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No need for CCS; solar and wind are clean
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CCS development simply moves the mess somewhere else.
The U.S. government estimates that there are at least several hundred years' worth of coal reserves in the country, but is coal more abundant than sunshine? Is it actually less expensive to burn after considering all of the indirect effects associated with its use?
The insatiable demand for energy in America and the world, and the predictions of future growth, make it so that coal will continue to be a valuable resource for years to come, but could wind and solar replace coal once energy storage technology is commercialized? Coal mining and burning is a 24/7 operation that seems to stop for nothing, not health risks nor environmental degradation; but it would stop if something cheaper, cleaner, and more reliable were developed.
To replace coal generated energy, experts claim, would require "2,400 times more solar generation,40 times more wind power, 250 new nuclear plants, almost double the US production of natural gas, 500 hydro plants the size of the Hoover Dam or halving electricity consumption. Even then, the US would have to find a way to meet new demand, given growth forecasts". (Financial Times)
To not replace coal would result in more health risks associated with air pollution, more mercury poisoning in the waters, and greater environmental damage in the areas where the resource is harvested.
Coal supplies upwards of 50% of the electricity generation in America and is responsible for nearly that percentage of domestic CO2 emissions. In order to be able to participate in international negotiations regarding climate change, the U.S. must address the coal problem.
To replace a significant portion of coal in electricity generation with clean energy would cost trillions; to build out the carbon capture and storage infrastructure for the industry would also cost trillions.
Whichever option the U.S. chooses, it will be decades before anything substantial is done; doing nothing is simply not an option anymore.
Steven Chu has said the Obama Administration wants technology for coal-fired power stations to capture and store CO2 ready for commercial deployment within a decade. To this end, they are prepared to pour billions into the industry in order to scale up technology for commercial deployment.
Billions poured into CCS technology only solves one side of the equation, though. While emissions are the talk of the town recently, coal still has the problem of substantial environmental damage associated with harvesting it. Once coal-fired power plants are built, their appetite for coal never stops; more mountains in Appalachia will have to be sacrificed, more basins in Wyoming will need to be strip mined. The process of mining for coal will continually consume the available resource from any given area and then move on to others while polluting everywhere.
While the U.S. may have several hundred years of coal reserves, do we really have several hundred years of storage space for the CO2 and concentrated toxic chemicals that will be 'cleaned' from coal-fired emissions? It sounds a bit like the scene from "The Cat in the Hat Comes Back" where the mess is simply passed around.
Advocates for the coal industry make the claim that solar and wind have an intermittancy problem that their resource does not. In order to create power 24/7, solar and wind are unreliable because the sun goes down and the wind stops blowing. For this reason, they say, coal is the most reliable energy resource we have and it cannot be replaced.
This would be true if we didn't have the option of developing an energy storage infrastructure that could store energy from the sun and wind which could then be drawn upon during non-sunny and non-windy times. The are probably billions of years of sunlight and wind left (as long as the earth and sun exist), and once the infrastructure is built, there is no need to build the infrastructure for capturing emissions or finding a place to store them.
Why build out the generation AND storage infrastructure that the coal industry requires when we can simply pay for only the generation process with clean energy? Solar and wind energy generation have no emissions; they do not require an expensive and time consuming infrastructure buildout phase in addition to the initial generation process.
The amount of money that is going to be thrown at CCS development could catapult energy storage technology to the next phase of its development. Once the energy storage problem is solved, so is the emissions problem.
While smaller solar applications will have to rely on battery storage, utility scale solar arrays are working on finding other methods for storing the sun's energy. Molten salt storage works by concentrating the sun's energy onto a tower filled with liquid salt using mirrors; the heated liquid salt is then used to create steam to turn a turbine in the same way that coal-fired steam does. "As many as 17,500 large mirrors – each one 24 feet by 28 feet — will be attached to 12-foot-hight pedestals. The mirrors, called heliostats, will be arrayed in a circle around a 538-foot-tall concrete tower. Atop the tower will sit a 100-foot-tall receiver filled with 4.4 million gallons of liquid salt. The heliostats will focus the sun on the receiver, heating the salt to 1,050 degrees Fahrenheit. The liquefied salt flows through a steam generating system to drive the turbine and then is returned to the receiver to be heated again." (Green Inc.)
One process (solar) creates no emissions while the other (coal) requires an expensive CCS system to be built.
"Putting carbon capture technology on existing coal plants would push up operating costs by 80%. Much of that will have to be passed on to consumers, who would want assurances it is safe to have large amounts of carbon stored locally."
Solar and wind solve the environmental and the emissions problem, whereas coal simply pushes both problems to another area and another generation of Americans.
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