Cleaning up coal

The dirty world of coal is pushing for major breakthrough that will turn it into a clean fuel.

WASHINGTON - As the global warming debate in Congress begins in earnest, there's no bigger villain than coal and its carbon pollution bellowing skyward from power plants across the country.

With coal the subject of legislation to limit or tax carbon emissions, the industry and its allies in Congress are working hard to turn it into something it's not -- a clean fuel.

A big hope -- but something far from certain -- is technology that would pump carbon dioxide deep into the ground rather than letting it waft into the atmosphere.

The survival of coal affects people everywhere who get their electricity from America's most abundant fossil fuel. But it looms even larger in the coal fields of Illinois, and in St. Louis, headquarters for the nation's two biggest coal companies, Arch Coal and Peabody Energy.

Each year, mines in Southern Illinois carve more than 30 million tons of the fossil fuel from the Illinois Basin.

In Illinois and Missouri, coal fuels 47 power plants with an average age of 43 years. The plants run on 50-year-old technology that environmental advocates say burns fuel efficiently and isn't compatible with technology to capture and store greenhouse gases.

Those plants send some 171 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year and make up the largest part of each state's greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Missouri Department of Natural Resources.

Environmental groups and coal industry advocates disagree on when technology might be available to eliminate carbon emissions from coal-fired plants. But they agree it will be necessary.

"The reality is that coal will be with us for a long time," said John Thompson, head of the Coal Transition Project for Illinois' Clean Air Task Force. "The wise path is to put the old way on Social Security and replace it with new technology."

The politics of coal

Coal's economic value means that restrictions and taxes on emissions face an uphill battle in Washington.

"I'm not going to be the member of Congress who votes for a bill that destroys the coal industry in Southern Illinois," said Rep. John Shimkus, R-Collinsville. He and other coal-state legislators, such as Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., also see coal as an opportunity to reduce America's depedence on foreign energy sources.

But expansion of the coal industry could translate to decades of unchecked greenhouse gas emissions. So both the Senate and the House are pursuing greater funding for research into ways to clean up the air pollution from power plants. The technology farthest along to reduce carbon emissions is called "capture and storage."

Here's the idea: Power plants would capture carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels through a chemical process. The gas is stored at high pressure and transported through a pipeline to a site where it can be injected deep into the earth or under the ocean.

In theory, the carbon dioxide would remain trapped for hundreds or even thousands of years.

Power plants today aren't able to capture carbon and more research is needed before the industry can invest in new plants, said Carol Raulston, senior vice president for the National Mining Association.

"Right now, there's really no way coal-based utilities can deal with their carbon emissions, and we're looking to Congress to fund that," Raulston said. 

'Daunting challenge'

Joseph Romm, a former top energy official in President Bill Clinton's administration, is among the scientists calling for a research and development effort comparable to the outfitting of American factories for World War II.

"We can't wait for imaginary future breakthroughs," he told a forum in Washington recently. "If you want to deal with climate, you've got to start today."

In addition to more research, Romm advocates a ban on the construction of power plants that don't capture carbon pollution.

Without such an effort, he said, the estimated 850 coal-fired plants to be built worldwide in the next 25 years would produce more greenhouse gases than all human emissions since the dawn of the industrial age.

China, in particular, builds one new coal plant every week, according to estimates from the International Energy Agency.

The Senate is considering bills that would increase funds for clean-coal research by $130 million and require the administration to map the nation's potential storage sites within nine months.

In recent testimony before the Senate Energy Committee, Bush administration officials said 2045 was their target date for wide-scale, commercial deployment of power plants with carbon capture and storage technology. They also said they need three years to map storage sites, which left some senators bristling.

"We need to be doing it, instead of these years and years of research," complained Sen. Craig Thomas, R-Wyo.

FutureGen

The federal government's best hope for action hinges on the FutureGen project, the first large-scale demonstration of carbon capture and storage technology. Tuscola and Mattoon, towns in east-cenral Illinois, are two of four proposed sites for the plant.

The FutureGen Alliance, a partnership between the Department of Energy and private energy firms including Peabody, will announce the site of the $1 billion plant this fall. But some are skeptical.

MIT's "Future of Coal" report, published earlier this year, worried that the project was more about experimentation than building something that can actually work on a commercial level.

Bill Hoback, head of the Illinois Office of Coal Development, doesn't share the report's concerns. 

"This is something we want," Hoback said.