Clean coal technology is not viable without carbon capture and carbon sequestration. Both of these could prove to be stumbling blocks toward a cleaner coal future. What we are dealing with now are mostly demonstration projects and other projects that some tout as major. But relative to the problems we face on CO2 they are miniscule.

Carbon sequestration is rife with technical and legal problems. One of the biggest legal problems is who will hold the liability, especially the long term liability that is potentially inherent in carbon sequestration fields. The carbon once captured and then sent into the ground could be there for pretty much forever. The places to store the carbon also have to be chosen very carefully. In the US and worldwide there are massive spaces underground that could be used to store the carbon. The best of these are deep enough that the carbon turns to liquid due to the pressures involved in such deep caverns.

The technology of carbon sequestration also seems to have some way to go. If the safety, economic and legal issues are resolved, and these are very complex problems to solve, then clean coal could be on its way to some extent, but with politics, policies, and lobbying pending.

The White House and DOE have been active on these issues. Please see http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/08/13/cleaning-coal and http://energy.gov/news/9333.htm. Clearly, the President is looking at clean coal as an option. He established a task force looking into CCS and their results can be found at http://www.fe.doe.gov/programs/sequestration/ccstf/ccstf_factsheet.pdf and http://www.fe.doe.gov/programs/sequestration/ccstf/ccstf_factsheet.pdf for those who want the short version and http://www.fe.doe.gov/programs/sequestration/ccstf/CCSTaskForceReport2010.pdf for those who want the more detailed and analytical versions.

Coal is clearly vital for the US for generating electricity. It is also important for many other countries. Please see: http://www.worldcoal.org/resources/coal-statistics/ . It is unlikely that China, Poland, Kazakhstan, India, The Czech Republic, Germany and Greece are going to move from coal any time soon. Israel, however, is moving more and more to natural gas and away from coal, but still has a long way to go. Morocco is seriously looking into using less coal in electricity generation and has groups set up looking at alternative energy futures. But they have a long road ahead: http://www.iea.org/stats/pdf_graphs/MAELEC.pdf. Morocco pretty much stopped its coal production a few years ago, so they need to find alternatives: http://www.iea.org/stats/pdf_graphs/MAPROD.pdf. Israel produces none of its coal: http://www.iea.org/stats/pdf_graphs/ILPROD.pdf.

Israel and Morocco are not coal producers so the coal lobbying groups are somewhat weakened in those two countries compared to places like Poland and the US where coal is the main source of electricity output, especially in Poland. Please see http://www.iea.org/stats/pdf_graphs/PLELEC.pdf and http://www.iea.org/stats/pdf_graphs/USELEC.pdf.

Israel is also a small country that is looking way ahead toward solar, wind, and, yes, nuclear energy http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/world/middleeast/10nukes.html . For those of you who may have thought Israel has been using nuclear power all along please see: http://www.iea.org/stats/pdf_graphs/ILELEC.pdf and http://www.iea.org/stats/pdf_graphs/ILPROD.pdf .

But I diverge, but not entirely. The success of CSS programs here in the US, in Norway, where I saw a CSS site recently, and elsewhere could determine the energy and environment futures of the world, not just of the US.

Coal supplies about 41% of all electricity worldwide: http://www.worldcoal.org/coal/uses-of-coal/coal-electricity/. Coal is also used worldwide to produce cement, steel, and other materials that are in need of extreme heat to process them.

The top 5 coal users in the world use 75% of the coal in the world. These are China, the US, India, Germany and Russia in order from largest and so forth. Focus on these countries could help solve a large part of the environmental problems from coal. China is looking into CSS in a very big way: http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2009/06/22/22climatewire-a-sea-change-in-chinas-attitude-toward-carbo-94519.html. India is also. Germany is heavily involved in research, development and policy developments toward CSS.

