Why FutureGen had to die

The blind alley of more coal

Posted by John McGrath (Guest Contributor) at 11:32 AM on 25 Mar 2008

Thomas Homer-Dixon, whose book I adore, has written an op-ed in The Globe and Mail arguing in favor of large government investments in carbon capture and sequestration technology. His advocacy of CCS has long confused me -- my reading of his book suggested (to me, anyway) that large-scale CCS was precisely the kind of technology we should avoid like the plague.

To recap: Homer-Dixon builds on the work of Joseph Tainter, who argues that societies respond to pressures and challenges by investing in complexity. But these investments come with increasing costs as time goes on, until society finds itself investing more in complexity than the challenge/pressure actually costs. In Tainter's example of the Roman Empire, it eventually became more expensive to run the Empire than it was worth to the local peasant, whose taxes had gone nowhere but up for the previous century, so the peasants didn't put up much of a fight when the Goths came through. Paying tribute to the barbarian was less of a burden than paying taxes to Rome, so the Empire imploded -- not because the Empire was militarily weak, but because people had been living in a system of negative returns.

Homer-Dixon's book argues that when we start getting to negative returns on increasing complexity, the proper response is new, more resilient systems, less about "efficiency" than resilience, withstanding the inevitable shocks that face any system.

We are at a pretty crucial decision point, or indeed past it: Do we keep investing in fossil fuels and the systems required to sustain them, or do we invest in the more resilient energy system of the future? Prof. Homer-Dixon and I agree that the grid of the future should be more renewable and resilient, but he argues in his op-ed that the scale of the climate crisis means we need to be using CCS now. But the two futures are not compatible, and I think we need to understand some pretty fundamental flaws with industrial CCS:

CCS will always deliver less energy to the consumer per pound of coal burned. The act of capturing and sequestering carbon is, by its very nature, going to require energy. (We are doing work, after all.) This energy will itself certainly come from fossil-fueled plants, meaning that any CCS plant will effectively be burning more coal to deliver the same amount of energy than its non-sequestering counterpart.
CCS will almost certainly be paired to large, centralized generators to achieve the required economies of scale. This will prejudice economic and political decisions away from generation and grid technologies that would build the resilient, renewable grid.
Any underground caverns used for CCS could also, arguably, be used for compressed-air energy storage. But if the whole point is to "never" let that CO2 back in to the atmosphere, you obviously can't do both at the same time. There is a large but finite number of these underground basins -- so, in some places, of course CCS will come at the expense of energy storage, one of the key developments necessary for the renewable future. (Bonus: compressed-air energy storage systems actually exist, and have for decades.)
So far, almost all of the existing CCS projects have been explicitly designed to increase the level of fossil-fuel production -- usually natural gas fields past their prime.

Add them up and 1, 2, 3 and 4 mean that large-scale investment in CCS will, at the very least, crowd out investment in renewables, and in the worst-case scenario actually further humanity's dependence on fossil fuels -- the exact opposite of what we should be doing. Even if we could wave our wand tomorrow and make all coal-burning plants everywhere carbon-sequestering, the simple fact of point No. 1 means the net effect would be a dramatic increase in our coal consumption. How is that a step in the right direction? And even if you think it is, do you think the families of Appalachia would agree with you?

When you add into the equation the declining costs of renewables, the rapidly-expanding costs of fossil fuels (excluding the environmental costs), and the fact that these two choices are incompatible with each other, I think CCS is exactly the kind of negative-returns investment in complexity that we can no longer afford. We will get less energy, make the future even dimmer for renewables, and potentially worsen our long-term problems by further ensconcing the fossil fuel industries at the center of our universe. And for what? Given the fate of FutureGen, whose price tag exploded to the point that even the Bush administration pulled the plug, we can say one thing for sure: not emitting carbon in the first place is almost always and everywhere going to be cheaper than trying to bury the evidence of our crime. So why bother? Homer-Dixon writes:

Even holding greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to double their pre-industrial level -- a limit that still risks severe climate disruption -- will require reducing worldwide emissions about 80 per cent below their business-as-usual level by 2050. Such a huge cut, even over 40 years, will require a staggering transformation of the global energy system.

Yet for the foreseeable future, modern societies and their industries will depend on centralized sources of high-reliability power to supply a large fraction of their energy. Nuclear reactors and coal-fired plants with CCS are arguably the only two methods of generating massive quantities of reliable low-carbon power using today's technologies. We can probably afford to reject one of these two options and still cut emissions quickly. But if we reject both, the problem gets vastly tougher and perhaps impossible. Why fight with one hand tied behind our back?

