07 February 2008 - International
— Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS),
the technological poster child for the future
of the global coal industry has just
had its biggest supporter pull the rug out
from underneath its feet.
With the Bush administration
withdrawing its support for the FutureGen
CCS project, its future seems doomed.
The coal industry sees
CCS as their last hope to stay relevant
in a world hungry for carbon-free energy.
The idea behind CCS is simple enough, as
the carbon dioxide is released from burning
coal, you capture it, and dump it underground
and hope it doesn't escape and end up in
the atmosphere.
The problem is that
no one has successfully done it on the scale
required to halt climate change and no one
can guarantee that the carbon dioxide will
behave and stay where it was dumped.
Solar Power Soars
At the same time that
the coal industry is pinning its hopes on
CCS, world demand for renewable energy continues
to soar. Between 2000 and 2005, the global
market for solar panels alone increased
by an incredible 40 percent per year.
FutureGen's official
supporters read like a Who's Who of the
global coal industry with the likes of the
US Department of Energy (DOE), BHP Billiton,
Rio Tinto, American Electric Power Service
Corp., Anglo American, and China's largest
coal-based power company, China Huaneng
Group all part of the FutureGen alliance.
Massive hand outs
Despite the impressive
list of friends, the project still put its
hand out for plenty of tax payers' money.
Some of the hand outs the project managed
to get are:
US Department of Energy
had agreed to pay 75 percent of the project
costs
US$17 million investment grant package to
bring FutureGen to Illinois, US
Sales tax exemption on building materials
and selected equipment
US$50 million of cheap loans by the Illinois
Finance Authority
If the cash hand outs
weren't enough, FutureGen was also fortunate
enough to have a law passed by Illinois
lawmakers to take ownership of any sequestered
carbon and thereby, somewhat ironically,
relieving FutureGen of any future financial
and legal liability if there was an accidental
release of carbon dioxide.
The coal addicted lawmakers
also agreed to indemnify FutureGen from
lawsuits and pay for insurance policies
to cover the plant if it does get sued.
It appears that the only things CCS is good
at capturing is tax payers hard earned cash.
The FutureGen power
station was originally scheduled to be operational
in 2012 but has still not left the drawing
board. Although President Bush announced
the project in 2003, it took the coal consortium
4 years to decide on the town of Mattoon,
Illinois, as the preferred construction
site.
Cost blow out
FutureGen was then further
delayed as the US Department of Energy required
a reassessment of the power station's design
due to the projected cost for building the
station rising in just three years to a
staggering US$1.76 billion, an 85 percent
cost blow out.
With the US Department
of Energy's promise to pay for 75 percent
of the project costs now topping out at
over US$1.3 billion, even the coal loving,
big spending US President decided the price
for the unnecessary and unproven CCS technology
was too high.
Other CCS projects like
BP's Miller oil and gas field in the UK
and a joint venture between Statoil-Hydro
and Shell in Norway have also hit financial
troubles forcing their cancellations.
Energy [R]evolution
Last year we launched
the Energy [R]evolution, which shows conclusively
that even without CCS or nuclear power,
the world can meet all its energy needs
by increasing energy efficiency and switching
to renewable energy.
Incredibly, even whilst
countries like the UK talk up the problem
of climate change, saying that it is a bigger
threat than terrorism, they are also proposing
to build new coal power stations. Our activists
recently interrupted a coal industry talk
fest in the UK to deliver the clear message
directly to the industry that coal has no
future in a carbon free world.
Every dollar spent on
false solutions like CCS is a dollar not
spent on real solutions like renewable energy
and increasing energy efficiency. With FutureGen
now all but scrapped, the smokescreen put
up by the global coal industry to hide the
massive climate impact of burning coal is
finally beginning to clear.
