[THS] Europe Turns Back to Coal, Raising Climate Fears

[Peter Webster]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/world/europe/23coal.html?_r= 2&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all

Europe Turns Back to Coal, Raising Climate Fears
Ralph Orlowski/Getty Images

About 50 coal-fired power plants, like the one in Bergheim, Germany,
are scheduled to begin operating in Europe in the next five years.

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Published: April 23, 2008

CIVITAVECCHIA, Italy — At a time when the world’s top climate experts
agree that carbon emissions must be rapidly reduced to hold down
global warming, Italy’s major electricity producer, Enel, is converting its
massive power plant here from oil to coal, generally the dirtiest fuel on
earth.

Italy’s Civitavecchia power plant is converting from oil to coal.

Marco Di Lauro for The New York Times

A view inside one of the domes of the coal-fired power plant in
Civitavecchia, Italy, scheduled to open in two months.
The New York Times

Residents around Civitavecchia opposed the coal plant.

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 expected to
put into operation about 50 coal-fired plants over the next five years,
plants that will be in use for the next five decades.

In the United States, fewer new coal plants are likely to begin
operations, in part because it is becoming harder to get regulatory
permits and in part because nuclear power remains an alternative. Of
151 proposals in early 2007, more than 60 had been dropped by the
year’s end, many blocked by state governments. Dozens of other are
stuck in court challenges.

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 among 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 the sooty factories of Dickens novels, and one that was
on its way out just a decade ago.

There have been protests here in Civitavecchia, at a new coal plant in
Germany, and at one in the Czech Republic, as well as at the
Kingsnorth power station in Kent, which is slated to become Britain’s
first new coal-fired plant in more than a decade.

Europe’s 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 spurt shortsighted.

“Building new coal-fired power plants is ill conceived,” said James E.
Hansen, a leading climatologist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space
Studies. “Given our knowledge about what needs to be done to stabilize
climate, this plan is like barging into a war without having a plan for
how it should be conducted, even though information is available.

“We need a moratorium on coal now,” he added, “with phase-out of
existing plants over the next two decades.”

Coal’s Advantages

Enel and many other electricity companies say they have little choice
but to build coal plants to replace aging infrastructure, particularly in
countries like Italy and Germany that have banned the building of
nuclear power plants. Fuel costs have risen 151 percent since 1996, and
Italians pay the highest electricity costs in 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
years for gas and oil. Coal is relatively cheap compared with oil and
natural gas, although coal prices have tripled in the past few years.
More important, hundreds of countries export coal — there is not a coal
cartel — so there is more room to negotiate prices.

“In order to get over oil, which is getting more and more expensive, our
plan is to convert all oil plants to coal using clean-coal technologies,”
said Gianfilippo Mancini, Enel’s chief of generation and energy
management. “This will be the cleanest coal plant in Europe. We are
hoping to prove that it will be possible to make sustainable and
environmentally friendly use of coal.”

“Clean coal” is a term coined by the industry decades ago, referring to
its efforts to reduce local pollution. Using new technology, clean coal
plants sharply reduced the number of sooty particles spewed into the
air, as well as gases like sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide. The
technology has minimal effect on carbon emissions.

In fact, the technology that the industry is counting on to reduce the
carbon dioxide emissions that add to global warning — carbon capture
and storage — is not now commercially available. No one knows if it is
feasible on a large, cost-effective scale.

The Struggle to Be Green

The task — in which carbon emissions are pumped into underground
reservoirs rather than released — is challenging for any fuel source, but
particularly so for coal, which produces more carbon dioxide than oil or
natural gas.

Under optimal current conditions, coal produces more than twice as
much carbon dioxide per unit of electricity as natural gas, the second
most common fuel used for electricity generation, according to the
Electric Power Research Institute. In the developing world, where even
new coal plants use lower grade coal and less efficient machinery, the
equation is even worse.

Without carbon capture and storage, coal cannot be green. But solving
that problem will take global coordination and billions of dollars in
investment, which no one country or company seems inclined to spend,
said Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia
University.

