFF JOHNSON
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"The bottom line, however, is there is no incentive for any
utility--regulated or unregulated--to do anything new," he says. "There
is no reward for risk.
"If you are an independent power producer, you want the
lowest capital cost to reduce your financial exposure, and that, of course,
is natural gas combined-cycle, where capital cost is maybe 40% of a new
traditional pulverized coal-fired plant, let alone an IGCC," Holt continues.
The concept of IGCC is attractive, he stresses, pointing
to its ability to produce hydrogen and potentially capture CO2
while using a plentiful domestic resource. But the main complaint of
utilities, after cost, is that the plants are different.
" 'These are chemical plants,' they say. We hear the
same kind of complaints that we heard about SO2 scrubbers
a decade ago, only with IGCC they come in spades," Holt says.
The plants are complicated, he notes. "You've got a cryogenic
oxygen plant, a pressurized gasifier, gas cleanup equipment, shift reactors,
and a new power system. It is a whole cultural difference.
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Herzog
PHOTO
BY ROBERT POHL
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"We take utility engineers to Florida and Wabash and show
them the plants. They see 250 MW in operation, and they say the economic
size needs to be double that. We can't point to a plant that is exactly
like they want."
Holt comes back to utilities' reluctance to make a change.
He notes that most of the coal-fired power plants operating today were
built 30 to 50 years ago and are completely paid off.
"We've got 320 gigawatts of coal-fired plants running,
and air emissions of only 100 GW are scrubbed. [The utilities'] costs
to generate electricity are about $20 a MW-hour, and they will keep going
as long as possible. It is a tremendous advantage.
"A new pulverized-coal plant will produce electricity
for $40 to $50 a MW-hour depending on coal and location, and there has
been almost none built in the last 20 years," Holt points out.
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Heydlauff
COURTESY
OF AMERICAN ELECTRIC POWER
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"If you take a close look at coal figures, you see coal-generated
gigawatts going up along with coal use. You see about 200 million more
tons of coal used each decade. Utilities are running the old plants more
and more, and they have every incentive to do it," he adds.
ONE
OF THE strongest supporters for IGCC in the power
industry is Dale Heydlauff, senior vice president for governmental and
environmental affairs at American Electric Power. AEP is the nation's
largest utility and biggest coal burner, and it depends on coal to generate
about 70% of its electricity.
AEP is a member of DOE's FutureGen alliance and plans
to pony up at least $20 million for its share of the project. Heydlauff
hopes that the program will make coal a safe bet for the future.
However, he says, when AEP engineers do the math, IGCC
doesn't work. The cost difference is significant, about $500 more per
kW, he says, when compared with a pulverized-coal plant with modern pollution
control equipment, which comes in at $1,100 per kW to build.
"When you compare it to a natural gas combined-cycle
plant at $500 per kW," Heydlauff says, "you understand why just about
the only new capacity built in the last 10 years is gas fired."
For AEP to try IGCC will take a federal subsidy, Heydlauff
says, laying out a plan similar to Rudins'. "Our belief is that over
time, if we build commercial-scale plants and replicate the technology,
we will engineer cost savings, but it will take a half-dozen installations
at commercial scale to get there.
"Without it," he says, "AEP will build gas units in the
near term, even with the $5.00-per-million-Btu natural gas prices. We
have surplus power now, but it will dwindle, and if there are only purely
economic drivers, we will turn to gas and maybe some wind energy."
Heydlauff is disappointed with how DOE is funding the
FutureGen hydrogen and sequestration R&D program--by drawing funds
from the base gasification R&D budget.
"I am deeply troubled by that," he explains, "because
we need more research to develop IGCC technologies. I know we are staring
at a $500 billion deficit, but if we care about energy security and air-quality
issues as well as beginning a down payment on technologies that allow
us to get serious about stabilizing greenhouse gases, we do desperately
need FutureGen, but we also need the base IGCC R&D program to get
there."
He also fears that Congress will take FutureGen program
funds to support other pet projects.
Heydlauff notes that so far, only one utility has tried
IGCC commercially, and that is We
Energies in Wisconsin. It proposed building three new coal-fired
units, one of which was to be an IGCC plant. However, the plan was turned
down last November by its own public utility commission.
