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.