Coal

By Smita Nakhooda, WRI

The prospect of a $3.75 billion World Bank loan to support the Medupi Supercritical coal plant in South Africa has raised questions about the future of development assistance in a warming world.

The coal plant, part of the national South African utility Eskom’s program to expand generation capacity, is expected to provide 4,800 MW of electricity. Construction of the plant has already begun, and contracts for key components have been signed. Yet Eskom’s longer-term electricity expansion program may have problematic implications for environmentally and socially sustainable development in South Africa.

In his Feb. 10 article "Obama: The Making of a Clean Coal President," David Sassoon wrote about the U.S. president's creation of a task force to develop a national carbon capture and storage strategy, calling it as a victory for the coal industry and describing how the backing of green groups had helped to cement Obama's support for CCS technology.

NRDC Climate Programs Director David Hawkins wrote the following response.

By David Hawkins

Let me offer a few thoughts on why I believe this task force actually is a step forward for all of us who want to put an end to investments in new polluting coal plants, increase our reliance on energy efficiency and renewable energy, and prevent disastrous climate disruption.

Our community uses several tactics to block new polluting coal plants. We intervene in permit proceedings and bring lawsuits to challenge coal plant permits. NRDC has actively used this tactic, joining the outstanding efforts by the Sierra Club and others. Another tactic, that NRDC also has pursued, is advocacy with Wall Street investors to convince them that investments in new polluting coal plants are a bad bet. A third is advocacy for performance standards that would make it legally impossible for new polluting coal plants to be built. NRDC worked hard to get such a law enacted in California and is seeking such standards in federal legislation. A fourth is to create a broad consensus that no new coal plant should be built unless it captures its carbon.

This last approach, which NRDC has pursued as well, is controversial in our community because it does not call for an absolute bar on new coal plants regardless of environmental performance and it lends legitimacy to carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology.

After a flood of wet coal ash swept from a power plant containment pond in December 2008, contaminating a river and covering 300 acres of eastern Tennessee, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced it would decide whether to issue new coal ash regulations by the end of 2009.

As that deadline approached last month, however, the agency admitted its findings would be delayed "due to the complexity of the analysis."

If it were simply a question of how best to protect the public, the decision would have been made weeks ago, health and environmental advocates say. But it appears cost has become as significant a factor as protection.

Oregon utility Portland General Electric (PGE) is maneuvering to shut down the state’s only coal-fired power plant in 2020, two decades ahead of schedule. It's a significant move that some observers say may prompt a shift in U.S. coal use. 

"It could be game-changing," said Jeff Bissonnette, the organizing director for the Portland-based Citizens' Utility Board of Oregon, a ratepayer advocacy group.

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Sunflower Electric Corp. today submitted a revised permit application to build a new coal plant in Holcomb, Kan., reviving a long-running effort to break ground on a locally polluting facility that would send most of its electricity to customers out of state.

The saga first drew national attention in 2007, when the head of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment rejected Sunflower's air permit request, making history as the first state official to base the rejection in part on the potential dangers greenhouse gas emissions pose to human health and the environment.

Despite a lack of substantive action on climate change in Copenhagen or, yet, in Washington, environmental groups are celebrating a year of victories over one of climate change’s biggest culprits.

Coal releases more carbon dioxide emissions per unit of energy produced than any other fossil fuel, but it also provides more than half the United States’ electricity supply. It is possible, however, that 2009 marked a turning point away from that reliance on coal.

As small island countries fight for a climate treaty that can ensure their existence, one archipelago has taken a more technical — and more direct — approach.

The Federated States of Micronesia filed a request with the Czech Ministry of Environment for a trans-boundary environmental impact assessment of the European country’s largest coal-fired power plant.

Prunerov isn't the worst polluter in Europe. But even as the 18th largest single source of carbon dioxide emissions on the continent, its emissions are 40 times the annual emissions of all Micronesia, according to Greenpeace.

A Czech law also makes it an open target for future climate change victims like Micronesia.

West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd has been among the coal industry’s staunchest defenders in Congress for over half a century, which makes the audio op/ed he issued today chastising some of the coal industry’s behavior all the more powerful.

“The time has come to have an open and honest dialog about coal's future in West Virginia,” Byrd says.

First, coal will survive, he tells his listeners. “No deliberate effort to do away with the coal industry could ever succeed” because there is no immediate replacement to meet the nation’s vast energy need, says the 92-year-old senator, whose state is one of the top coal producers and among the most coal-reliant in the nation.

But the coal industry must change with the times, just as it has done before, he says.

My grandchildren began to influence me when I realized that policy makers were ignoring the message from the climate science, or rather that politicians were developing the fine art of greenwash — they would say favorable words about the environment and stabilizing climate, but their actions were inconsistent with that goal.

Politicians would be happy if scientists just tell them there is a climate problem and then go away and shut up. Let them decide what they want to do.

But I decided that I did not want my grandchildren, some day in the future, to look back and say, “Opa understood what was happening, but he did not make it clear.”

What is clear is that we cannot burn all the fossil fuels. There is a limit on how much carbon we can put into the atmosphere.

By Jesse Emspak

Renewable energy could get a boost on the Northern Plains after the utilities behind the controversial Big Stone II coal-fired power plant dropped the project this week.

The proposed plant near Milbank, S.D., would have generated 500-580 megawatts. It had been backed by Montana-Dakota Utilities Co., Missouri River Energy Services, Heartland Consumers Power District, Central Minnesota Municipal Power Agency and Otter Tail Power Co., but Otter Tail pulled out in September citing cost and an uncertain regulatory climate.

The remaining four utilities announced on Monday that, because of the lack of a fifth, the $1.6 billion project had to be scrapped. Four utilities, they say, is not enough to make efficient use of the power generated.

Michelle Rosier, senior regional organizing manager at the Sierra Club’s Minnesota chapter, says the success of the campaign to stop the coal plant is another step toward making wind power competitive.