So we are not alone in this issue. Cracking the clean coal-CSS connection will bring us a long way toward helping to solve the environmental impacts of using coal for electricity production. Given that we can’t exactly dump coal in the use of electricity any time soon, much like we are unlikely to be able to dump oil and refined products for transportation worldwide any time soon it behooves us to find the intermediate solutions that will involve CSS here and worldwide.

It would be best to collaborate and compete with others in the world on various aspects of clean coal and CSS. There are already many competing technologies for CSS being helped by governments, such as Norway and the US, and trying to make it on their own in the market. Governments can help by setting up fast track R&D for CSS and other clean coal technologies. Governments can also help by giving some policy clarity and stability. In the US the coal industry and the electricity industry has none—other than to rely on the dysfunctional Congress to accomplish effectively nothing on the carbon markets and other carbon-related issues. Norway, the EU and many others are way ahead of the US on this. Legal clarity and clarity in legal thinking also needs to be developed. That is hardly the case here and such legal clarity is rare worldwide.

This is a worldwide issue that requires worldwide actions, support, research efforts and more. It is great that the President sees things this way and has, along with previous working groups and joint efforts established before his time, also established some greater working relations with many other countries on these issues. The problems are seemingly solvable. But they are not easy.

Given the importance of coal to electricity, steel, cement and more it is of the utmost importance that the CSS code be cracked. It is also important in the longer run to move from carbon intensive fuels to a new energy future. But, reasonably, we are not ready for that yet, and it could take decades to get it done. We need to be reasonable and find solutions for today’s problems and the nearer term future problems in order to have a better, more secure and more stable energy future.

For those who want to stop coal altogether and fast, please give me an alternative that can be set up quickly, effectively, and will lend to economic growth at the same time. My ears and eyes are open, but I have yet to see a systematic solution to this problem that can be accomplished in the time periods that some would like these changes to happen. I am all for change, but for reasonable change that looks into the systems within systems connections that can be found with energy sources such as coal.

NRDC believes that CCS will be one of many weapons we can use to fight global warming pollution. Energy efficiency and renewables are far more powerful weapons, of course, but CCS has a role to play, and we support incentives that are tied to real performance, such as tons of emissions captured and stored.

But let’s be clear: There is no such thing as “clean coal.” Every single step in the coal power cycle is dirty, from destructive mountaintop removal mining and other extraction to toxic smokestack emissions and the disposal of coal ash. Yet the reality is that coal is abundant, remains relatively cheap, and generates about half of U.S. electricity. Coal will be a part of our energy portfolio for some time to come.

The need to reduce global warming emissions is so urgent that we cannot wait until we have political support for immediately replacing all coal plants with renewable sources or for banning all new coal plants. What are the odds of getting Congress or any significant coal-using state to adopt a "no new coal, period" policy in the next few years? NRDC has fought the coal industry for 40 years, and in our judgment, the odds are slim.

That is where CCS comes in. A policy requiring new coal plants to use CCS would ensure that dangerous global warming emissions were blocked from going into the atmosphere. Retrofitting old plants with CCS would slash pollution even more.

Just as important, such a policy would improve the economic competitiveness of cleaner alternatives overnight, because it would internalize a cost of coal use that is currently ignored. That is a huge step forward in ending the distorted market that has allowed coal to dominate electricity production until now.

It is true that CCS will not stop mountaintop removal mining; neither will SO2 scrubbers, NOx controls, mercury controls, or baghouses. But that has never caused us to oppose those vital life-saving control measures in the past. NRDC will continue to fight destructive coal mining and all the other dangerous aspects of the coal cycle, and, at the same time, we will push for smart CCS incentives that help America reduce global warming pollution.

Putting a cap on carbon emissions is the most effective incentive we have. Significantly, Obama’s task force report concluded that the biggest hurdle to CCS wasn’t technical problems or legal barriers, but the absence of climate legislation.

NRDC wholeheartedly agrees. A cap will provide the market signal that industry needs to invest in CCS technology on a major scale. Until we pass a comprehensive climate bill, CCS will continue to be costly and coal plants will continue to spew dangerous emissions.