First off, if we start by assuming that we'll need large, centralized stations in the future, then of course we've already prejudiced any debate in favor of coal and nuclear. Secondly, I'm not sure under what criteria CCS counts as "today's technologies" but solar, wind, and other renewables do not. Given that there's not a single existing and commercially-operating CCS power plant but the installed capacity of wind turbines is now greater than 90,000 mW, and some countries get more than 30 percent of their electricity from wind, I find the argument that these technologies cannot scale to be puzzling indeed. Spain's installed wind capacity grew by an order of magnitude in just seven years, and it is now larger than the Spanish nuclear sector.

But say it were true: the proper role of public policy in cases like this is to create the conditions necessary for technology to scale quickly. Adam Browning brought up the example of the integrated circuit a while back, and it's worth asking how successful Texas Instruments would have been if it hadn't invented the IC at precisely the time the U.S. government was building both the Minuteman missile and the Apollo launch vehicles. And Spain, and other countries with large and growing wind sectors, have found success due to well-executed policies that have allowed those industries to scale up quickly.

Prof. Homer-Dixon argues that there's green hypocrisy at work here: we support subsidies for renewables but not for CCS. That would be hypocrisy, except the argument is (usually) not over what the proper tools for policymakers are: the argument is what it has always been, an argument over the proper goals.

I want to stress that I'm pretty sure Prof. Homer-Dixon and I agree on the long-term vision: an energy system powered by renewables, with a substantial amount of energy storage, can not only be cleaner and better but also more resilient. Our disagreement is on what could only be a generations-long detour in to the blind alley of CCS technology, when the proper objective should be to aim for the system that we actually want.

For story: Why FutureGen had to die
19 Comments | Post a Comment

ccs and nuclear

The reason I'm opposed to both of these is just as you said - they head in exactly the wrong direction. CCS is a means of propping up the fossil fuel system, while both CCS and nuclear only further intensify the high-consumption, high-impact paradigm. Both only seek the further centralization of infrastructure, and of political and economic power.
It's unfortunate that Homer-Dixon accepts as doctrine that this gargantuan energy consumption must continue, and is therefore a de facto ideologist of the demented "growth" ideology.

What we need is the opposite of all this - to free ourselves of the growth and megalomania mindset, and instead to aggressively sound the call to Simplify, that this course is not sustainable, that the only choices are to voluntarily be more modest in our impacts, or else have nature forcibly chasten us.

Toward this, the vision of a more resilient, sustainable energy system is clear -decentralized, renewable, simplified, no longer allowing the accumulation of concentrated power which has proven so destructive. (I'm sorry if Homer-Dixon believes this makes me some kind of "leftist" renegade, but the historically proven fact is that immense SIZE of wealth or power is an absolute evil, while smallness, decentralization, simply has less opportunity for mischief.)

As far as subsidies go, there is of course no contradiction in supporting subsidies which propel the system in the right direction but opposing those which do the opposite.

by Russ at 12:58 PM on 25 Mar 2008

Rumors of the demise have been greatly exaggeratd

Thanks for the link to Keith and Homer-Dixon's thoughtful editorial. You have some misconceptions in your reply, john. Like some of the other writers here.

FutureGen was killed when it touched the third-rail of Administration climate objections - Bush can do nothing about AGW that might cost money. But the utilities are suddenly panicky because they see cap-and-trade ahead and need a plan for their baseload. The price of wind, solar, coal and nuclear power have ALL soared drastically in the past few years. Don't be so sure FutureGen is dead. It could be built by the next Administration, if they have any sense.

DOE took the money from FutureGen and are putting it in multiple CCS projects. They'll fund CCS at a much higher level, trying several capture processes including one suitable (perhaps) as a retrofit. They will inject C02 into monitored wells at high volumes. The downside is DOE foolishly killed what is essentially a long-term efficiency project to fund this. IMO the next Administration will drastically increase $ for energy research. We need to be sure that budget again includes the orphaned renewables and that policies are put in place to drive their growth.

