When a small coal-fired power plant opened in northern Germany last September, it was heralded as the first example of a technology that could save us from the ravages of global warming, while allowing us to keep burning cheap and plentiful coal. The demonstration plant, built and operated by the Swedish power company Vattenfall, was designed to capture its carbon dioxide emissions and to pump them deep underground in a process called carbon capture and storage (CCS). But the project has thus far been a victim of “numbyism” – not under my backyard [The Guardian].
The plant’s managers say they’ve captured about 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide, but they haven’t been able to pipe it underground to the selected underground zone, where scientists say the atmosphere-warming carbon dioxide would instead be trapped in the rocks. Locals, apparently, aren’t so sure about the technology. “It was supposed to begin injecting by March or April of this year but we don’t have a permit. This is a result of the local public having questions about the safety of the project,” said Staffan Gortz, head of carbon capture and storage communication at Vattenfall. He said he did not expect to get a permit before next spring: “People are very, very sceptical” [The Guardian].
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If the human race continues on its present industrial course, by 2040 we will have added more than 1 trillion tons of carbon dioxide to the air–which will have caused an average global temperature rise of more than 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s the scenario described in two new studies, both published in Nature, that paint an ominous picture of global warming. A worldwide temperature rise of just a few degrees may not sound like much, but it would lead to wide-scale environmental disruptions including floods and droughts, and more than 100 nations support the goal of keeping temperature rise below 2C [BBC News].
The studies, which used computer models, take a different approach than other research on figuring out how much carbon dioxide in the air is too much. Instead of the proportion of carbon dioxide in the air at any given time, they looked at the total amount spewed out over many decades to arrive at a tipping point of 1.1 trillion tons [AP]. As study coauthor Myles Allen explains, the analysis shows that humanity is hurtling towards that tipping point. Industrial activity since the mid-18th century has already emitted 500 billion tonnes of carbon, so we are halfway there. “But don’t let this fool you,” says Allen. “On current trends we’ll burn the next 500 billion in less than 40 years.” If we carry on regardless, we will exhaust what Allen calls the “carbon budget for the human race” by 2040 [New Scientist].
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The Obama administration is once again working to reverse the path of former president Bush in another series of environmental policy changes, with two moves in particular looking to some like a crackdown on the coal industry. The Justice Department announced this week that it will challenge Bush’s mountaintop coal mining rules, the EPA has withdrawn a permit for a coal power plant scheduled to be built on Navajo land, and the Interior Department has strengthened endangered species rules.
On Monday, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar asked a federal court to abandon a rule approved during the final days of the Bush administration that allows coal mining companies to dump their waste near waterways. Prior to the change, regulations in place since 1983 have barred mining companies from dumping waste within 100 feet of streams if the disposal would diminish water quality or quantity [AP]. However, the Interior Department’s move didn’t go far enough for some environmentalists, who oppose this method of coal mining in general, regardless of the proximity of waste dumping to streams. In mountaintop removal operations, miners blast away large areas of a mountain in order to expose the buried coal seams. A spokeswoman for environmental law firm Earthjustice notes that Salazar’s move won’t halt the practice of mining itself, and says that reverting to the status quo is not enough because it won’t prevent coal companies from filling valleys with mine waste. “That’s not helping the communities concerned with mountaintop removal” [AP].
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Seven grassroots activists who fought powerful polluting industries and often stood up to intimidation are now receiving rewards and recognition: They’re winners of the Goldman Environmental Prize, sometimes called the environmental Nobel Prize. Each year winners are chosen from the six inhabited continents: Africa, Asia, Europe, Islands and Island Nations, North America, and South and Central America [USA Today]. Each winner receives a $150,000 purse.
The winner from North America, Maria Gunnoe, took her stand against coal mining companies in Appalachia, where companies commonly blast the tops of mountains apart to expose hard-to-reach coal seams, and dump the debris in the valleys. “I never even knew I was an environmentalist,” Gunnoe, who lives in southwestern West Virginia, said with a chuckle. Though raised to mind her own business, she was also taught to fight when attacked. That’s how she sees the destruction of her gardens and orchard…. Gunnoe’s home sits below a valley fill and has been flooded with coal waste seven times since 2000 [AP].
Gunroe says she has received numerous threats from miners angered by her opposition the coal industry; after she helped convince a judge in 2007 to shut down an operator working without a legal permit, a “wanted” poster printed with her face hung in local stores until the FBI demanded its removal [Mercury News].
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In large industrial experiments across the globe, factories and power plants are trying to capture the carbon dioxide that streams out of their flues in order to bury it deep underground. Researchers believe the greenhouse gas will stay put for thousands of years and therefore won’t contribute to global warming, but the costs and long-term effects of the procedure are still unclear. The experiments currently underway are expected to determine whether carbon capture and storage will allow nations to continue burning fossil fuels for energy without ill effects.
In France this month, the first retrofitted power plant will begin to use its new carbon capture and storage technology. The system used by the natural gas-burning power plant will transport and store 60,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide every year in the nearby depleted gas field at Rousse – once the biggest onshore natural gas field in Europe, but which is now almost empty [The Guardian]. The carbon dioxide will flow through existing pipelines that once brought natural gas to the power plant. While the first new power plant using carbon capture and storage opened last year in Germany, some environmentalists say that the French plant’s retrofit is an important example of how existing industries can be adapted to a future that requires clean energy.
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The Obama administration is moving ahead with the development of the “clean coal” technology of carbon capture and storage, even though experts say that the technology’s high costs will prevent it from being widely adopted for decades. Carbon capture and storage requires that carbon dioxide emissions be captured in the smokestacks of coal-fired power plants and factories, and then converted into a liquid and pumped into reservoirs deep in the earth. “I won’t be surprised if we have some of these [systems] in place in the 2020 to 2030 decade, but … it’s going to be on the margins, just because it costs so much” [Reuters], says energy consultant Bill Durbin.
