EU heads for clean coal era

By Emily Smith

Date: 18/05/06

The next ten years could be the first 'clean coal decade', according to researchers, the European Commission, industry and green groups.

The Commission says that it will publish in December a communication on clean coal, pointing Europe in the right direction for the future. A Commission spokesman said the publication would report on the state of clean coal technologies and suggest plans for developing them.

Clean coal, or the art of capturing and storing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from coal, is a dream uniting many industrialists and environmentalists.

As a still plentiful natural resource, 'dirty' coal might provide Europe with a safe energy supply if it could be made more environmentally friendly.

No EU country has yet adopted clean coal technologies on a commercial scale.

Neighbouring Norway, however, stores more than one million tonnes of liquefied CO2 a year in an appropriate geological structure - a saline aquifer.

An engineer from the Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) said his group was now focusing mainly on carbon capture.

Existing technologies make it possible to capture 80%-90% of the CO2 produced in coal power plant flues, but this method, he warned, would lead to a rise in electricity prices of 5%-30%.

A zero emission power plant is at the moment too expensive to be practicable. "Everything is a trade-off between cost and capture...the market won't accept a more than 2% price increase," he said.

"The EU is currently funding a significant number of projects to optimise the technology... But don't expect to see them tomorrow."

The JRC hopes by 2008-9 to be able to demonstrate two methods of carbon capture and storage (CCS).

In Germany, the biggest electricity producer RWE announced in March that it would invest 1 billion euro in the world's first large-scale clean coal power plant, which it says could be up and running by 2014.

Other major industry groups with plans to build clean coal power stations include Shell, E.ON and Vattenfall. Estimates of when these will be ready for use vary from 2012 to 2025.

Stefan Singer of the environmental campaign group WWF said some industrialists were playing down the "advanced" state of carbon capture technologies out of fear that money would shift to "more cost-competitive technologies like off-shore wind power".

Although WWF regarded carbon capture and storage (CCS) as "not a visionary new technology but still an end-of- pipe solution", he added that his group would not hesitate to lend its support to clean coal developers in one situation. "If the choice is between clean coal and nuclear power, we will say: go for clean coal as soon as possible," he said.

But he added that clean coal was unlikely to be developed on a commercial scale without tough EU-wide CO2 emission restrictions. "Clean coal puts a price on carbon. No one will do it just for fun, only if they are forced to because of strong carbon constraints," he said.

Article takes a look at clean coal technologies which rely on creating energy from coal with minimal or no net carbon emissions.