That is not true. FutureGen efficiencies were equal or higher than most present coal plants, even with sequestration.
Of course it will. That's why we'll need electric and PHEV to use that base-load, nightime power.
The CO2 will be sequestered in deep saline reservoirs and unmineable coal seams, not in the empty caverns often used for natural gas. So there is no conflict . Now if as you suggest, the release of CO2 is awful, imagine how bad it would be for the methane to slip out. 20X worse, right? Yet no one bothers to talk or think about that. Why? Because natural gas storage clearly works.
That is a lucky thing, since it has given us alot of experience in the technology. Put a rising price on carbon and sites won't be limited to depleted oil and gas fields. (But CO2 sequestration must still be proven and regulated first. )

Perhaps someone here will eventually figure out that supporting renewables should be linked to supporting CCS demonstrations. Otherwise you simply get new Administrations canceling perfectly good projects when they like one over another. We don't have time for that stupidity. We will need all the wedges of reduction options that are available.

by Jay Alt at 1:10 PM on 25 Mar 2008

gas storage

Because natural gas storage clearly works.

For years, perhaps decades. But centuries or millennia? You're conflating two very different problems.

by GreenEngineer at 1:23 PM on 25 Mar 2008

CCS as carbon insurance.

Even if we are able to get sufficient renewables to cut our emissions, it is unlikely that developing countries like China, India will do so as well. Having viable CCS at least gives them another option that wouldn't be disastrous for the rest of the world. Jay is right about the lack of competition for compressed air storage sites, carbon sequestration is NOT high pressure gas in the ground, but rather CO2 which dissolves into fluids -or chemically combines with minerals, these are not the same formations that we would use for compressed air storage.

There certainly is a case to be made for multiple small scale projects as opposed to FutureGen at this point in time. We have several proposed capture technology. Amine and ammonia based chemical methods are the current leading candidates. Xeolites IIRC could be very promising. And of course in ground combustion, without the dilution with notrogen which makes concentration needed. This diversity of potential technologies should dictate that several small scale projects are pursued, with the intention that any promising technology is developed. I may personally dislike coal -and ever expanding energy use (the brute force way of living), but I doubt I will be successful in convincing NASCAR dads to go along with a less is better solution. If we don't provide good options for societal energy useage, we risk a severe political reaction from the economic forces.

by bigTom at 1:57 PM on 25 Mar 2008

gas storage v2.0

Meanwhile, back in the real world...

by In the belly at 3:52 PM on 25 Mar 2008
[ Parent ]

Re-correction

Jay, his #1 point is dead accurate, regardless of the device. When you say "FutureGen efficiencies were equal or higher than most present coal plants, even with sequestration." you are not responding to the point actually made -- which is that, no matter the efficiency of the system, CCS is costing you something -- it reduces the plant's net output (compared to the same power island operating without CCS).

The 5% Project

by JMG at 6:23 PM on 25 Mar 2008

Cost comparison

Compare the options. This is an article containing a graph from "The economist" from 2004, no advocate for wind power.

http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2005/7/10/192721/947

Now imagine this graph with fuel price increases and construction cost increases since 2004. Coal is just going in a big price tear, just like oil is on already. Nuclear fuel prices are rising fast too. natural gas is at risk at any time of huge cost increases.

Now add "clean" coal and CCS techologies to the coal bar in the graph, triple the construction cost?

Now figure in mass production efficiencies just starting to be realized with wind power. And the 20mw wind machines under design in Europe, bigger and taller is cheaper per kwh for wind.

Wind power rises with the cube of windspeed and wind at greater height goes much faster. The power collected goes up with the square of the size of a wind machine rotor.

Why would anyone even think about building anything but wind? And why would they ever consider more expensive versions of coal, like gassification, coal to liquid, and carbon capture and storage?

This "Alice in Wonderland" energy policy. Alice flying around the globe on executive jets allocating billions for boondoggles. What kind of mass delusion on the junkets of power causes this kind of insanity.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

by amazingdrx at 7:12 PM on 25 Mar 2008

CCS education

For a definitive summary of the technology:
IPCC Special Report

In the main, CCS is putting gas in the ground. A lot of gas. It will never, ever be viable on a useful scale here's why:

In summary, the sequestration of carbon dioxide produced every year by the burning of coal would require roughly the same volume of material to be moved as all of the earth moved by humans in same time period based on the following calculations:

http://gristmill.grist.org/comments/2007/11/5/0113/48638/ ...

Ok I'm quoting myself here but I stand by those numbers. Way way way way too much gas to deal with.

by elbarto at 7:49 PM on 25 Mar 2008

I don't think so.

" and some countries get more than 30 percent of their electricity from wind, "

Which countries are these, provide a reference.

