Europe Turns Back to Coal, Raising Climate Fears
Richard Moore
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/world/europe/23coal.html
April 23, 2008
Europe Turns Back to Coal, Raising Climate Fears
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
CIVITAVECCHIA, Italy At a time when the worlds top climate experts
agree that carbon emissions must be rapidly reduced to hold down
global warming, Italys major electricity producer, Enel, is
converting its massive power plant here from oil to coal, generally
the dirtiest fuel on earth.
Over the next five years, Italy will increase its reliance on coal to
33 percent from 14 percent. Power generated by Enel from coal will
rise to 50 percent.
And Italy is not alone in its return to coal. Driven by rising
demand, record high oil and natural gas prices, concerns over energy
security and an aversion to nuclear energy, European countries are
expected to put into operation about 50 coal-fired plants over the
next five years, plants that will be in use for the next five decades.
In the United States, fewer new coal plants are likely to begin
operations, in part because it is becoming harder to get regulatory
permits and in part because nuclear power remains an alternative. Of
151 proposals in early 2007, more than 60 had been dropped by the
years end, many blocked by state governments. Dozens of other are
stuck in court challenges.
The fast-expanding developing economies of India and China, where
coal remains a major fuel source for more than two billion people,
have long been regarded as among the biggest challenges to reducing
carbon emissions. But the return now to coal even in eco-conscious
Europe is sowing real alarm among environmentalists who warn that it
is setting the world on a disastrous trajectory that will make
controlling global warming impossible.
They are aghast at the renaissance of coal, a fuel more commonly
associated with the sooty factories of Dickens novels, and one that
was on its way out just a decade ago.
There have been protests here in Civitavecchia, at a new coal plant
in Germany, and at one in the Czech Republic, as well as at the
Kingsnorth power station in Kent, which is slated to become Britains
first new coal-fired plant in more than a decade.
Europes power station owners emphasize that they are making the new
coal plants as clean as possible. But critics say that clean coal
is a pipe dream, an oxymoron in terms of the carbon emissions that
count most toward climate change. They call the building spurt
shortsighted.
Building new coal-fired power plants is ill conceived, said James
E. Hansen, a leading climatologist at the NASA Goddard Institute for
Space Studies. Given our knowledge about what needs to be done to
stabilize climate, this plan is like barging into a war without
having a plan for how it should be conducted, even though information
is available.
We need a moratorium on coal now, he added, with phase-out of
existing plants over the next two decades.
Coals Advantages
Enel and many other electricity companies say they have little choice
but to build coal plants to replace aging infrastructure,
particularly in countries like Italy and Germany that have banned the
building of nuclear power plants. Fuel costs have risen 151 percent
since 1996, and Italians pay the highest electricity costs in Europe.
In terms of cost and energy security, coal has all the advantages,
its proponents argue. Coal reserves will last for 200 years, rather
than 50 years for gas and oil. Coal is relatively cheap compared with
oil and natural gas, although coal prices have tripled in the past
few years. More important, hundreds of countries export coal there
is not a coal cartel so there is more room to negotiate prices.
In order to get over oil, which is getting more and more expensive,
our plan is to convert all oil plants to coal using clean-coal
technologies, said Gianfilippo Mancini, Enels chief of generation
and energy management. This will be the cleanest coal plant in
Europe. We are hoping to prove that it will be possible to make
sustainable and environmentally friendly use of coal.
Clean coal is a term coined by the industry decades ago, referring
to its efforts to reduce local pollution. Using new technology, clean
coal plants sharply reduced the number of sooty particles spewed into
the air, as well as gases like sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide. The
technology has minimal effect on carbon emissions.
In fact, the technology that the industry is counting on to reduce
the carbon dioxide emissions that add to global warning carbon
capture and storage is not now commercially available. No one knows
if it is feasible on a large, cost-effective scale.
The Struggle to Be Green
The task in which carbon emissions are pumped into underground
reservoirs rather than released is challenging for any fuel source,
but particularly so for coal, which produces more carbon dioxide than
oil or natural gas.
Under optimal current conditions, coal produces more than twice as
much carbon dioxide per unit of electricity as natural gas, the
second most common fuel used for electricity generation, according to
the Electric Power Research Institute. In the developing world, where
even new coal plants use lower grade coal and less efficient
machinery, the equation is even worse.
