Coal-fired power generation worth a look by BC Hydro

Coal-fired power generation worth a look by BC Hydro
Don Whiteley, Vancouver Sun, 30-Nov-2005
Too good to be true
Arthur Caldicott, GSX Concerned Citizens Coalition, 30-Nov-2005

Don Whiteley
Vancouver Sun
Wednesday, November 30, 2005

The B.C. Progress Board's report on the province's energy future was critical of both the provincial government and BC Hydro for allowing the province to become a net importer of electricity, after decades of money-generating surpluses available for export.

"We do need to do something," the report said. "We haven't done anything significant to increase our electricity supply for 20 years ... the least we can do is to take the opportunity to responsibly meet our own energy requirements."

Hydro will soon file its latest Integrated Electricity Plan with the B.C. Utilities Commission. Along with commitments to pursue conservation and green energy, the power utility is expected to put the Site C Dam proposal forward as its recommended big future supply project.

I wonder if they are missing the boat here. A number of recent developments suggest that B.C. should fully explore coal-fired power generation as the big-ticket item, instead of another hydro-electric dam.

Coal-fired power generation is only a couple of points below nuclear energy on this province's irrational hysteria index, largely due to coal's reputation as a dirty fuel and its contribution to global warming through CO2 emissions.

But the coal industry is well on the way toward solving that problem. The Canadian Clean Power Coalition (CCPC), an association of coal-fired generating companies and utilities, has completed the first phase of what will ultimately be a pilot plant to test commercial feasibility of what could be an emissions-free coal-fired generating plant.

"The fundamental principle underlying the goals of the CCPC was to identify a process that would produce electricity from coal in some fashion and that would also provide a relatively pure stream of CO2 that could be captured, further processed as necessary, and subsequently used or stored," says a report on the first phase of the project.

The goal is to get all the pollutants out of the emissions, except CO2, which could then be captured and stored.

And on that score, the U.S. Department of Energy announced just a week ago the completion of a successful pilot project using CO2 for enhanced oil recovery in southern Saskatchewan. The Weyburn Project took five million tons of CO2 extracted from a coal gasification plant in Montana, and used it to breathe life back into a moribund oil reservoir.

"The success of the Weyburn Project could have incredible implications for reducing CO2 emissions and increasing America's oil production," said U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel W. Bodman in a press release. "Just by applying this technique to the oil fields of Western Canada we would see billions of additional barrels of oil and a reduction in CO2 emissions equivalent to pulling more than 200 million cars off the road for a year."

Mark Jaccard, a professor of resource and environmental management at SFU, has just published a book called Sustainable Fossil Fuels: An Unusual Suspect in the Quest for Clean and Enduring Energy, in which he writes extensively about this project and its potential to help with global warming. [The Sun's Don Cayo gave the Jaccard book a three-part infomercial, available at www.sqwalk.com/blog/000540.html]

"I should emphasize that when we talk about clean coal technology, I mean clean -- nothing," Jaccard said in an interview. While the Weyburn project used CO2 from a coal gasification project, the gas can just as readily be captured from a generating station that burns the coal. He explained that CO2 injection to enhance oil recovery will provide just the kind of economic jump-start that clean coal technologies need.

CO2 injection to enhance oil recovery is not new -- it has been underway for nearly 30 years. The technique was out of favour when oil prices were low, but with crude oil expected to remain well above $40 US a barrel for the foreseeable future, the economics look good.

Another piece to the puzzle, from a B.C. perspective, is that North America's biggest supplier and distributor of CO2 for enhanced oil recovery is Kinder Morgan, the company that just completed its purchase of Terasen.

In the press release announcing completion of the acquisition, Kinder Morgan said it will "conduct a comprehensive feasibility analysis of CO2-related opportunities in Canada utilizing this expertise for the purpose of identifying and pursuing viable projects."

B.C. has huge coal reserves in almost every part of the province. More than 25 years ago, BC Hydro was considering a coal-fired generating plant at Hat Creek, but emissions technology was in its infancy at that stage and the impact was anything but zero.

Hydro spokesperson Elisha Moreno said the company turned its Hat Creek coal licences back to the provincial government more than a year ago, and is not pursuing any coal-fired power generation at the moment.

"Someone can make a proposal," she said, referring to Hydro's commitment to purchase energy from independent power producers.

"We'd look at it on costs. We still have our 50-per-cent clean criteria to meet. Obviously coal challenges that. The resource is there, but the challenge is public perception."

But if Hydro is willing to consider spending $3.5 billion on its own account to build a new hydro dam on the Peace River, why wouldn't it consider the same kind of investment in other technologies -- and not just coal?

don_whiteley@telus.net

© The Vancouver Sun 2005

TOP

Natural gas WAS attractive, as a generation fuel source, because it WAS cheap, plentiful and burned much cleaner than coal, which was similarly cheap and plentiful.