The commission's rejection was to protect ratepayers
and was due primarily to cost and the uncertainty of the technology,
says Kris McKinney, manager of environmental policy at We Energies. He
adds that the utility might try it again in the future.
We Energies estimates that the 550-MW IGCC unit would
cost $1,580 per kW to build versus $1,435 per kW for a conventional unit.
When financing, timing, and uncertainties in the new technology are factored
in, total costs would reach $250 million more for the IGCC plant, according
to We Energies officials.
IF
WE ENERGIES tries it again, the Natural Resources
Defense Council has a plan to help. NRDC is attempting to get IGCC defined
by New Mexico and Illinois as a "best available control technology,"
or BACT, under the Clean Air Act. The environmental group tried that
strategy in Wisconsin but failed, says Antonia Herzog, a physicist and
staff scientist with the environmental group. It plans to try again,
she adds.
A BACT designation would require that new coal-fired
units use IGCC. "We are taking a pragmatic approach," Herzog says. "We
support energy efficiency and renewable energy, but in the near to medium
term, coal is not likely to disappear in the U.S. or the world."
Support for the technology by NRDC is due to the potential
for large reductions in emissions of conventional pollutants as well
as CO2 reductions gained through efficiency and carbon removal.
The group wants more R&D on CO2 sequestration to see if
it can be safe and effective.
To spur the technology to commercialization, NRDC wants
the government to require a carbon cap. But meanwhile, IGCC, if defined
as a best technology, will lead to the development and use of new technologies
that will allow easier capture of carbon when or if regulations come
in the future.
"Remember, when a utility builds these units, they can
operate for 40 or 50 years," she adds.
COURTESY
OF PEABODY ENERGY |
LOADED
Wyoming's Powder River Basin mines, like Peabody Energy's mine above,
produced 373 million tons of low-sulfur coal in 2002.
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The question of incentives is one that environmental economists
like to examine, and Dallas Burtraw, senior fellow at Resources for the
Future, has looked long and hard at coal. Asked to choose between pushing
the industry with regulatory-forcing regulations or pulling it along
with tax credits, Burtraw goes with the push.
He points to research from University of California,
Berkeley, engineering assistant professor Margaret Taylor and others
that show that it was the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments that forced utilities
to finally make SO2 reductions, despite decades of incentives
and study. Economists had hoped that newly developed SO2 reduction
technologies would enter the marketplace on their own, drive out inefficiencies,
and lead to reduced sulfur emissions, all by themselves.
"Only when the Clean Air Act mandated a 50% SO2
reduction did anything happen," Burtraw says.
"With a mix of the carrot and stick, the stick turns
out to be a very important instrument," he says. "We are placing a lot
of hope in clean-coal technologies because we are likely to live in a
carbon-constrained economy in the not-too-distant future. Clean-coal
technology gains would seem to be an incentive to achieve carbon reductions
in the near term, but the Administration's unwillingness to use carbon-reduction-forcing
measures in the short term is allowing industry to miss a lot of low-hanging
fruit.
"Forcing regulations don't need to be big, but they must
start soon," he continues. "They begin a process to influence investments
and change industry expectations. They can lead to more public- and private-sector
research and many small improvements on the margin that matter."
Burtraw says right now the Administration is doing nothing
to encourage carbon reductions, other than R&D spending for new technologies.
Without reaching out through regulations or subsidies,
the Administration is having the unintended affect of encouraging utilities
to burn more natural gas for new capacity, which the Administration says
it opposes.
"Uncertainties can kill you," says Paul S. Fischbeck,
a Carnegie Mellon University professor and director of the Center
for the Study & Improvement of Regulations. Fischbeck and his
colleagues have developed models that utilities can use to overcome regulatory
uncertainties and deal with unknown risks.
"We run seminars with utility executives" he says, "and
ask them to raise their hands if they don't expect carbon regulations
in 20 years, and in a room of 200 we get about two or three hands.
"They expect something, but they don't have any idea
what shape or form it will take or when it might be enacted. The cost
of uncertainty makes people afraid to act. It is too risky.
"If there was a somewhat certain future, utilities would
lock in, and decisions would be a lot different," Fischbeck says. "Instead,
they will go with the gas turbines, which are cheap and fast."