In 2008 the Bush administration canceled the flagship clean coal project, called FutureGen, which called for the construction of a near zero-emissions coal power plant that would test carbon capture and storage technology. The project’s costs had escalated to $1.8 billion by the time it was canceled, but new Energy Secretary Steven Chu has indicated that he may revive at least parts of the project, saying, “We are taking, certainly, a fresh look at FutureGen, how it would fit into this expanded portfolio” [Greenwire].
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It may be a platitude that fresh, clean air is good for you, but now researchers have quantified how much cleaning up air pollution has improved the public health: It has boosted the lifespan of the average American city-dweller by five months.
Coauthor Majid Ezzatin explains that when his team examined three decades of health data from 51 U.S. cities, researchers found that people are living about three years longer than they did before. Controlling for changes in income, education, demographics and smoking, about five months of that can be chalked up to air improvements…. “Rather than just saying pollution is bad for health,” he said, “we can say that regulations are good for health” [Wired News].
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As the cleanup continues of the billion gallons of ash that spilled out of a reservoir at a Tennessee coal-fired power plant two weeks ago, nearby residents continue to worry about the long-term health and environmental effects of the waste material. Residents of Kingston, Tennessee, say they’ve gotten conflicting messages regarding the gray sludge that poured into the Emory River and coated their fields and roads. Meanwhile, other coal-burning power plants around the country are inspecting their own waste storage systems for weaknesses.
Preliminary results from water samples taken in the spill area show no unsafe levels of toxins, said Leslie Sims, on-scene coordinator for the Environmental Protection Agency. The testing includes municipal supplies and private wells, he said. However, samples of the fly ash scooped up along roadsides and river banks show elevated levels of arsenic that normally would trigger an EPA response, Sims said. “These are levels that we consider harmful to humans,” he said [CNN]. But the EPA is not responding because the Tennessee Valley Authority, which operates the plant, is already working on cleaning up the pollution, Sims said.
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American voters may have enthusiastically chosen to send Barack Obama to the White House as the next president of the United States, but the Bush Administration still has 76 days in office and seems to be making the most of that time by passing a host of so-called “midnight regulations.” Many of these last-minute rule changes relax environmental regulations, and watchdog groups say these controversial changes may be difficult for the incoming president to undo.
Some of the rule changes would ease or lift constraints on private industry, including power plants, mines and farms. Those and other regulations would help clear obstacles to some commercial ocean-fishing activities, ease controls on emissions of pollutants that contribute to global warming, relax drinking-water standards and lift a key restriction on mountaintop coal mining [Washington Post]. If the rules take effect before inauguration day, the incoming Obama Administration would have to begin a long and complicated regulatory process to reverse them.
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A British jury has cleared six Greenpeace activists of causing criminal damage when they vandalized a power plant last year in a protest over global warming, based on the defense attorneys’ argument that the protesters were trying to prevent even worse damage from climate change. Yesterday’s verdict is expected to embarrass the government and lead to more direct action protests against energy companies [The Guardian].
Last October, the Greenpeace protesters scaled the smokestacks of a coal-fired power plant as a publicity stunt to protest the United Kingdom’s continued reliance on coal-fired power plants, which emit large amounts of the greenhouse gases responsible for global warming. The protesters were halfway through painting a slogan on the side of one smokestack (”Gordon, bin it,” a British way of asking Prime Minister Gordon Brown to chuck coal), when the police served the activists an injunction by helicopter and forced them to stop. They were charged with causing more than $50,000 in damages based on the cost of removing the paint. E.ON, which owns the power plant, said that the company was in a state of shock over the verdict [The Times].
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Next week, German officials will flip the switch and turn on the world’s first coal-fired power plant to use carbon capture and storage technology, in which carbon dioxide is stripped out the plant’s emissions and pumped deep underground. This “clean coal” technology has been hailed as a possible way to get cheap energy without further contributing to global warming. The 30 megawatt Schwarze Pumpe power station, built and operated by Swedish power company Vattenfall, will produce power along with 10 tons of highly concentrated CO2 an hour. The CO2 will be loaded onto tankers and taken to a nearby gas field for sequestration [Earth2Tech].
The new Vattenfall plant is a relatively small pilot project intended to test the viability of carbon capture and storage; these technologies have yet to be deployed in full-scale commercial plants, which typically generate hundreds of megawatts of power. The technologies are currently expensive, partly because capturing and compressing carbon dioxide into liquid requires a good amount of energy. Critics also have questioned their effectiveness in keeping emissions sealed underground [GreenTech Media]. For all these reasons, some experts have wondered whether clean coal plants are a realistic option for large-scale energy production.
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In a national first, a judge in Georgia blocked a proposed coal-fired power plant based on concerns over global warming. The state judge denied the $2 billion power plant’s air pollution permit because it didn’t set limits for its emission of carbon dioxide. Both opponents of coal use and the company that wants to build the plant said it was the first time a court decision had linked carbon dioxide to an air pollution permit [The New York Times].
The energy companies plan to appeal the decision to the Georgia Supreme Court, and some experts say the ruling is likely to be overturned. But the Sierra Club, which was one of the plaintiffs in the case, pronounced itself thrilled with the judge’s decision. “We think this is the beginning of the end of conventional coal-fired power plants, because of the enormity of their emissions,” said Bruce Nilles, director of the Sierra Club’s national campaign against coal. Of the 80 coal plants in the permitting process nationwide, about 30 are in active litigation, Nilles said [Atlanta Journal-Constitution].
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