POWER May 2015 - 46

CARBON CAPTURE AND SEQUESTRATION
CCS Development, the Key to Coal
Power's Future, Is Slow
Advocates for the continued reliance on coal for baseload electricity cheered
late last year when North America's largest power-related carbon capture
and sequestration (CCS) facility was commissioned. Since then, that pool
of advocates is evaporating as prominent electricity industry decisionmakers
publicly distance themselves from coal and champion alternatives
for a low- or no-carbon future. If CCS is to rescue coal-based power, time
is of the essence.
Jason Makansi
H
istory shows it's unwise to bet heavily
against coal. At the same time,
past performance is no guarantee of
future results.
Vocal electricity industry CEOs, such as
NRG Energy's David Crane, have distanced
themselves from coal in recent public comments.
Even before the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency's (EPA's) proposed
Clean Power Plan, leading Wall Street banks
proclaimed in 2007 through their " carbon
principles " that they would not finance coalfired
power plants without carbon capture
and sequestration (CCS). Meanwhile, the
Canadian province of Ontario reduced its
coal share of electricity from 25% to zero in
under 10 years.
Historically coal-based utilities, including
Tennessee Valley Authority, American
Electric Power (AEP), Duke, and Southern
Company, are retiring old coal units and
building gas-fired combined cycle or nuclear
units. Despite CCS research, demonstration,
and development programs (see " The Carbon
Capture and Storage R&D Frontier " in this
issue), the Obama administration's hostility
toward coal is evident in the EPA's draconian
emissions rules for coal-fired power, which
essentially are a forcing function for CCS.
Meanwhile, use of coal for power generation
grows in China and India, and recently
even made a comeback in Europe
when natural gas prices went the wrong
way and governments pulled back on nuclear
power.
Handicapping the future of coal aside,
the real question is less whether coal can
be economically competitive with CCS and
more how fast CCS technology can become
a viable commercial addition to a coal plant
compared to the techno-economic development
of the options it will compete against.
As this article shows, that shrinking pool
46
of advocates for coal had better assume a
heightened sense of urgency. With natural
gas price forecasts at historic lows, older coal
plants being retired at an alarming rate, wind
and solar continuing to make in-roads when
utilities seek capacity, and a slate of gridscale
energy storage technologies proceeding
through development and commercialization,
recent setbacks in CCS activities-including
the Feb. 3 Department of Energy (DOE) defunding
of FutureGen 2.0-loom large.
Scale Required for Success
In the aggregate, the CCS numbers are disturbing:
■
Only three large-scale coal-fired power
plant CCS projects likely will be operating
in North America by 2020.
■ According to Fossil Forward, issued
to the DOE in January by the National
Coal Council, the total CO2
capture
from all CCS projects operating, under
construction, or in advance planning in
the U.S. is 65 million tons/year, less
than the 77.6 million tons/year CO2
output from just West Virginia's coalfired
power stations.
■ Of 22 large-scale CCS projects around the
world in operation or under construction,
fewer than 10 are power-related.
■ The total number of large-scale projects
(including those in planning) worldwide
is 55, but this is 10 fewer than in 2013,
according to The Global Status of CCS:
2014, issued by the Global CCS Institute.
■ Three high-profile U.S. projects-DOE's
FutureGen, AEP's Mountaineer, and Tenaska's
Trailblazer-have been shelved or
cancelled. Another large project, Summit
Power, is listed as still in planning.
■ Fossil Forward notes that no CCS option
has achieved a technical readiness level
www.powermag.com
(TRL) above 6 on a 0 to 10 scale.
At minimum, a process at commercial
size must achieve extended periods of
operation (typically several years) under
variable operating conditions to qualify
for a TRL above 6. TRL is an important
metric for the highly regulated power industry
because of its generally low tolerance
for technical risk. According to Fossil
Forward, a conservative definition of a
" commercial " technology for the power
industry is when it can claim 10% of the
installed base or 50% market share for new
installations. At the current rate of CCS development,
commercial options won't be
available until 2030 in the best-case scenario
and more likely not until 2040, according
to published reports.
While the bulk of demonstration activity is
in the U.S., Canada, and other Organisation
for Economic Co-operation and Development
(OECD) countries, 70% of the deployments
need to occur in non-OECD countries,
according to the International Energy Agency,
in order to have a meaningful impact on
projected average worldwide temperature by
2050. However, China is pursuing only four
large-scale projects (beyond early planning)
and India none.
Even a 260-MW equivalent power plant
CCS project at the Belchatow coal-fired plant
in Poland, one of the world's largest power
plants, could not make it past investment hurdles,
according to the Jan-Feb 2015 issue of
Carbon Capture Journal. Legal issues concerning
the CO2
pipeline and sequestration
sites were major barriers.
Although processes to recover CO2
from
flue gas or other gas streams have been proven
and commercial for decades, enormous
barriers remain. Barriers for coal-fired power
applications are, above all others, scale and
POWER | May 2015
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POWER May 2015

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