‘Clean coal’ has a role to play in emissions reduction template
Innovation could change the smudged face of coal - Canada's top emissions culprit
The term “clean coal” might seem like a contradiction to anyone who has handled the stuff, is old enough to remember the era of burning it to heat homes or has merely seen the smudged faces of coal miners in photographs. But the phrase has been in the lexicon of power and mining companies for the past 25 years and is taking on a new and somewhat urgent meaning.
Back in the 1970s and early ’80s, when acid rain was destroying lakes and killing trees, clean coal referred to natural deposits with low sulfur content. Alberta’s sub-bituminous coal, which provides the fuel for most of the power generated in the province, is mediocre in energy content, but has little sulfur, unlike much of the coal burned in eastern North America. It was a source of provincial pride that Alberta coal was not contributing to acid rain.
But the ideal of an acceptable fossil fuel has become much more demanding. With growing concern about climate change in the past few years, clean coal now refers to an evolving, complex technology that involves burning the stuff on an industrial scale with only traces of carbon dioxide emissions or none at all.
Alberta is most famous for its oil, but it is just as blessed with incredible coal reserves – about a 400-year supply, estimates Sherritt International, the firm that, in a development partnership with the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, mines just about all the coal used by thermal power stations across Canada. With growing political pressure to reduce exhaust emissions and the imminent development of a carbon trading market, the companies that mine coal and use it to generate electricity are poised to commit major investments to make coal cleaner.
The Holy Grail for clean coal is carbon capture and storage, which is becoming a household word under the acronym CCS. That means taking the CO2 out of plant exhaust, compressing it and injecting it deep into the earth into disused oil and gas wells, porous rock or salty underground water. Some of the CO2 can be used to for enhanced recovery of hard-to-get oil.
So far CCS is in the research and pilot project stage, but many hopes are being pinned on this emerging technology as the key to environmentally responsible energy.
CCS has potential for all major carbon-emitters, including oil sands plants and petrochemical complexes, but so far much of the research is being directed at coal-burning power plants.
While carbon dioxide emissions in the oil sands attracts a lot more popular attention, cleaning up emissions from coal could reap more immediate benefits for the atmosphere, says Eddy Isaacs, executive director of the Alberta Energy Research Institute, which has doled out $30 million in research grants for CCS.
“I know it is,” Isaacs says when asked whether coal is just as valid a target as the oil sands as a carbon cleanup target. “Fifty-five per cent of our emissions are from coal-fed plants, while 25 per cent are from the oil sands, although the oil sands will grow.”
Unlike in Canada, where greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired electricity fly under the radar, thermal power generation has a high profile south of the border. In the United States, coal naturally attracts attention by providing more than half the power for a population of over 300 million, Isaacs says.
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