Environmentalism and the future of coal, part two

So if coal is going to be a major part of our energy system for the foreseeable future, what should we do about it?

First, some of coal’s problems may be solved in unexpected ways through sharp regulation and smarter R&D. Several boiler manufacturers are attempting to design C02 scrubbing retrofits for power plants. Greenfuel is doing the same with an emissions-to-biofuels strategy. Figuring out a way to capture significant portions of emissions from our existing plants would in some ways be an even bigger breakthrough than building a new CCS plant from scratch, as it would not require as much infrastructure investment of the sort that makes new plants politically difficult.
Perhaps more importantly, but less recognized, there are some dramatic changes at the end-use level that could make even coal less damaging environmentally. The emergence of electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids (such as the Chevy Volt and Saturn Vue plug-in, which will likely be on the market within three years) could fundamentally alter coal’s environmental profile. As several studies (including a detailed recent study from EPRI and NRDC) show, plug-in hybrid cars have better net C02 emissions performance than traditional gasoline-powered cars, even if they are powered entirely by electricity from coal-fired power plants that do not do carbon capture. (Full disclosure: EPRI is a funder of my research group, though my personal funding comes from Stanford University’s general funds — and I was not involved in any way with the study.)

Combine this with the lower price of running a car on electricity, the energy security benefits of using an abundant domestic fuel, and the potential to achieve far more dramatic reductions in emissions if power plants capture and store C02 (in a way gasoline powered cars never could), and suddenly coal, while certainly a dramatically sub-optimal solution, begins to look far more palatable in the short-term — at least from a C02 perspective. Doing a “well-to-wheels” analysis of coal in the transport sector also causes us to change our thinking about emissions, focusing less on the amount of C02 released in combustion than on whether the usage of the fuel is point source (like power plants) which can, at least in theory, be captured, or mobile source (like gasoline-powered transport) which is pretty much impossible to capture.

As for how to bridge the gap between where we are and where we need to be, a global Apollo Alliance-type approach, with substantial revenue going to clean up sources like coal, would have been a much better solution than chasing after the failed strategy of Kyoto. Getting serious about FutureGen, as the Bush administration has failed to do, would also be helpful. Yes, these sources of emissions reductions will be expensive at first — but they are also a necessary option to have at our disposal.

Gristmill