Planned Coal Plants Reverse 5 Times CO2 Impact Of Kyoto Protocol

Mark Clayton of the Christian Science Monitor has written an excellent analysis of the carbon dioxide emissions of planned coal-powered electric generation plants.

China is the dominant player. The country is on track to add 562 coal-fired plants - nearly half the world total of plants expected to come online in the next eight years. India could add 213 such plants; the US, 72.

The rapid industrialization of China and to a lesser extent India, rising natural gas prices, concerns about energy security, and large coal reserves in the United States and China are all driving the shift toward the construction of electricity generators that burn coal.

It is worth noting that the Kyoto treaty does not place any CO2 emissions restrictions on India or China.

Without the development and deployment of CO2 sequestration technology these coal plants alone will boost world CO2 emissions by 14% in a mere 8 years.

Without such technology, the impact on climate by the new coal plants would be significant, though not entirely unanticipated. They would boost CO2 emissions from fossil fuels by about 14 percent by 2012, Schmidt estimates.

One thing that is striking about these numbers is the scale of world economic growth. Coal-fired electric plant construction alone in only 8 years can boost worldwide CO2 emissions by 14%. There is so much money sloshing around in the world that in a relatively short period of time a few hundred gigawatts of electric power plants can be constructed.

The other point that strikes is that if nuclear power was cheaper (perhaps using a pebble bed modular reactor approach) than coal then these plants would be getting built as nuclear plants and there would be no concern

Clayton comments that a US government effort named FutureGen to build a large scale technology demonstrator coal generation plant with CO2 sequestration technology is slipping its schedule due to lack of a push for it by the Bush Administration. Right he is. The schedule for the completion of the FutureGen plant has it being completed in 2018 but even that late date looks unlikely to happen.

Industry groups are becoming increasingly impatient with the US Energy Department's (DOE) handling of the FutureGen project because the government has failed to provide basic financial details and DOE's schedule for building the near-zero-emissions coal power plant is slipping.

...

Under DOE's plan, the department would spend $620-mil by 2018, industry would contribute $250-mil and foreign participants would kick in $80-mil toward the $950-mil facility. Part of that money would go toward a carbon sequestration system that would be used to store CO2 captured at the site.

I do not know whether we face a serious future problem with global warming. But I think it is prudent to spend the money to develop lots of energy-related technology to make it far cheaper to handle the problem should it become clear at some point in the future that CO2 emissions must be drastically decreased.

Over on the Crumb Trail blog the pseudonymous blogger back40 has reacted to my comments about how it would be cheaper to develop energy technologies that reduce CO2 emissions than to lay on a worldwide regulatory regime and he has provided details on the hundreds of trillions of dollars cost estimates made for some of the CO2 emissions reductions proposals. The underfunded DOE FutureGen proposal is a piddlingly small amount of money as compared to what it would cost to implement Kyoto. Even a very ambitious energy research effort on the scale of $10 billion per year (as Nobelist Richard Smalley argues) would still be orders of magnitude less than the costs of enforcing Kyoto starting now. Such an effort would produce cleaner technologies that would be cheaper than today's energy technologies. The market alone would move many of those technological developments into widespread use without any regulatory costs.

Even if we accept the contention of some of the global warming believers (and MIT climate scientist Richard Lindzen thinks the belief in global warming is religious and irrational) that we face a real problem from global warming in the future that problem will not become hugely expensive to the human race for decades to come. Therefore if we spend relatively smaller amounts of money (but still tens of billions of dollars) now on energy research we will eventually be able to reduce CO2 emissions for many orders of magnitude less in costs than if we attempt to reduce CO2 emissions using today's technologies. A big energy research effort is the most rational and cost-effective response to the potential threat of global warming.

Update: The construction of coal-fired power plants is going to continue well beyond just the next 8 years discussed above. The US alone needs 1,200 300 megawatt power plants over the next 25 years.

Electricity demand will increase 53.4 percent over the next 25 years. Meeting this rising growth rate will require the construction of the equivalent of more than 1,200 new power plants of 300 megawatts each—the equivalent of about 65 plants each year. Coal will remain the largest single source of electricity—accounting for 51 percent of power generation in 2025. Clean coal technologies will help meet these needs, plus continue the decline in SO2 and NOx emissions already underway.

That need could be met by building about 330 AP1100 1,100 Megawatt nuclear power plants (perhaps more than if the nuclear plants have lower capacity utilization rates). What would be cheaper? Coal CO2 emissions sequestration or nuclear power? Both costs are likely to drop in the future. Hard to say which will cost less in the longer run.

By Randall Parker at 2004 December 24 02:45 PM  Energy Tech | TrackBack