Denmark has a lot of windmills, but they export a lot of it when wind is good and import power at other times.

http://www.cphpost.dk/get/100287.html

http://db.world-nuclear.org/info/inf99.html

Things Everybody Should Know About Energy

by BILL HANNAHAN at 9:41 PM on 25 Mar 2008

Wind kWh's are not the same as conventional kWh's

" Compare the options. This is an article containing a graph from "The economist" from 2004, no advocate for wind power.

http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2005/7/10/192721/947
"

The problem is that wind is not reliable or dispatchable, it is intermittent and unpredictable. Conventional power plants provide voltage and frequency stability to the grid, while windmills subtract stability from the grid.

http://www.eon-netz.com/Ressources/downloads/EON_Netz_Win ...

Windmills need conventional backup plants so the only savings is the cost of fuel not consumed when the wind blows.

So, when you look at the graph from "The economist" you should compare the total cost of wind with the fuel cost of nuclear.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat8p2.html ...

Things Everybody Should Know About Energy

by BILL HANNAHAN at 10:00 PM on 25 Mar 2008

Still wrong BILL

Don't you get tired of it? Hehey.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

by amazingdrx at 10:12 PM on 25 Mar 2008

"blind alley" ? or eyes wide shut?

CC & S doesn't need a subsidy; it needs to be a regulatory mandate for new coal plants.

Yes, it's expensive; that's what will improve the relative economics of the renewable alternatives and speed their introduction.

Also, carbon dioxide injection into an oil bearing strata would seem to allow for successful sequestration, considering that natural gas in such formations has already been held underground without leakage for millions of years.

Yes, it's not anything more than transitional technology; but as such it's needed. It's not the ultimate destination, but it can help us get there.

by Green Texan at 1:42 AM on 26 Mar 2008

eyes wide open

But better yet, why not a mandate for no new coal plants? If there should be any mandate for CCS it should be that it be required for existing coal plants as a requirement for extension of their licensing (tough as that would be for post-combustion CO2 extraction).

Regarding sequestration into oil-bearing strata:

Mobility of gas is of course quite a bit different that oil, and just because oil has been trapped doesn't mean that gas will not be able to diffuse out. Indeed, sometimes variations in gas-oil ratios are the result of selective leakage of gas from a trap.

Poorly abandoned and undocumented oil wells can themselves be a conduit for leakage of CO2.

I think it telling that the oil&gas industry now prefers to talk about carbon capture and storage rather than CC and sequestration, explicitly for the reason that they might expose themselves to more liability if they imply that storage is permanent.

Oil-bearing (or, for that matter, saline aquifers) with suitable structure for a trap are probably unlikely to exist in close proximity to the power plant which needs to dispose of CO2. A whole pipeline infrastructure will need to be developed to transport to the point of disposal.

And finally, I don't know if you are suggesting oil-bearing reservoirs as a CCS sink for the purpose of displacing residual oil for recovery. Some people (O&G companies) do. I think that is just wrong.

by In the belly at 5:25 AM on 26 Mar 2008
[ Parent ]

Waste of capital

"...it can help us get there."

No it's a waste of capital, financial and political. A diversion by coal lobbyists and politicians.

Just build wind power with distributed biogas backup generation, like this offset outfit is doing. They have a solar project with Stonyfield Farms.

http://www.nativeenergy.com/pages/our_projects/14.php#14

Their combination of wind, solar, and farm biogas is just the right course to lead into a complete renwable smart grid. Excel Energy is working on that.

Government is way behind on this. Gotta get Barack up to speed.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

by amazingdrx at 7:18 AM on 26 Mar 2008

not just coal lobbyists

Oil&gas companies also push CCS as the easiest way for them to greenwash their increasingly CO2 intensive activities. Don't be surprised to see announcements regarding CCS for tar sand and oil shale developments--nor be surpised when they cover only a small percentage of the total emissions associated with the production.

You'll also see renewables used for the same purpose--wind and geothermal to power or provide process heat for tar sand cooking. It hasn't been said, but I expect the proposed Montana-Alberta tie line is for exactly this purpose, to move Montana wind power to the tar sands of Alberta (although the developers won't rule out moving coal-powered electricity as well). O&G is also behind efforts to rehabilitate the image of nuclear, in case they have to go that route for the tar sands/oil shales...

by In the belly at 8:00 AM on 26 Mar 2008

Nuclear tar sand

They are already proposing that. Montana's governor won't even consider powering his big coal to liquid pet project with wind..yet.

It's the small business, organic farm, distributed renewable smart grid forces versus big politics and big coal, nuclear, agribizz fuel lobbying.

We the people could tip the scales with a direct subsidy plan, straight to home solar panel owners and farm and small business wind and biogas. I think Barack would listen to us.

Enough viable, economically sound projects of this kind are up and running, unoticed by mass media for the most part. That can be changed.

