New EEE Blog:CNBC Clean Coal Segment Underscores Need for Bridging Technologies
by Evergreen Energy on Mon 23 Jun 2008 03:05 PM MDT | Permanent Link
by Kevin R. Collins
President & CEO
CNBC featured a video segment earlier today about the future of clean coal, and it served to highlight, once again, the huge gap between futuristic “clean coal” technologies and the status quo. This comes on the heels of a New York Times story on the same subject a few weeks ago.
Steve Miller, president of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, and financial analyst Paul Forward of Stifel Nicolaus & Company, Inc. agreed that carbon capture technology is 10-15 years away from wide scale commercial deployment. Other experts say it’s more like 2045 because of huge liability and monitoring issues and the need to build a pipeline infrastructure equal to our current natural gas pipeline system.
Miller and Forward also agreed that coal is a key part of the global energy picture and will remain so for many years to come. With environmental intransigence on once side, leapfrog technology on the other and rising electricity rates in the middle, the “default” position for the energy industry will be to rely on the existing coal infrastructure for decades.
Want proof? Look no further than the North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s 2007 Long Term Reliability Assessment, which examined projected electricity demand in the western United States. NERC projected that by 2016 demand in the Western U.S. will rise by 54,800 megawatts, or 19.5%, but committed additional generation totals only 15,000 megawatts, leaving an unmet demand of 39,800 megawatts.
NERC concluded “Electricity capacity margins continue to decline – action is needed to avoid shortages.”
Can alternatives and renewables make up the difference? Hardly. Across the west, wind accounts for only 3.7% of capacity and it cannot be used reliably for baseline power generation – the kind that’s available 24/7.
A NextGen Energy Council analysis shows that even under the best scenario, where by 2016 where we achieve 30% efficiency improvements, 50% generation by renewables (including hydro) and a 40% renewable capacity factor, there will still be a supply shortage of 12,670 megawatts in the west.
Natural gas is becoming more expensive and is subject to price swings based on weather and demand. As the National Energy Technology Laboratory recently said in a special White Paper on natural gas as an electric generation source, “Expecting natural gas generation to displace coal-fired generation is, at best, problematic. By 2016, in the absence of 18 GW of currently forecast new coal-fired plants, the addition of natural gas plants to supplant these kWh would demand 1.4 Tcf/year, or almost all of the presently forecasted LNG growth.”
U.S. Coal is the only baseline power source available to reliably fill this gap. That is a plain, hard, unavoidable fact.
Circumstances will force generators and regulators to continue using traditional coal generation for decades, and they will need ways to make it cleaner and more environmentally acceptable. That’s where Evergreen fits in.
Just as $4 gasoline has caused a favorable political and popular opinion shift toward offshore oil exploration, rising electric bills and possible brownouts will shift opinion in support of cleaner coal technologies because, frankly, that’s the most practical choice we have.