Energy secretary nominee sees coal as
'nightmare'
Dec 17 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Ken Ward Jr. The Charleston
Gazette, W.Va.
President-elect Barack Obama's pick for U.S. energy secretary isn't sold on
the idea that technology to capture greenhouse emissions and pump them
underground will save the coal industry.
Carbon capture and storage research is still in its early stages, said
Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist announced by Obama this week as
his nominee to run the U.S. Department of Energy. Real-world projects to
pump millions of tons of carbon dioxide might also be rejected unless
scientists show it can be done safely, Chu said during an April speech.
"Coal is my worst nightmare," said Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory and a Stanford University professor.
Chu noted that coal is the current "default option" for meeting growing
energy needs in the United States, China and India. But coal is also firing
continued increases in worldwide carbon dioxide emissions, even at a time
when scientists say the need to dramatically reduce those emissions is
critical.
"We have lots of fossil fuel," Chu said during a talk outlining his views on
energy policy. "That's really both good and bad news. We won't run out of
energy, but there's enough carbon in the ground to really cook us."
Chu said existing pilot projects involving a few million tons of carbon
dioxide sequestration are far too small to tell if the process would work on
the scale needed.
"It's sort of a research and development issue," he said. "I think we have
to do this if we're going to go forward with coal, but it's not a guarantee
that we have a solution with coal."
Late last week, when word began leaking that Chu was a likely Obama Cabinet
choice, his comments about coal began circulating on the Internet, primarily
after they were posted on a Wall Street Journal blog.
Bill Raney, president of the West Virginia Coal Association, said he had not
seen Chu's remarks, but that they gave him cause for concern.
"What I'm concerned about is how many coal mines has he been to, and what is
his thought about the coal mines and their families who rely on this
industry?" Raney said. "That may be his personal opinion, but that's got to
be sobered up a bit."
Other coal boosters were familiar with Chu's comments, but also insisted
they were less concerned.
"Any remarks Dr. Chu has made over the years, whether positive or negative
about coal must be viewed against specific public policy objectives laid out
by President-elect Obama," said Carol Raulston, spokeswoman for the National
Mining Association.
Raulston noted that Obama has emphasized "energy independence" and supports
"the next generation of clean coal technology to capture and store emissions
of carbon from coal-based generation."
She pointed to a presentation Chu gave to the Chinese Academy of Sciences in
October 2007 in which he said, "Technologies for capturing and sequestering
carbon from fossil fuels can play a central role in the cost-effective
management of global carbon dioxide emissions."
Environmental groups and other advocates of swift and serious action to deal
with the climate change crisis said Chu's comments on coal reflect a clear
understanding of the scientific basis for concern and a practical view of
the challenges for reducing the energy industry's greenhouse impacts.
"He isn't fooled by clean-coal claptrap," wrote Joseph Romm, an energy
expert who edits the blog Climate Progress.
During the campaign, Obama pledged to reduce U.S. carbon dioxide emissions
by at least 80 percent by 2050. In the near term, his campaign plan called
for reducing emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.
United Mine Workers officials and some within the coal industry aren't as
concerned about the 2050 target. But the near-term reductions scare coal
industry backers. They say cutting back to 1990 emissions by 2020 doesn't
provide adequate time to work out the long list of hurdles to implementing
carbon capture and sequestration technology on coal-fired power plants.
Obama and Vice President-elect Joe Biden have also proposed to invest $150
million over 10 years on a variety of energy programs -- everything from
plug-in hybrid vehicles to biofuels and "low-emissions coal plants."
They also said they would instruct the DOE to start a new public-private
partnership to build five commercial-scale coal-fired plants that capture
carbon dioxide emissions and pump them underground. But it remains unclear
exactly how much government money Obama and Biden would chip in for those
plants, or how much of the $150 billion "clean energy" program would go
toward coal.
Chu said carbon dioxide controls on power plants could increase electricity
bills by about 25 percent. But he said the higher costs are not the biggest
challenge.
Carbon dioxide that is pumped underground could form a big bubble that finds
its way out, or could turn acidic and create cracks in geologic formations
that prompt leakage, Chu said. These potential problems, he said, are likely
to bring lawsuits from residents where such projects are proposed.
"Why would there be a legal challenge?" Chu said. "Because there would be
people saying I don't want this done in my back yard because if the carbon
dioxide ever does bubble to the surface, it could actually kill people."
He also said that fly-ash emissions from coal-fired power plants amount to
100 times more radiation than is released by nuclear power plants.
"If you're concerned about radiation, coal might be worse than a nuclear
reactor," Chu said. "It's worse in every other respect."
Reach Ken Ward Jr. at kward@wvgazette.com or 304-348-1702.
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