Clean coal and dirty coal

Coal is dirty to touch and dirty when it is burnt. Can we ever have clean coal? We burn lots of it in order to generate electricity, and so does the United States, China and India as well as many other countries. It is the fossil fuel that emits the most carbon dioxide when it is burnt. It is a matter of some irony that the closing of Britain’s coal mines had the unintended consequence of making Britain pollute less, as electricity generation switched to natural gas.

Because we have rising gas and oil prices the government is turning back to coal to produce electricity. It can be imported cheaply from friendly nations, so it can be a secure supply of energy. Environmentalists all over the world are trying to prevent coal being sued to generated power because oil is so carbon intensive; in the USA carbon dioxide has been declared a pollutant by one state court and this ruling looks as though it will prevent any new coal power stations until coal can be used in a way that emits very little carbon dioxide – so called “clean coal”.

Unfortunately one local authority in Kent has recently given permission for e.on to build a new coal power plant at Kingsnorth and there are plans for another five or six new coal power plants. So far the energy companies have said that they will get these plants to be as clean as possible but with the existing state of knowledge I am afraid that does not mean very much.

The basic problem is quite simple; when you burn coal you end up releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. If you can find a way to get the carbon dioxide sequestrated before it reaches the air you will have clean coal. You have to do something with the flue gases before they reach the air.

One idea (and probably the best so far) is to capture the hot gas from the flues, which contain both carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and sulphurs and nitrogen and pipe them into some underground store – possibly the underground chambers vacated by the extraction of oil and gas under the North Sea.

I doubt if this will be an economic in Kingsnorth, located in the Medway and far away from the oil North Sea oil and gas fields. It is also uncertain as to whether this sequestration will be permanent. We just do not know.

Another problem is that this method makes coal more expensive because it reduces the energy output that can go into generating electricity. We do not know yet how much more coal will have to be burnt to produce the same power as dirty coal – figures ranges from anther 13% to another 33%. I imagine it depends on just how much carbon is captured, and there will be a point at which the extra coal burning will outweigh in carbon emissions terms the carbon sequestrated.

The problem of dirty coal not really being addressed by the government; instead of a well funded research program which could look at all the possibilities, the government is only funding research into the carbon capture method I have outlined. It is relying on the emissions trading market to drive the carbon price so high that the energy market will be forced to find a solution. It is a pious wish because markets are unpredictable. A year or so ago everyone had faith in markets to regulate banking and lending both in the USA and in the UK. Today banks are in chaos and the loan market has largely dried up. The market has misbehaved as all markets do.

Relying on the carbon market to force energy companies to only use clean coal under various emission trading schemes will be foolish. The system of carbon markets is already a highly artificial because there is no end user for carbon and the value of it is set by some methods which are not precise not ultimately capable of full and complete audit in all the countries that participate in the schemes.

Sequestrating carbon from coal burning is too important to be left to markets. Parliament’s robust Environmental Audit Committee, chaired by Tim Yeo, thinks that all coal burning power stations, new or old, must be fitted with carbon capture devices.  Others think that their permits should depend on them capturing a specific percentage of the carbon emissions and that percentage could be increased year by year. I rather fear that neither of these sound ideas will be followed.

Clean coal is at the moment a pipe dream; by not funding research into all possible types of clean coal technology and by relying on the power generators and markets clean coal will remain a concept, not a reality.