Carl Pope makes some important observations about cleaning up industrial and natural gas emissions. But I'm not so sure about CCS as the critical path item (needing Federal funding) in those areas - CHP and combined cycle are low-hanging fruit. In other words, minimize the emissions/delivered quads ratio before deciding how much CCS is feasible. Industrial emissions excluding electricity are about a billion tons, or almost one-sixth of total U.S. co2. These emissions are high because 58% are from oil or coal - and the 42% from gas lacks the near 60% efficiency of a new utility scale combined cycle plant. Sure, capturing the co2 from these sources and sticking it in the ground would be great someday - but there is plenty to do in the meantime on the efficiency front. And industrials would act quickly on efficiency if co2 emissions were made costly by policy.

If we are to meet our future energy demands we must focus on developing all sources of energy including natural gas, coal, nuclear and renewables particularly if we are going to spark economic and job growth. Each one percent increase in U.S. GDP growth is accompanied by a 0.2 percent increase in energy use.

Given the nation's abundant supply of coal, the administration should pursue R&D efforts in clean coal technology. If CCS and clean coal could be commercialized, it could certainly fill the gaps and shortcomings in supply. The federal government already invests heavily in renewables energies like wind and solar and should pursue further development of clean coal as well.

The term doesn't mean anything, and your respondents will always end up arguing about that, instead of answering the same question.

I'm answering what I think was the intended question -- should we invest in carbon capture and sequestration technology as a means of keeping alive coal as a viable source for generating electricity while solving the climate crisis? If so how? And how much? And how likely is it to work?

In my view, CCS is important -- too important to be wasted on coal fired electricity, its least likely actual market. It's fairly easy to imagine a world in which we meet a vastly increased demand for the services provided by electricity, with a generating system that has moved on Beyond Coal, and at prices that make lighting my house or powering this lap top no more expensive than they would be if we had continued to rely on coal. You simply combine the visions offered below by John Anda, William O'Keefe (first time I think I've agreed with you Bill), and Bill Snape. I'm sure we'll also see numerous other posts pointing out how we can move Beyond Coal to a higher performance, low carbon utility sector using smarter grids, renewable electricity sources, combined heat and power technologies, and ending our criminal and costly waste of about 50% of the electricity we generate.

But if an electrical generating sector that has moved beyond coal is easy to envision, it's not so easy to imagine a world that doesn't need CCS. Steel and cement (at least in its present chemical formulation) unavoidably emit huge quantities of process CO2, regardless of how clean the source of their electricity and heat -- the basic chemistry means that we're going to need to capture CO2 from their facilities. And for decades at least a low-carbon electrical sector will rely, as Bill O'Keefe says, on natural gas, and it emits enough CO2 that we need to keep it out of the atmosphere.

But by giving control of CCS research to the utilities and the coal companies, we run the risk of investing the wrong dollars in the wrong technologies. It will do us little good to develop very expensive CCS technologies which can only be installed on new coal fired power plants built near exhausted coal beds or depleted oil fields. Because, even if we do make CCS work at scale, we aren't going to need very many such power plants, and few of them will be in the right locations for the geologic injection CCS technologies getting all the attention.

Why is CCS unlikely to make sense for coal fired electricity? Because, first and foremost, capturing the carbon will consume from 10-28% of the electricity being generated -- the so-called "parasitic load." Second, once you add the increasing costs of coal (we don't have nearly as much as has been pretended and the cost is going up steadily), and the costs of cleaning up other pollutants from coal like mercury, sulfur, and soot, coal fired electricity won't be able to compete with natural gas, with wind, or with properly located solar, much less with the investments needed to reduce our overall waste of electricity.