“Figuring out carbon capture is really critical — it may not work in the
end — and if it is not viable, the situation, with respect to climate
change, is far more dire,” Mr. Sachs said.

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.

At the end of January, the Bush administration canceled what was
previously by far the United States’ biggest carbon-capture
demonstration project, at a coal-fired plant in Illinois, because of huge
cost overruns. The costs of the project, undertaken in 2003 with a
budget of $950 million, had spiraled to $1.5 billion this year, and it was
far from complete.

The European Union had pledged to develop 12 pilot carbon-capture
projects for Europe, but says that is not enough.

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.”

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. There is a new coal-fired plant going up in India or
China almost every week, and most of those are not constructed in a
way that is amenable to carbon capture, even if it were developed.

Plants that could someday be adapted to carbon capture cost 10 to 20
percent more to build, and only a handful exist today. For most coal
power plants the costs of converting would be “phenomenal,”
concluded a report by the United States Environmental Protection
Agency.

Then there is the problem of storing the carbon dioxide, which is at
some level an inherently local issue. Geologists have to determine if
there is a suitable underground site, calculate how much carbon dioxide
it can hold and then equip it in a way that prevents leaks and ensures
safety. A large leak of underground carbon dioxide could be as
dangerous as a leak of nuclear fuel, critics say.

As for its plant here, Enel says it will start experimenting with carbon-
capture technology in 2015, in the hopes of “a solution” by 2020.

“That’s too late,” Mr. Sachs said.

In the meantime, it and other new coal plants will be spewing more
greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere than ever before,
meaning that current climate predictions — dire as they are — may still
be “too optimistic,” Mr. Sachs said. “They assume the old energy mix,
even though coal will be a larger and larger part.”

An Efficient Plant

On many other fronts, the new Enel plant is a model of efficiency and
recycling. The nitrous oxide is chemically altered to generate ammonia,
which is then sold. The resulting coal ash and gypsum are sold to the
cement industry.

An on-site desalination plant means that the operation generates its
own water for cooling. Even the heated water that comes out of the
plant is not wasted: it heats a fish farm, one of Italy’s largest.

But Enel’s plan to deal with the new plant’s carbon emissions consists
mostly of a map of Italy with several huge white ovals superimposed —
subterranean cavities where carbon dioxide potentially could be stored.

The sites have not been fully studied by geologists as yet to make sure
they are safe storage sites and well sealed. There is no infrastructure or
equipment that could move carbon into them.

The new Enel plant here opens its first boiler in two months. It will
immediately produce fewer carbon emissions than the ancient oil boiler
it replaces, but only because it will produce less electricity, officials here
admit.

Unhappy Neighbors

In the towns surrounding Civitavecchia, the impending arrival of a huge
coal plant, with its three silvery domes, is being greeted with a hefty
dose of dread.

“They call it clean coal because they use some filters, but it is really
nonsense,” said Marza Marzioli of the No Coal citizens group in the
nearby ancient Etruscan town of Tarquinia. “If you compare it to old
plants, yes it’s better, but it’s not ‘clean’ in any way.”

The group says that Enel has won approval for a dangerous new coal
plant by buying machines for a local hospital and by carrying out a
public relations campaign. Enel advertisements for the project show a
young girl erasing a plant’s smokestack.

Most people who took part in a 2007 local referendum voted no, but the
plant went ahead anyway, the group said.

The European Union, through its emissions trading scheme, has tried to
make power plants consider the costs of carbon, forcing them to buy
“permits” for emissions. But with the price of oil so high, coal is far
cheaper, even with the cost of permits to pollute factored in, Enel has
calculated.

Stephan Singer, who runs the European energy and climate office of
WWF, formerly the World Wildlife Fund, in Brussels, said that math was
shortsighted: the cost of coal and permits will almost certainly rise over
the next decade.

“If they want coal to be part of the energy solution, they have to show
us that carbon capture can be done now, that they can really reduce
emissions” to an acceptable level, Mr. Singer said.