Dominick Chilcott

France and the US: once again a revolutionary alliance

New Haven, West Virginia may seem an unlikely spot for a revolution. The town is dominated by American Electric Power's monster (1,300 mega watts) coal-burning, Mountaineer power station but is otherwise unremarkable. But that is where AEP and the French company Alstom began, last Friday, to show the world that there really might be such a thing as clean coal. If this carbon capture and storage pilot works out, the effect really will be revolutionary.
 
The conundrum is a familiar one. Human beings need electricity and, in many countries, the cheapest and most available source of fuel to produce that electricity is coal. 50% of the US's electricity is produced from coal-fired power stations. The figure is about 33% in the UK. China is said to be building a new coal-fired power station every two weeks to meet its growing energy needs.
 
But buring coal produces a lot of carbon dioxide; in fact, twice as much, per unit of power generated, as gas does. 
 
The science is not complicated. If we are to restrict the rise in the average temperature of our planet to 2 degrees Celsius (above which scientists estimate the effects of global warming become catastrophic), we have to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas (that cause the greenhouse warming effect) in the atmosphere. In practice, that means we have to drastically cut back the burning of fossil fuels, which produce CO2 and of which coal is one of the worst offenders.
 
Humankind appears to be caught on the horns of a dilemma. We can have the electricity that powers our lives but warms the planet to dangerous levels or we can preserve our climate and save the planet for future generations. But not both.
 
The philosopher's stone of climate change and energy is a solution that enables us to have our electricity and preserve our planet. For some time, scientists and engineers have talked about methods to capture carbon and store it away from the atmosphere. But it had never been attempted in an intergrated system at a coal-buring power plant.
 
Until last week. At the Mountaineer plant at New Haven, West Virginia. Alstom have built a CCS plant at AEP's power station that uses chilled ammonia to capture the CO2. The gas is then pumped thousands of feet underground into safe storage. Alstom reckons that its system will capture and store some 90% of all the CO2 passing through it. For now, that applies only to 20mw, a fraction, of the power generated at Mountaineer. But the intention is to scale up the CCS activity as it proves itself.
 
In Britain, the government are strong supporters of finding a commercially viable CCS system. Our target is to achieve this by 2020. For now, that means any new combustion plant must be designed to be able to retrofit CCS once it is commercially proven. Once the technology is proven, all new coal power stations approved after April 2009 will have five years to retrofit CCS to their full capacity. The UK is fortunate in being so close to the North Sea where there are a number of potential sites for storing captured CO2 in depleted gas and oil reservoirs .
 
So last week was a beginning, the start of a clean revolution in power generation, a shot heard around the world. And it was fired by an American company in alliance with a French one. But this time, unlike in the American revolutionary war, the British are on the same side as the US and France. And we all hope that the revolution succeeds.

Posted at 14:50 04 November 2009 by Dominick Chilcott  |  Comments[0]