It's striking that as new coal fired power plants come on line in the United States this year, plants that must clean up public health pollutants, but don't yet have to clean up CO2, utility rates are soaring in the states which authroized them years ago. In Wyoming, the cost of operating a tiny (25 MW) new coal fired plant led the utility apply for a 25% increase in rates. In Illinois preliminary estimates indicate that when the new Prairie State coal burner comes on line, customers will see utility bills soar by 30%, because the plant cost twice as much as promised.

Existing coal burners aren't going to stay cheap either. Internal estimates prepared for the utility industry suggest that about half of the nation's coal fired electricity faces price increases of about $0.05/kwh just to bring those facilities up to modern pollution control standards.

So we ought to develop CCS -- but we ought to prioritize its most likely and important uses, in steel and cement plants, and at natural gas facilities which don't face the burden of cleaning up mercury, soot and sulfur and emit only half as much carbon anyway. If a technological breakthrough occurs, and suddenly coal fired electricity can meet the test of the market without dumping its health and climate costs on the public, terrific. Then we could start talking about what "clean coal" really means -- starting with the way we mine it. But that's not too likely, in my view, and we shouldn't hang the future of our electrical sector on coal, or invest in CCS only to make the big utilities happy.

These comments were submitted by Steve Miller, president and CEO of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity.

Clean coal technology is not only viable, it is essential if the United States is going to meet growing energy demands, decrease emissions of greenhouse gases, and hold down consumer costs, while protecting American jobs and our economy.

Coal—America’s most abundant domestically-produced energy resource according to the United States Energy Information Administration (EIA) —has long been the dominant fuel to generate electricity in our nation, and advanced clean coal technologies (CCT) will allow coal to be “America’s fuel” for decades to come.

First, what do we mean by “clean coal technology?” The term refers to many different technologies that have been developed, or are being developed, by industry—typically in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy and sometimes the EPA and state agencies—since the 1980s to reduce air emissions from coal-fueled power plants. These emissions include sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, particulate matter, mercury, and carbon dioxide. All of these technologies have achieved – or are expected to achieve – substantial emission reductions, often in excess of 90%.

Second, has CCT worked? Absolutely—to the benefit of the environment, electricity consumers, and taxpayers. Over the past thirty years, America’s coal-based electricity providers have invested over $90 billion in technologies to reduce emissions of major air pollutants, while providing affordable, reliable electricity. EPA’s latest analysis shows that sulfur dioxide emissions are 56% lower than in 1980, while nitrogen dioxide emissions are 46% lower during this period—even as the use of coal to generate electricity has almost tripled. Clean coal technologies have played a critical role in these reductions, and investments in CCT to meet new regulations will cut emissions significantly more in the years ahead.

Third, can clean coal technologies help address climate concerns? Yes—carbon capture and storage technologies (CCS) will do that. Last week, the President’s Interagency Task Force on Carbon Capture and Storage found “there are no insurmountable technological, legal, institutional, regulatory or other barriers that prevent CCS from playing a role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.” The task force noted that CO2 has been removed from industrial gas streams for more than sixty years and that we have transported CO2 in pipelines for almost forty years. Further, it is well documented that American businesses have safely stored CO2 underground to extract otherwise unrecoverable oil deposits for more than twenty years.

Independent analysis shows that higher costs will be incurred if we are not able to count on CCS. For example, EPA analysis of the Kerry-Lieberman bill concluded that allowance prices would be 34% higher if CCS is delayed. The EIA determined that allowance prices could be 100% higher if enabling technologies – including CCS – turn out to be more expensive than expected. Additionally,the International Energy Agency projected that, without CCS, overall costs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 2005 levels by 2050 would increase by 70%.

Fourth, can investments in CCT help create new jobs? Yes. Recent analysis by BBC Research & Consulting for four major labor organizations and ACCCE showed that investments in carbon capture and storage technologies could create five to seven million “man-years” of employment during construction and add about 250,000 permanent jobs during operation.

Investing in CCS and other clean coal technologies will allow the U.S. to exert global leadership in making the environment cleaner, as well as making America more competitive.

