The Guardian Mar 19 2008:
Carbon capture is turning out to be just another great green scam
Cleaner technology is possible, but Labour plans to introduce it so slowly that any benefits will be lost in higher coal output
George
Monbiot The
Guardian, Tuesday March 18 2008
About this article
This article appeared
in the Guardian on Tuesday
March 18 2008
'Coal is so clean and fresh that
the prime minister brushes his teeth with it, Downing Street said
last night. Mr Brown said advances in coal technology meant it was
now one of the cleanest substances on Earth, and an unrivalled
remover of stains and scaling." So says the satirical website
the Daily Mash. The real claims are scarcely battier.
Ministers
are about to decide whether to approve a new coal-burning power
station at Kingsnorth in Kent. This would be the first such plant to
be built in Britain since the monster at Drax was finished in 1986.
As well as coal, it will burn up the government's targets, policies
and promises on climate change.
John Hutton, the secretary of
state in charge of energy, has started justifying the decision he
says he hasn't made. "For critics," he argued last week,
"there's a belief that coal-fired power stations undermine the
UK's leadership position on climate change. In fact, the opposite is
true." Quite so: if we don't burn this stuff the Chinese might
get their hands on it. Or could he be a true believer? Does he really
think there's such a thing as clean coal?
Clean coal's
definition changes according to whom the industry is lobbying.
Sometimes it means more efficient power stations - which still
produce almost twice as much carbon dioxide as gas plants. Sometimes
it means removing sulphur dioxide from the smoke, which boosts the
CO2. Sometimes it means carbon capture and storage: stripping the
carbon out of the exhaust gases, piping it away and burying it in
geological formations. None of these equate to clean coal, as you
will see if you visit an opencast mine. But they create a marvellous
amount of confusion in the public mind, which gives the government a
chance to excuse the inexcusable.
In principle, carbon
capture and storage (CCS) could reduce emissions from power stations
by 80% to 90%. While the whole process has not yet been demonstrated,
the individual steps are all deployed commercially today: it looks
feasible. The government has launched a competition for companies to
build the first demonstration plant, which should be burying CO2 by
2014.
Unfortunately, despite Hutton's repeated assurances,
this has nothing to do with Kingsnorth or the other new coal plants
he wants to approve. If Kingsnorth goes ahead, it will be operating
by 2012, two years before the CCS experiment has even begun. The
government says that the demonstration project will take "at
least 15 years" to assess. It will take many more years for the
technology to be retro-fitted to existing power stations, by which
time it's all over. On this schedule, carbon capture and storage, if
it is deployed at all, will come too late to prevent runaway climate
change.
Kingsnorth will produce around 4.5m tonnes of CO2
every year; if all eight of the proposed coal plants are built, they
will account for 46% of the emissions Britain can produce by 2050,
assuming the government sticks to Brown's new proposed target of an
80% cut. Aviation, using the government's own figures, will account
for another 184% (these figures are explained on my website). Even if
we stopped breathing, eating, driving and heating our homes, the new
runways and coal burners the government envisages would more than
double our national greenhouse gas quota.
The government
seeks to bamboozle us by arguing that the new power stations will be
"CCS ready", meaning that one day, in theory, they could be
retrofitted with the necessary equipment. But even this turns out to
be untrue. In January, Greenpeace obtained an exchange of emails
between E.ON, the company hoping to build the new plant - yes, the
same E.ON that broadcasts footage of fluttering sycamore keys,
suggesting that its dirty old habits have gone with the wind - and
Gary Mohammed, the civil servant drawing up the planning conditions.
Mohammed begins by sending an email of such snivelling
obsequiousness that you can almost smell the fear on it. "Drafting
the conditions for Kingsnorth. If possible I would like to cover CCS
... I admit this suggested condition could be without justification
and premature but no harm in trying to gauge your opinion."
(This "suggested condition" was actually government policy.
Who's running this country?) E.ON replied by claiming that the
secretary of state "has no right to withhold approval for
conventional plant" (in fact he has every right). All it would
allow the government to specify was that the potential for CCS "will
be investigated". Mohammed wrestled with his conscience for all
of six minutes before replying. "Thanks. I won't include. Hope
to get the set of draft conditions out today or tomorrow."
This
exchange took place in mid-January, a few days before the European
commission published a proposed directive specifying that all new
coal-fired stations must be CCS ready. Mohammed must have known that
he was helping E.ON to win approval for the plant before the
directive comes into force next year.
You might by now be
beginning to derive the impression that carbon capture and storage is
not the green panacea ministers have suggested. But you haven't heard
the half of it. Even if it does become a viable means of disposing of
carbon dioxide, new figures suggest that it's likely to enhance
rather than reduce our total emissions.
For the companies
bidding for contracts to bury the gas, one technique is more
attractive than the others. This is to pump it into declining oil
fields. The gas dissolves into the remaining oil, reducing its
viscosity and pushing it into the production wells. It's called
enhanced oil recovery (EOR). The oil the companies sell offsets some
of the costs of carbon storage.
A few weeks ago, the green
thinker Jim Bliss roughly calculated the environmental costs of this
technique. He used as his case study the scheme BP proposed but
abandoned last year for pumping CO2 into the Miller Field off the
coast of Scotland. It would have buried 1.3m tonnes of CO2 and
extracted 40m barrels of oil. Taking into account only the four major
fuel products, Bliss worked out that the total carbon emissions would
outweigh the savings by between seven and 15 times.
So has the
government ruled out enhanced oil recovery? Not a bit of it. Its memo
about the demonstration project says that Hutton's department "will
want to ensure that the treatment of EOR and non-EOR projects are
dealt with on a level playing-field basis". Another document
suggests that it favours this technique: enhanced oil recovery will
lead to "increased energy security, domestic revenue and
employment". But, the government notes, this will have to happen
before the North Sea's oil infrastructure is dismantled. "Now is
the perfect opportunity to realise the significant opportunities
offered by CCS."
Like biofuels and micro wind turbines,
carbon capture and storage turns out to be another great green scam.
It will come too late to prevent runaway climate change; the
government has no intention of enforcing it; and even if it had, the
technique is likely to boost our carbon emissions. This is what John
Hutton calls "meeting our international obligations".
Heaven knows what breaking them might look like.
