An International Approach to the Carbon Capture and Storage Conundrum

Just a week ago the Department of Energy announced that $612 million dollars from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act are going towards three large-scale carbon capture and storage demonstration projects.  These funds, along with $386 million dollars in private funding, represent one of the most controversial investments in clean energy technology to date.

Simultaneously, the New York Times “Green” blog posed a rarely uttered question, is this the “Twilight of the Coal Era?”  The story focuses on a Siemens contract to build two natural gas turbines for power plants in North Carolina.  The catch is that these power turbines are being built to retrofit old coal plants.  Randy H. Zwirn, president of the Siemens Power Generation Group, believes that this is in fact indicative of a larger trend, America moving away from coal fired plants.  While orders for new natural gas turbines are up, Siemens has no new coal related contracts for America in the pipelines.

So the question becomes, in the face of potentially dwindling demand for coal-burning power plants, should large sums of government money for research, development, and deployment of clean energy solutions go towards carbon capture and storage?  The arguments for both sides are abundant, but at the heart of the issue is that coal is one of the world’s cheapest energy sources and also one of its dirtiest.

While coal may be on the out in America, investment in CCS is still a necessary part of the United States’ energy plan. Unlike the politics which govern energy policy, the economy and environment are international issues.  Today 1.6 billion people in the world don’t have access to power.  When these people do get access to power it will be in the form of the cheapest and most accessible technology, which today has proven to be coal. The Finance Minister of South Africa, defending his nation’s decision to build a new coal plant with World Bank money, summed up the conundrum perfectly in an op-ed in the Washington Post:

If there were any other way to meet our power needs as quickly or as affordably as our present circumstances demand, or on the required scale, we would obviously prefer technologies — wind, solar, hydropower, nuclear — that leave little or no carbon footprint. But we do not have that luxury if we are to meet our obligations…to our own people…

For better or worse the amount of energy created by coal power in the world will only increase for the foreseeable future.  China builds roughly one coal fired plant a week and will have built 550 new plants between 2004 and 2012.  Even Europe seems to be increasing its use of coal power.  European countries were recently reported to be constructing 50 new coal plants.  The Energy Information Administration (EIA) projects that global coal consumption will double by 2030. It may be the twilight of the coal era in America, but it is the dawn for the developing world.

Accepting this reality, it becomes imperative that potential technologies that make coal burning plants cleaner are explored.  This is not to say that CCS is an ideal solution or even a reliable technology, but that we must at least fund its research, development, and deployment if we hope to meet carbon emission reduction goals and close the United States’ trade deficit.  The point here is not to advocate for greater investment in CCS than is already proposed by the Waxman-Markey bill or America Powers Act, but to put an end to an essentially distracting debate.  The debate shouldn’t be about whether we fund CCS or wind and solar, but how we can fund all potentially helpful technologies. To meet the gargantuan challenge of combatting climate change we will need every tool in the toolbox.

While increased funding in R&D leading to breakthroughs in low emission energy technologies is necessary, it alone will not solve our climate challenge.  The international consensus is that greenhouse gas emissions (including carbon dioxide) have to be reduced by roughly 80% in the developed world and 50% worldwide by 2050 to avoid the worst effects of global warming.  If we are to seriously strive for the President’s goal of an 83% reduction of CO2 in the U.S. by 2050, while also trying to achieve the same for the developing world, we are going to have to find ways to make already existing and under construction coal plants cleaner.

In an ideal world giant leaps in solar and wind power technologies could solve our climate problem, but the scale of the challenge is such that we must both make our future and past sources of energy cleaner.  Nonprofit think tanks and research institutes are beginning to rally around this reality, stated concisely by the Clean Air Coalition, “there is widespread agreement that technologies for carbon capture and sequestration from coal power plants are an essential tool to mitigate global climate change …”

As a integral piece of the energy puzzle, CCS must be funded properly or it will be a waste of taxpayers’ money.  Carbon capture technologies will be expensive to develop especially in the latter phases.  The demonstration phase,  known ominously as the technology “valley of death,” will necessitate large amounts of capital without an assurance of positive results.   For this reason it is especially critical that the federal government provides funding not just in early research but all the way through deployment.

To America CCS represents more than an environmental cause but also an economic opportunity.   The current recession highlights what has been a persistent problem, an American trade deficit estimated by the Department of Commerce to be $695 billion anually.  The energy sector promises to be an area of major growth in the world economy.  New technologies necessitate new factories which in turn means new jobs.  But already America is falling behind in the race to capture the emerging clean energy market.  The Breakthrough Institute’s comprehensive report on national progress in clean energy, Rising Tigers, Sleeping Giant, makes it clear that America has fallen behind China, South Korea, and Japan in the production of clean energy products as well as in the investment in future capacity, most notably in solar and wind power technologies.  While America can still catch up in these highly competitive arenas with large direct government investment in R&D, education, and other innovation policies, it can move ahead now in the relatively unexplored realm of CCS.

As the U.S. begins to wean itself off coal power it will continue to have the world’s most abundant stockpile of the precious resource.  Trends in coal exports point to a growing market in developing nations for American coal.  From 2008 to 2009 percentage increases in coal exports were startling.  Brazil increased its purchase of American coal by 23 %, India 29.9%, South Korea 61.1 %, and China imported coal from the U.S. for the first time since 2004.This provides the U.S. with a unique opportunity to begin closing its trade deficit.  But exporting coal alone would be environmentally and economically irresponsible, making it necessary for the U.S. to develop CCS capabilities to sell alongside its vast coal resources.  Using trade agreements we could mandate the purchase of CCS technologies in order to gain access to cheap American coal. In essence America would be killing two birds with one stone, maintaining those jobs related to coal production while also creating high value jobs in CCS research, development, deployment, and eventually private production.

Today our nation faces daunting challenges, an environment heading towards disaster and an economy trying to pull itself out of one.  Yet we have faced such challenges before.  The U.S. emerged from the Great Depression to defeat one of the most powerful war machines the world had ever seen and sent the first man to the moon after watching the USSR beat us into space.  To curb greenhouse emissions and revitalize our economy we will need every tool available and all hands on deck. What we need now is the same spirit of innovation, the same courage to go where no man had gone before, and the audacity to risk failure in the pursuit of progress that we have mustered so many times before.