Carbon…from Al Gore to Michael Bloomberg to enhanced oil recovery

Al Gore’s newly named Climate Reality Project (he’s not giving up!) wants everyone to make September 14-15 “24 Hours of Reality,” with people around the world sharing videos about climate change effects and local approaches to solutions.

Coal’s role probably will be just one focus of the event, which aims at regular people, not so much at policymakers like members of Congress. It seems like the only thing to do right now for people who want to get at greenhouse gas emissions, because CO2 reduction might be last on the list of things that stand a chance of being done in Washington. It might even be first on the list of things that stand no chance of being done in Washington. It appears Michael Bloomberg agrees somewhat with the more grassroots approach.

Bloomberg, through his foundation, has just given the Sierra Club $50 million to expand its work against coal, helping the organization double the number of people it has working on the issue full time. The club has been notably effective working with local groups against individual coal plants, organizing public sentiment, contesting coal plant permits and negotiating with power companies and state officials to get more efficiency and renewables installed (sometimes natural gas, too) to nudge coal out.

That strategy has legs.

(The strategy also doesn’t sit well with everyone. In April, when the Tennessee Valley Authority announced a broad resource plan negotiated with the Sierra Club and others, Representative Ed Whitfield, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Power, decried the TVA deal. Federal energy policy is being determined by privately settled lawsuits and monetary payoffs with absolutely no input from elected representatives in Congress, he fumed: “We intend for this to stop.” But wait, conservatives don’t want federal programs, right? It’s so confusing.)

Attacking environmental permits, delaying them by months or years, is another approach the Sierra Club has pursued. As of this year, permits (unless Congress stymies the Environmental Protection Agency’s continued imposition of the permit requirements) must take carbon emissions into consideration. So far it just means taking small steps to deal with them, mainly by making a plant more efficient.

EPA itself has acknowledged that the long-vaunted solution of carbon capture and storage is not ready for prime time. CCS is just about the only thing that would allow coal burning without release of CO2. So the Sierra Club can’t insist on it. But there may be other things it can try; the full range of attacking permits may not be entirely clear yet.

But will CCS ever be ready? American Electric Power’s announcement July 14 that it was shelving the expansion of its very small CCS pilot at the Mountaineer plant disappointed a lot of people. But as AEP said, the economics just didn’t make sense.

The absence of a mandate to cut carbon means state regulators won’t make ratepayers foot the bill. So the company would need to swallow the cost, and really, one must ask what AEP would have to gain by spending millions to remove a small fraction of the 1,300-MW plant’s CO2 emissions, beyond some moral credit for “doing the right thing” by advancing real-life experience with CCS.

Carbon capture projects that sell the CO2 for enhanced oil recovery at least have a revenue stream. There are lots of these project associated with oil fields. And the Summit Power Group has a new kind of integrated gasification combined-cycle project in Texas with three revenue streams: it’s selling urea as fertilizer material; CO2 to oil producers in the nearby Permian Basin; and power output to the San Antonio utility. This project expects financing soon.

The National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, the group of state officials who regulate electric utilities, adopted a resolution this month urging more federal funding for power plant CCS development, but for EOR purposes, “to increase the energy security of our nation.”

Even if a number of more coal plants could capture carbon and sell the CO2 for EOR, would it be practical? Maybe. If the price was good enough. But even if it was, the figure talked about as the CO2 demand for EOR is 60 million tons. That is 60 million of the 2 billion tons of CO2 coal plants emitted in a recent year. Does this fix the CO2 problem that Al Gore, the Sierra Club and Michael Bloomberg have identified?

Nothing’s simple, though. Yes, EOR demand for CO2 could enable more carbon capture from coal plants. But there are some who object to capturing carbon from coal plants only to sell it to oil producers who use it to pump more oil to make more gasoline to contribute to the CO2 load.

It just goes to show you: if it’s not one thing, it’s another.

Platts