Cleaner coal? Activists now say it’s possible

A few years ago, any environmentalist who said coal had a place in the energy pie would have been considered a traitor by his or her peers. But a new technology that traps pollutants and emissions tied to global warming has made activists rethink that view.

The technology — called integrated gasification combined cycle, or IGCC — gasifies coal before it’s burned, cutting large quantities of pollutants harmful to human health, such as particulates, small components and mercury, from going up the smokestack.

But the process still costs 20 percent more than traditional coal burning, and that means a reluctance to buy in from industry, which is going through a boom. In the mid-1990s, not one utility had plans to build a coal-fired power plant in the United States. Now more than 120 have been proposed, more in the last 12 months than the last 12 years, according to the National Energy Technology Laboratory.

Environmentalists say they’re willing to buy in — as long as the industry does as well, and goes a step further by also using the process to trap carbon dioxide, one of the greenhouse gases that many scientists fear are contributing to global warming.

“We believe it should be considered the requirement for a modern power plant, but until (carbon capture) happens, this is still just the shiny object that distracts us from the nearly 500 dirty coal plants that are polluting the air,” said Greenpeace energy policy specialist John Coequyt.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, for its part, placed the issue front and center as the cover story in the fall issue of its magazine Onearth.

“Until coal is replaced with cleaner fuels, we must somehow make it part of the solution,” Onearth editor Douglas Barasch wrote in explaining why the topic was chosen.

Barasch suggested that all sides in the debate need to give a little. “These technologies are available now,” he wrote. “But their broader adoption requires that environmentalists, politicians, energy executives, and coal miners relinquish old habits of mind.”

A carbon trap?
Utility giant Cinergy is big on the process. “This is the way we need to go to preserve the coal option,” said Cinergy environmental strategist John Stowell.

Cinergy and American Electric Power plan to build IGCC plants in the Midwest in the next decade. Both companies are also involved with the U.S. Energy Department’s FutureGen coal demonstration project, which aims to capture carbon.

But they don’t plan yet to add the capturing equipment on the IGCC plants they aim to build.

That concerns some environmentalists, especially as the technology could increase coal use and open up vast areas of high-sulfur coal in the Midwest that the 1990 Clean Air Act made too expensive to consider.

“If IGCC is not built with carbon capture and storage, it may as well be the old dirty stuff,” said Dave Hamilton, the Sierra Club’s global warming program director. “It will be a cumulative increase in our carbon emissions.”

The Bush administration is not likely to require that, having refused to regulate carbon dioxide citing the costs to the economy. “Until there is such a requirement we’re not going to put that technology in place at this point,” said Melissa McHenry, a spokeswoman for American Electric Power.

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