What was once a mountain. image courtesy of Appalachian Voices. AppVoices.org
Writing in the New York Times, here, Joe Nocera, says,
Sometime this summer, in Odessa, Tex., the Summit Power Group plans to break ground on a $2.5 billion coal gasification power plant. Summit has named this the Texas Clean Energy Project. With good reason.
The people behind this project want people to believe that the energy the plant produces is clean. Mr. Nocera continues.
Part of the promise of this power plant is its use of gasified coal; because the gasification process doesn’t burn the coal, it makes for far cleaner energy than a traditional coal-fired plant.
The plant doesn’t burn SOLID coal. It gassifies the coal, then burns the gas. It’s still burning the coal. Only this process uses energy to gassify the coal. It then uses more energy to capture and sequester 90% of the carbon. Think, Mr. Nocera, how can this make CLEANER? Answer: It Can’t and it Doesn’t. But it can – and does – make it more expensive.
And what about the Arsenic, Mercury, Uranium that are embedded in coal? And the processes that dig coal out of the ground? Refer to Appalachian Voices for more on mountaintop removal.
Nocera continues,
this plant — and a handful of similar plants — has such enormous potential is that it will capture some 90 percent of the facility’s already reduced carbon emissions. Some of those carbon emissions will be used to make fertilizer.
I hope they separate the arsenic, lead, mercury, thorium, uranium, and other toxic heavy metals out of the ash from which the fertilizer is made. Otherwise the “fertilizer” will be laced with toxic heavy metals.
Nocera reports that Laura Miller, former mayor of Dallas, is “the public face of the project.”
“As the mayor of Dallas in 2006, Miller founded the Texas Clean Air Cities Coalition to fight a plan by TXU Energy, a big power company, to build 11 new coal-fired plants.”
I am sure Ms. Miller’s intentions are good. However, she is an executive for Summit Energy. Selling this plant is her job. That is not an ad hominem attack on Ms. Miller. Nocera continues,
So who could possibly be against coal gasification and carbon capture? Ratepayers, for one, mainly because carbon-capture technology is so expensive. In 2011, American Electric Power, or A.E.P., canceled a big carbon-capture project, in part because it was clear that state regulators were not going to allow the company to pass on the additional costs to its customers.
In 2011 or 2012 the Purgen Plant, that was to have been built in Linden, NJ, was also cancelled. Purgen was to have been a 350 to 400 MW plant that would have cost $9.0 Billion – $22.50 per watt. (I estimate Solar today at at $3.50 / watt). I wrote about it on this blog in “Coal Plant with Carbon Sequestration“, April 30, 2009, “Sustainability and Carbon Sequestration,” Feb. 20, 2010. It’s a bad idea for New Jersey and a bad idea for Texas.
Based on Summit’s public information, this plant will have a nameplate capacity of 400 MW. compressing and sequestering carbon requires energy. Most likely, 25to 33% of the energy of the plant will be used in carbon capture and sequestration. Therefore, it’s effective capacity will be 240 to 300 MW. It is estimated to cost $2.5 Billion. That’s only $8.33 per watt to $10.42 per watt – more than double the price of solar.
And Nocera? He ends his argument with ad hominem attacks on Bill McKibben, who he describes as “Mr. ‘Stop Keystone’ himself.” Nocera reports
“When I e-mailed [McKibben] to ask whether he supported carbon-capture for enhanced oil recovery, he replied that if carbon were sent back into the ground ‘the worst possible thing to do with it is to get more oil above ground.’ He continued, ‘It’s time to keep oil in the earth, not to mention gas and coal.’
To me, at least, his answer suggests that his crusade has blinded him to the real problem. The enemy is not fossil fuels; it is the damage that is done because of the way we use fossil fuels. If we can find a way to create clean energy from fossil fuels, then they can become (as they used to say) part of the solution instead of part of the problem. Thankfully, Laura Miller and Eric Redman understand that, even if Bill McKibben doesn’t.
With all due respect to Joe Nocera, Bill McKibben is an authority on climate change and sustainable energy. Mr. Nocera is merely a columnist for the NY Times. The damage, to use Nocera’s metaphor, is in the way we extract fossil fuels, and in the very fact that we rely on them. The solution is in the efficient use of solar, wind, geothermal, marine hydro: Nega-Watts and Nega-Fuel-Watts.