Once carbon dioxide emissions became an issue, natural gas was even more attractive, with approximately a third the greenhouse gas emissions for comparable electrical output.

Then natural gas became not so plentiful and the price went up and up and up and all those proposed natural gas plants were shelved, everywhere except in Nanaimo, since BC Hydro seemed to be the last place in North America to notice price and supply trends with gas that were becoming evident to others five years ago.

With the increase in gas prices, the interest in coal-fired generation regenerated, so to speak.

But of course, the reputation of coal as a dirty fuel source hindered its acceptability, and other jurisdictions, like Ontario, found themselves in conflicting situations - on the one hand, initiatives to phase-out of coal generation because of its emissions ran smack into the relatively cheap cost of the fuel and our insatiable demand for electricity.

The industry met this with branding, with marketing, and with technology: the word "coal" was no longer uttered by coal people, without the word "clean" prefixed to it.

"Clean coal" has indeed taken on a life, but there's a big cost to it. Building a plant that implements "clean coal" technologies that result in emissions from coal combustion, equivalent to emissions from a state-of-the-art natural gas plant, may guts the competitive edge that cheaper coal has as a fuel.

Capturing greenhouse gases and disposing of them in some way that is more acceptable than simply spewing them into the atmosphere, is another issue. What works with coal, works with natural gas. But a little contemplation of what these guys are proposing - capture the GHGs at the generation source, move them to depleted oil fields to be pumped back into the ground to extract more oil - isn't a simple or inexpensive task. It hasn't been done on any scale yet. It's all new. The capture technologies cost a whack of dough. The infrastructure to get the GHGs back to the oil fields (pipe, rail, truck) doesn't exist and/or needs extensive investment. The sequestration integrity of the exercise is largely unknown.

The US led Weyburn project cited in the article, is all experimental. It has no economic underpinnings. So all this talk about carbon sequestration is so much talk. And experiment. I'm not aware of any company anywhere that is proposing a production coal-fired generation facility that incorporates carbon sequestration - at least nothing on an industrial scale, that does not rely on huge subsidies. Your comment about too good to be true, and perpetual motion is wonderfully apt.

FutureGen is a US-government led proposal, that may result in an emissions-free coal-fired generation plant. But it's all drawing board and lofty vision right now, seeking participation by other countries, blah, blah. http://www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/powersystems/futuregen/

Interesting, too, is coal's ultimate solution to what to do with all the carbon dioxide. It's the same answer the nuclear industry has to the same problem with wastes. Bury it somewhere. Ocean, underground reservoirs. Outa sight. Another great ecological legacy for our kids.

In a roundabout return to your question, why isn't this carbon dioxide method applicable to natural gas plants? Well, it is, but no-one cares very much because a) natural gas is so expensive that no-one is much interested in developing any plants right now, b) natural gas isn't imbued with the same "dirty" reputation that needs to be overcome for this renewed interest in coal to move from unacceptable to acceptable.

Much of the talk about cleaning up coal is just talk - proponents of real projects are not including carbon sequestration in their proposals. Here in BC, proposals for coal-fired generation are likely to crop up again with BC Hydro's F2006 Open Call for Power, which may be open for bids in December. Any proposals are likely to be nickle-and-dime operations, small plants, probably "mine-mouth" plants (where they propose burning unmarketable "waste coals" which cost them nothing and don't have to be shipped anywhere), with only as much emission control technology to meet the BC government emissions guidelines. Anything better than that will cost too much, and may push the project out of competition.

A quick final word about the BC government guidelines for coal plants. The Liberals came to power in 2001 beholden to big coal mining companies and donors like Teck Cominco, Fording, etc. The Energy Plan issued in 2002 promised regulations that would enable coal generation to get going in BC. The Coal-fired Power Boiler Emission Guidelines were issued in 2003, setting limits for three substances - nitrogen oxides (NOX), sulphur dioxides and particulates. The limits were disgusting - among the most lenient limits in the regulated world. Mercury, a powerful toxic in even the smallest quantities, and a predictable emission from coal generation, was not regulated at all.

In August 2005, the new Ministry of Environment revised the 2003 document, and actually came close to a set of limits that is close to those of other jurisdictions. Not only that, they included mercury.
Coal-fired Power Boiler Emission Guidelines

This would seem like a good thing, something the government would laud itself for. But the government has been pretty quiet about these new limits. Why?

The answer may be that the government is quietly setting the stage for coal-fired projects, but wants to remove the charge of "dirtiest plants in North America" from the list of criticisms these projects will be subject to.

Back to your comment about perpetual motion, isn't that the illusion of fossil fuels? When all the fundamental economic and ecological costs of fossil fuels are accounted for, the net outcome is ...

TOP