At a time when the world’s top climate experts agree that carbon emissions must be rapidly reduced to hold down global warming, a leading Italian electricity producer, Enel, is converting its massive power plant here from oil to coal, the dirtiest fuel on earth.
According to IHT, over the next five years, Italy will increase its reliance on coal to 33 percent from 14 percent. Power generated by Enel from coal will rise to 50 percent. And Italy is not alone in its return to coal.
Driven by rising demand, record high oil and natural gas prices, concerns over energy security and an aversion to nuclear energy, European countries are slated to build about 50 coal-fired plants over the next five years, plants that will be in use for the next five decades. The fast-expanding developing economies of India and China, where coal remains a major fuel source for more than two billion people, have long been regarded as one of the biggest challenges to reducing carbon emissions.
But the return now to coal even in eco-conscious Europe is sowing real alarm among environmentalists who warn that it is setting the world on a disastrous trajectory that will make controlling global warming impossible. They are aghast at the renaissance of coal, a fuel more commonly associated with a sooty Dickens novel and which was on its way out just a decade ago.
There have been protests in Civitavecchia in Italy ; at a new Vattenfall plant in Germany ; at a plant in the Czech Republic ; as well as at the Kingsnorth Power station in Kent , which is slated to become Britian’s first new coal-fired plant in over a decade. European power-station owners emphasize that they are making the new coal plants as clean as possible. But critics say that “clean coal“ is a pipe dream, an oxymoron in terms of the carbon emissions that count most toward climate change. They call the building spree short-sighted.
Aging Infrastructure
Enel, like many electricity companies, says it has little choice but to build coal plants to replace aging infrastructure, particularly in countries like Italy , which prohibit nuclear power. Fuel costs have risen 151 percent since 1996, and Italians pay the highest electricity costs in Europe .
In the United States, fewer new coal plants are slated to go on line, in part because it is becoming hard to get regulatory permits for those previously planned and in part because nuclear power is an alternative, politically unacceptable in much of Europe. In terms of cost and energy security, coal has all the advantages, its proponents argue. Coal reserves will last for 200 years, rather than 50 like natural gas and oil. It is relatively cheap compared to oil and natural gas, although coal prices have tripled in the past few years. More important, many countries export coal--there is not a coal cartel--so there is more room to negotiate prices.
Clean coal is a term coined decades ago by the industry, referring to its efforts to reduce local pollution. Using new technology, clean coal plants sharply cut down the number of sooty particles spewed into the air, as well as gases like sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide. The technology has no effect on carbon.
In contrast, the technology that the industry is counting on to reduce the carbon emissions that add to global warning--carbon capture and storage--is not now available for coal. No one knows if it is feasible on a large, cost-effective scale.
Underground Reservoirs
Enel says it will only start experimenting with the technology--in which carbon emissions are pumped into underground reservoirs rather than released--in 2015, in the hopes of “a solution“ by 2020.
In the meantime, new coal plants will be spewing more green house gas emissions into the atmosphere than ever before, meaning that current climate predictions-- dire as they are--may still be “too optimistic,“ he said. “They assume the old energy mix even though coal will be a larger and larger part.“
The problem is that carbon capture and storage, the holy grail of clean coal, will take global coordination and billions of dollars in investment, Sachs says, which no one country or company seems inclined to spend.
There are a few dozen small demonstration projects in Europe and in the United States , most in the early stages. But progress has not been promising.
The European Union had pledged to develop 12 pilot carbon capture projects for Europe , but said that was not enough. There is a new coal-fired plant going up in India and China every week and most of those are not constructed in a way that is amenable to carbon capture, even if it were developed.
Many have likened carbon capture’s road from the demonstration lab to a safe, cheap, available reality as a challenge equivalent to putting a man on the moon. Norway , which is investing heavily to test the technology calls carbon capture its “moon landing.“ In fact it may be even harder than that. It is a moon landing that must be replicated daily at thousands of coal plants in hundreds of countries, many of them poor.
Plants that are capable of capturing carbon gases--those that generate pure carbon as an efflux--cost 10 percent to 20 percent more to build and only a handful exist today.