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An analyst with Popular Logistics, Lawrence J. Furman holds a Bachelor’s in Biology, an MBA in “Managing for Sustainability” from Marlboro College, experience with information technology. He can be reached at ‘L Furman 97” @ G Mail.
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The full text of Mr. Nocera’s column is below.
A Real Carbon Solution
By JOE NOCERA Published: March 15, 2013Sometime this summer, in Odessa, Tex., the Summit Power Group plans to break ground on a $2.5 billion coal gasification power plant. Summit has named this the Texas Clean Energy Project. With good reason.
Part of the promise of this power plant is its use of gasified coal; because the gasification process doesn’t burn the coal, it makes for far cleaner energy than a traditional coal-fired plant.
But another reason this plant — and a handful of similar plants — has such enormous potential is that it will capture some 90 percent of the facility’s already reduced carbon emissions. Some of those carbon emissions will be used to make fertilizer. The rest will be sold to the oil industry, which will push it into the ground, as part of a process called enhanced oil recovery.
Let us count the potential benefits if plants like this became commonplace. Currently, some 40 percent of carbon emissions come from power plants. The carbon-capture process Summit will employ “is the only technology that can reduce CO2 emissions from existing, stationary sources by up to 90 percent,” said Judi Greenwald of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. To put it another way, this technology could be a climate-saver.
Second: Environmentalists could call off their war against the coal industry, thus saving tens of thousands of jobs, as climate-destroying coal-fired plants were replaced by clean coal gasification plants. Third: Gas-fired power plants, which already emit 50 percent less carbon than coal-fired plants, could become even cleaner if they included the carbon-capture technology. Fourth: Using carbon emissions to recover previously ungettable oil has the potential to unlock vast untapped American reserves. Last year, ExxonMobil reported that enhanced oil recovery would allow it to extend the life of a single oil field in West Texas by 20 years.
Fifth: China. Too often, American environmentalists ignore the reality that the Chinese are far more concerned with economic growth than climate change. (And who can blame them? All they want is what we already have.) The Chinese are relentlessly building coal-fired power plants, which Western environmentalists couldn’t stop even if they tried. But if power plants like Summit’s — which will turn CO2 into profitable products — were to gain momentum, that would likely catch China’s attention. A reduction of carbon emissions from Chinese power plants would do far more to help reverse climate change than — dare I say it? — blocking the Keystone XL oil pipeline.
The Summit executive most closely associated with the Texas Clean Energy Project is Laura Miller. Her environmental credentials are unimpeachable. As the mayor of Dallas in 2006, Miller founded the Texas Clean Air Cities Coalition to fight a plan by TXU Energy, a big power company, to build 11 new coal-fired plants. During a trip to Europe, she saw both coal gasification and carbon-capture technologies being used. When she left the mayor’s office, she signed up with Summit and became a passionate advocate of the Odessa plant. Eric Redman, the president and chief executive of Summit Power, describes her as “the public face of the project.” (As a young man, by the way, Redman wrote one of the classic works about Congress, “The Dance of Legislation.” It’s still worth reading.)
So who could possibly be against coal gasification and carbon capture? Ratepayers, for one, mainly because carbon-capture technology is so expensive. In 2011, American Electric Power, or A.E.P., canceled a big carbon-capture project, in part because it was clear that state regulators were not going to allow the company to pass on the additional costs to its customers.
To help make the project economically viable, the Texas Clean Energy Project is getting a $450 million grant from the Department of Energy. (Absurdly, the Internal Revenue Service is requiring Summit to pay taxes on the federal grant, which means that a third of it will go right back to the government.) But if the plant proves successful — as I believe it will — and others replicate it, the costs will inevitably come down, and federal help won’t likely be needed.
And the other opponent? None other than Bill McKibben, Mr. “Stop Keystone” himself. When I e-mailed him to ask whether he supported carbon-capture for enhanced oil recovery, he replied that if carbon were sent back into the ground “the worst possible thing to do with it is to get more oil above ground.” He continued, “It’s time to keep oil in the earth, not to mention gas and coal.”
To me, at least, his answer suggests that his crusade has blinded him to the real problem. The enemy is not fossil fuels; it is the damage that is done because of the way we use fossil fuels. If we can find a way to create clean energy from fossil fuels, then they can become (as they used to say) part of the solution instead of part of the problem.
Thankfully, Laura Miller and Eric Redman understand that, even if Bill McKibben doesn’t.