CLEANER COAL

By Stefanie Schramm

Construction work has broken ground in the harbor town of Tianjin for a "clean coal" power plant with advanced technology to be built by the end of this year. This could be the beginning of a cleaner future for coal in China. In a later stage, a system will be added that captures carbon dioxide – and thus could turn major polluters into climate savers.

As temperatures are rising in the run-up to the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in December, coal-rich countries all over the world are exploring ways to give a future to coal but not to CO2. China, the United States, Germany, Australia and many more are in the same dilemma. Obviously, they cannot switch completely to renewable sources any time soon.

Carbon capture and storage, or CCS, is the short name for their big ambitions. The technology would trap CO2 and stow it underground and coal would join the race as a newcomer for climate friendly energy.

But there is a snag to mission "Mr. Clean." All the technologies explored to date reduce the efficiency of a power plant. That means, cheap coal isn't cheap anymore: You have to burn more for the same amount of power. And as it still hardly costs anything to emit CO2, power companies around the world are reluctant to put the technologies from lab into practice. It just doesn't pay off economically.

One such effort, the American FutureGen project, was stopped last year by the George W Bush administration on the grounds that the cost had doubled.

As it turned out, this was a major and probably deliberate math error by the US Department of Energy. The House Science Committee found internal communications indicating that the department heads were looking for reasons to kill the project.

Now new energy secretary Steven Chu has said he is considering renewing support, but a lot of time has been lost. This example shows impressively that with CCS in Western countries it always is about two things: money and political intent.

In Germany there are some pilot plants but they are still small, and Australia only plans to start its first demonstration plant in 2017.

Compared to this, China is in fast-forward mode. The national GreenGen project aims to start a demonstration plant with a capacity of 400 megawatts in 2015. That could be a world's first.

"I wouldn't be surprised if the first CCS plant of the world would be sited in China", says Howard Herzog, head of the CCS research program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

A German research engineer Malte Förster agreed. "In the West you can often hear people say 'The Chinese are coming'. Wrong! They are already there," he said.

Förster is based at the prestigious technical university RWTH in Aa-chen. He collaborates a lot with Chinese scientists and presented his own work at a conference in Wuhan, Hubei Province recently where a Chinese former RWTH post-doctorate now works as a professor.

One of Förster's Greman colleagues Ewald Pfaff also appreciates the Chinese researchers' work. "In materials science already 70 percent of all publications come from China," he said. Quantity alone doesn't necessarily mean quality, but one thing is clear: Chinese science and engineering is moving forward, and fast.

Last year one of China's top five power suppliers, Huaneng Power International built a pilot plant for washing CO2 from the flue gases of a coal-fired power plant in the Beijing suburb of Gaobeidian. It took them only nine months. In comparison to that, some Western projects are barely crawling.

Huaneng also cooperated in the American FutureGen project. When it was stopped, Chinese leaders overtly showed their irritation.

"That wouldn't happen in China", Lu Xuedu told the American science magazine Nature. Lu is in charge of global environmental issues in the Ministry of Science and Technology. "If the Chinese government says we do it, then we do it."

There is something to this claim, as Chinese officials can probably more easily push a project through than their Western counterparts. MIT researcher Herzog believes: "It could be easier to build a demo plant in China."

What is more is that China could actually mount an industry sized CCS plant completely under its own steam, even earlier than German or American companies. With this, the coal country could push into the world market for green technology. After all, China is in close contact to a lot of developing countries.

Therefore, the Australian ZeroGen people and the Americans of FutureGen as well as German energy companies will keep an eye on the progress of the Chinese GreenGen project. Meanwhile the construction work in Tianjin is continuing where the power plant with coal gasification technology will have a capacity of 250 megawatts. In 2015 the 400 megawatt plant is planned to follow, then comprising CCS. At the moment, that is all you can hear from GreenGen planners. For more information they suggest to "get back to us later in the year, when the air is clean."

But the pace set by Chinese researchers and engineers cannot hide the fact that China faces the same problems as western countries when it comes to a broad implementation of the technology.

"As long as there is no cost attached to emitting CO2, nobody will invest into a CCS system", said Liu Hengwei, a visiting scholar for energy policy at Harvard University. Therefore, Liu pointed out, financial incentives are even more important than technological development. This means China would have to be included in a worldwide cap and trade system - which is still to be established.

There is only one incentive system for developing countries at this moment: the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which is part of the Kyoto protocol.

Developed nations who invest in climate projects in developing countries can credit the emissions saved to their own reduction goals. China benefits most of this program.

Until 2012 it will receive $7 billion from European countries – a proverbial drop in the bucket. That is why Andreas Oberheitmann, director of the Research Center for International Environmental Policy at Tsinghua University, had made the case for expanding CDM and also including CCS into the system.

The Kyoto treaty expires in 2012. The struggle for a new compromise has long begun. It will culminate at the summit of Copenhagen. It is all about politics, money – and lots of coal.

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