Coal's Future Wagered on Carbon Capture

At a bend in the Ohio River, a bulky new device is being attached to a 30-year-old coal plant near the small town of New Haven, W.Va.

The device is being housed in a building four stories tall and bigger than a football field. A 150-foot-tall exhaust stack — so wide that it would take six adults with their arms fully stretched to reach around it — will reach into the sky. And pipelines will run out of the building and into saline aquifers two miles underground. The entire contraption will start up as early as September.

The purpose: capturing carbon dioxide emissions and stashing them in underground rock formations — a critical part of the global effort to slow climate change. This is the technique that promoters say will make coal “clean” and critics say is an expensive pipe dream.

The stimulus bill devoted $2.4 billion to pilot projects. On Monday the Obama administration awarded $20 million of that to a program that uses supersonic shockwaves to compress carbon for storage, on top of $408 million in stimulus money awarded to two other carbon pilot projects. It has pledged $1 billion more to a model plant called FutureGen. If the Waxman-Markey climate bill becomes law, a new Carbon Storage Research Corp. would pump another $1.1 billion a year into researching this nascent technology, and first movers would get billions of dollars more in bonus emission allowances that could be sold.

Coal companies and environmentalists alike are counting on a breakthrough in carbon capture and storage technology to siphon off harmful emissions from the world’s coal plants. Coal plants in the United States account for a third of U.S. greenhouse emissions. In the past five years China has brought online coal-fired electricity equal in size to total U.S. installed capacity, and new plants are coming online in the developing world all the time. Without a breakthrough on coal plants, it may be impossible to meet emission limits climatologists say are needed.

Washington Post