Over the next five years,
And
In the
The fast-expanding developing economies of
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
“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.”
Coal’s 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
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, Enel’s
chief of generation and energy management. “This will be the cleanest coal
plant in
“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
“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
At the end of January, the Bush administration canceled what was
previously by far the
The European Union had pledged
to develop 12 pilot carbon-capture projects for
Many have likened carbon capture’s road from the demonstration lab
to a safe, cheap, available reality as a challenge equivalent to putting a man
on the moon.
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
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.
“That’s 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
But Enel’s plan to deal with the new
plant’s carbon emissions consists mostly of a map of
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
“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
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 plant’s 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
“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.