Without carbon capture and storage, coal cannot be green. But solving
that problem will take global coordination and billions of dollars in
investment, which no one country or company seems inclined to spend,
said Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia
University.
Figuring out carbon capture is really critical it may not work in
the end and if it is not viable, the situation, with respect to
climate change, is far more dire, Mr. Sachs said.
There are a few dozen small demonstration projects in Europe and in
the United States, most in the early stages. But progress has not
been promising.
At the end of January, the Bush administration canceled what was
previously by far the United States biggest carbon-capture
demonstration project, at a coal-fired plant in Illinois, because of
huge cost overruns. The costs of the project, undertaken in 2003 with
a budget of $950 million, had spiraled to $1.5 billion this year, and
it was far from complete.
The European Union had pledged to develop 12 pilot carbon-capture
projects for Europe, but says that is not enough.
Many have likened carbon captures road from the demonstration lab to
a safe, cheap, available reality as a challenge equivalent to putting
a man on the moon. Norway, which is investing heavily to test the
technology, calls carbon capture its moon landing.
It may be even harder than that. It is a moon landing that must be
replicated daily at thousands of coal plants in hundreds of countries
many of them poor. There is a new coal-fired plant going up in
India or China almost every week, and most of those are not
constructed in a way that is amenable to carbon capture, even if it
were developed.
Plants that could someday be adapted to carbon capture cost 10 to 20
percent more to build, and only a handful exist today. For most coal
power plants the costs of converting would be phenomenal, concluded
a report by the United States Environmental Protection Agency.
Then there is the problem of storing the carbon dioxide, which is at
some level an inherently local issue. Geologists have to determine if
there is a suitable underground site, calculate how much carbon
dioxide it can hold and then equip it in a way that prevents leaks
and ensures safety. A large leak of underground carbon dioxide could
be as dangerous as a leak of nuclear fuel, critics say.
As for its plant here, Enel says it will start experimenting with
carbon-capture technology in 2015, in the hopes of a solution by 2020.
Thats too late, Mr. Sachs said.
In the meantime, it and other new coal plants will be spewing more
greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere than ever before,
meaning that current climate predictions dire as they are may
still be too optimistic, Mr. Sachs said. They assume the old
energy mix, even though coal will be a larger and larger part.
An Efficient Plant
On many other fronts, the new Enel plant is a model of efficiency and
recycling. The nitrous oxide is chemically altered to generate
ammonia, which is then sold. The resulting coal ash and gypsum are
sold to the cement industry.
An on-site desalination plant means that the operation generates its
own water for cooling. Even the heated water that comes out of the
plant is not wasted: it heats a fish farm, one of Italys largest.
But Enels plan to deal with the new plants carbon emissions
consists mostly of a map of Italy with several huge white ovals
superimposed subterranean cavities where carbon dioxide potentially
could be stored.
The sites have not been fully studied by geologists as yet to make
sure they are safe storage sites and well sealed. There is no
infrastructure or equipment that could move carbon into them.
The new Enel plant here opens its first boiler in two months. It will
immediately produce fewer carbon emissions than the ancient oil
boiler it replaces, but only because it will produce less
electricity, officials here admit.
Unhappy Neighbors
In the towns surrounding Civitavecchia, the impending arrival of a
huge coal plant, with its three silvery domes, is being greeted with
a hefty dose of dread.
They call it clean coal because they use some filters, but it is
really nonsense, said Marza Marzioli of the No Coal citizens group
in the nearby ancient Etruscan town of Tarquinia. If you compare it
to old plants, yes its better, but its not clean in any way.
The group says that Enel has won approval for a dangerous new coal
plant by buying machines for a local hospital and by carrying out a
public relations campaign. Enel advertisements for the project show a
young girl erasing a plants smokestack.
Most people who took part in a 2007 local referendum voted no, but
the plant went ahead anyway, the group said.
The European Union, through its emissions trading scheme, has tried
to make power plants consider the costs of carbon, forcing them to
buy permits for emissions. But with the price of oil so high, coal
is far cheaper, even with the cost of permits to pollute factored in,
Enel has calculated.
Stephan Singer, who runs the European energy and climate office of
WWF, formerly the World Wildlife Fund, in Brussels, said that math
was shortsighted: the cost of coal and permits will almost certainly
rise over the next decade.
If they want coal to be part of the energy solution, they have to
show us that carbon capture can be done now, that they can really
reduce emissions to an acceptable level, Mr. Singer said.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
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