Tuesday, 24 November

It is only a fortnight before the UN COP15 meeting in Copenhagen. The COP15 means the 15th Conference of the Parties, where the "Parties" is the short of "Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)". The COP14 was in Poznan and it passed without much public attention. In contrast, the COP15 has been attracting a lot of media space because of the raised expectations about an outcome from this Conference about some form of united action against climate change.

Yesterday, I received the November copy of the Power Engineering International, which allocated its editorial to Clean Coal in expectation of the COP15 discussions on this topic. I must admit that I do not know enough about this area to make any useful comments but I thought it was strange that there had not yet been a large enough field demonstration project in this area considering its importance and the financial power of the stakeholders. According to the PEI Editorial, this might be changing, although most of the attention is focussed on "capture" with little note of "storage". The European Union last month proposed six CCS projects to receive a total of 1 billion euros. A number of different capture technologies are to be trialled in these projects. There are other projects also coming on stream in the coming years. While duly reporting on these projects, the editorial laments that the attention given to storage of the captured CO2 is nowhere near the effort spent on capture technologies. In fact, the title is "We can capture carbon, but can we store it?". I quote from the Editorial: "Is there sufficient space in the Earth's subsurface to store this (a mind-blowing scale of many billions of tonnes per year of) CO2. The answer to this question at the moment is quite simply, we don't know".

These are the new large-scale carbon projects mentioned in the Editorial:

• Powerfuel Power's Hatfield IGCC power plant in the UK (funded by the EU)
• Vattenfalls's Jaenschwalde plant with oxyfuel combustion in Germany (funded by the EU)
• Poland's Belchatow power station using an advanced amine post-combustion capture process (funded by the EU)
• The Meri-Pori CCS project of the Finnish utilities Fortum and Teollisuuden Voima Oyj in partnership with Siemens to treat approximately 50% of the flue gas with the aim of capturing 90% of the CO2 in the treated stream
• US Wisconsin Pleasant Prairie power plant of the utility company We Energies that uses an advanced chilled ammonia process to capture over 90% of the flue stream
• TransAlta of Canada and Alstom to construct a large-scale CCS facility in Alberta in partnership with the independent power produced Capital Power

  The situation in Australia is murky at the moment but it will get clarified by June 2010. It appears that a recent Geoscience assessment will be used to choose up to four industrial-scale projects to be funded with the $2.4billion set aside in the May budget's "CCS flagships" program. All these developments are to be applauded. At the moment clean coal has a credibility problem allowing some pundits (Al Gore) to liken it to "healthy cigarettes". This is probably because the technology has not been demonstrated yet in the field at a scale large enough to be convincing. I know that the similar applies to the EGS or HFR geothermal as well. But I think the geothermal energy sector has the excuse that the players are much smaller and hardly with the financial muscle available to the coal mining companies and the owners of the coal-fired power generators. Having said that the HFR geothermal energy may beat Clean Coal to the first large-scale demonstration plant (or two) with the Innamincka and Paralana projects. Keep your fingers crossed.

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