This is a very close election, Barack will need every green vote to win. He might just want to rally green energy populism to win. But his wall of campaign staff/lobbyists are blocking that.

Groups like NRDC, finally deserting boondoggles like "clean" coal and nuclear power, now waking up to reality. Might even help break through?

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

by amazingdrx at 8:29 AM on 26 Mar 2008

replies and thoughts

JMB writes:
Jay, his #1 point is dead accurate, regardless of the device. When you say
"FutureGen efficiencies were equal or higher than most present coal plants, even with sequestration."
you are not responding to the point actually made -- which is that, no matter the efficiency of the system, CCS is costing you something -- it reduces the plant's net output (compared to the same power island operating without CCS).

First, I don't accept that using the Administration's phony 'excessive cost' argument is truthful or productive. Second, I don't disagree there is a cost, only what that really means -

A rising coal price_tide raises all renewable boats.

elbarto
You link the IPCC Special Report on carbon sequestration. I have read it. The top US expert (probably the world) is Ken Caldeira. He's very concerned with global warming and is a primary author.

In a 3.07.08 broadcast from the Commonwealth Club, Caldeira expressed dismay that FutureGen had been cancelled. He said it could have (and certainly should have) been begun several years ago. So I think I'll go with Dr. Caldeira's considered view.

http://www.commonwealthclub.org/archive/08/08-02climatepa ...

Climate Change After Bali
[ panel discussion and questions ]
AMB. RENO L. HARNISH III, DIANA FARRELL, KEN CALDEIRA

(Harnish 'represented' the US in obstruction at Bali. )

Concerning your calculation, we do produce alot of CO2. And we don't have the capacity to bury any, so perhaps we shouldn't fret about burying all of it all, just yet. Just bury part of it. Just for a while.

bigTom
I don't see CCS and FutureGen as mutually exclusive. We shouldn't toss out our seed corn (futuregen) because Bush's DOE politicos couldn't see that CCS was an imminent priority.

You make many good points. Especially the one about assuring reliable power. It won't do to convince the public we need action, then loose support & momentum because of power/grid problems, ala California. Delayers will then blame renewables.

by Jay Alt at 11:46 AM on 26 Mar 2008

When in Rome

Interesting analogy between the old Roman Empire and our modern complex technologies, the cost of which can be quite taxing. I agree the tax on the peasants probably was a deterrent to Roman infrastructure but I also believe they as us had the added tax burden of funding military campaigns and trying to police the known world. Their troops in Gaul, Germania and Briton probably taxed the populace into deciding which was worse, their own government or the barbarians at the gate. I have trouble deciding the same thing in these modern times. It seems since the old U.S.S.R. fell we always come up with a booger man to have defend against. Justify that out of control defense spending while the infrastructure and energy structure goes to hell in a hand basket. To be fair to the old Roman bureaucracy I think lead plumbing wiped out the cognitive functions of the ruling class after about 2 or 3 generations. No EPA back then or theirs was about as useless as ours. No body told them you should not run your drinking water through lead pipes off the old aqueduct.
So while the masses decided who would offer the best tax package the Romans or the Goths and the upper class was in some kind of heavy metal orgy the infrastructure problem along with funding wars on several fronts problem kinda solved themselves. I wonder if coke and alcohol have the same effect on the cognitive process as lead.

The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.

by Pompey Road at 5:59 PM on 26 Mar 2008

Fund FutureGen

While your arguments for development of renewable energy sources should not be ignored, I feel your "either/or" stance in terms of our energy policy is flawed. Carbon capture and sequestration technology is vital as part of our energy future because it allows us to tap an abundant domestic energy source while respecting the environment and our air quality.

Numerous international governments are looking to CCS technology to allow coal to remain as part of a diverse energy mix that will work to meet growing energy demands worldwide while protecting the environment. And they're looking to the U.S. to lead the way.

Certainly, renewable energy sources like solar and wind power can and should be part of our energy mix. But it is not an either or situation as presented here. Currently, coal provides affordable, reliable electricity generation to millions of Americans, and we have vast coal reserves available to meet our growing electricity demands well into the future.

In the U.S. alone, demand for electricity is expected to increase 49 percent by 2030. It is essential Congress acts to fund the FutureGen site in Mattoon, Ill., now so that the research and development of CCS technology can be demonstrated for wide, commercial use. That plus renewable sources of energy equals a smart, balanced plan for our energy future that makes use of domestic energy sources in the most economically and environmentally responsible way.

by Alex M at 10:02 AM on 02 Apr 2008

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