Huffington Magazine Issue 66 | Page 62

THE CARBON QUANDARY Such are the many reasons, advocates for the technology say, that CCS will prove vital in the battle to combat climate change. “Coal is an affordable and available source of energy,” says Victor K. Der, a former assistant secretary for fossil energy with the Department of Energy and now the general manager for North America operations at the Global CCS Institute, a trade organization. Developing countries in particular, Der noted, need affordable power to create industry and jobs, to improve sanitation and water treatment, to provide better levels of human health and higher standards of living as they climb out of the trap of poverty — just as the rich world did over the preceding two centuries. Der points to recent estimates that as many as 1,200 new coal power plants are currently in the planning stages worldwide. “How many of these actually will be built remains to be seen, but clearly the amount of new, unabated coal capacity will be very large,” he says. “And these new plants will require post-combustion capture sometime in the future in order to meet climate objectives.” HUFFINGTON 09.15.13 EASIER SAID THAN DONE Cleaning up the emissions profile of coal, by far the biggest contributor to global warming, currently takes one of three tacks. In some cases, developers have been able to exploit advanced alloys to build coal boilers able to withstand incredibly high pressures and temperatures — a boon for improving the efficiency of coal plants. Such plants, known technically as “su- “We are a society that has inadvertently chosen the doubleblack diamond run without having learned to ski first.” percritical” and “ultra-supercritical” coal plants, use less coal to extract each unit of electricity, resulting in lower overall emissions. Another promising technology converts coal into a synthetic gas, which in its most advanced form is also more efficient and less carbon-intensive than conventional coal combustion. Both of these methods remain in early stages, are wildly expensive, and represent a mere fraction of the global coal plant population, both proposed and existing.