Clean coal technology, particularly carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), may be the dumbest public policy initiative of our time. Even if it eventually works, and that is far (far!) from certain, the amount of money it will take and the real dangers it creates make it the metaphoric epitome of Homer Simpson continually sticking his hand in the electric socket (pun intended) and repeatedly shocking himself.

CCS is a pure political sop to coal state members of Congress, who are themselves controlled by the coal industry. There is no question the better course of action is to use that money and invest in solar, wind and geothermal, or give the money back to the American people with a true price on carbon and other greenhouse pollutants.

If we want to get to where scientists tell us we need to go with climate change air pollution, and if we want the American people to support the transition, federal gifts to an unproven technology that will sustain the very industry that got us into this mess are most certainly not the answer.

The administration’s carbon capture task force acts as a reminder of Ronald Reagan’s observation that “government doesn’t solve problems, it subsidizes them.” Its report really said that clean coal technology is not commercially competitive and making it competitive involves making other energy sources more expensive. Carbon capture and storage is one way to mitigate emissions from burning coal but it is nowhere near ready for widespread use. Indeed, it may turn out to never be commercially viable. Additional time and R&D -- not taxpayer funded subsides -- will provide the ultimate answer.

Since the 1970s, there have been repeated efforts to achieve breakthroughs in clean coal technology. While progress has been made, none has achieved broad use. For example, fluidized bed combustion and coal gasification technologies have been worked on for decades; yet, both are still too expensive. Instead of seeking ways to push carbon capture and storage or some other clean coal technology, the government should provide incentives for utilities to switch to natural gas. US reserves of natural gas are every bit as large as our coal resources, but they are cleaner burning and much more reasonably priced.

Utilities that rely on coal do not need to be federally strong-armed into switching to ‘clean coal’ -- whatever that is. Instead, they need some certainty as to how clean is clean enough.

The Federal Government’s goal should not be to promote a specific suite of energy systems. Our leaders in Washington should strive to set realistic and reasonable emission standards -- those that are achievable at a competitive price -- and then let energy providers find the best way to provide the energy we need for a growing economy.

The government could do a lot to stimulate capital investment in newer technologies by making the R&D tax credit permanent, reducing the corporate tax rate (currently the second highest in the industrialized world), and imposing a modest carbon tax with its revenue used to lower taxes on wages.

The notion of ‘incentivizing’ favored alternatives to fossil energy or uneconomic low carbon coal technologies just offers political cover for continuing wasteful spending. Providing subsidies to favored technologies has been tried over and over with the same result; resources are wasted and rent seekers are created and rewarded. The history of government picking winners in the energy field demonstrates that seductive illusions produce dismal results.

Over the past three decades, federal spending on clean energy development had surpassed the total inflation-adjusted cost of the Apollo program and Manhattan Project combined -- almost $120 billion combined. Does anyone think that the results have been cost effective?

At a time when our national debt has reached a frightening level and our fiscal policy is a disgrace, the last thing politicians should be considering are programs that divert more resources from more productive to less productive uses and in the process lower tax revenues and increase the federal deficit. Indeed, it borders on lunacy for the government on the one hand to be considering more subsidies to industries that cannot stand on their own without government support while it simultaneously is proposing to tax the foreign source income of US-based companies, even though they already pay taxes in the country in which it’s earned

The climate challenge requires far more than incentivizing existing technologies. It requires incentivizing revolutionary technological innovation. Meaningful breakthroughs in carbon capture and sequestration and other technologies will only come when there are substantial rewards for innovation. One effective way to do this is through the use of technology inducement prices. The Administration has shown some interest in prizes, but it’s time to do more than just talk about them. Bankrolling prizes for real CCS breakthroughs is a far better use of taxpayer monies than FutureGen and other white elephant projects.

Putting a price on carbon will help encourage CCS and other carbon-reducing technologies, but there’s no stomach for imposing a major tax increase on the American economy. If the Administration is serious about putting a price on carbon, it should abandon complex, corporate-welfare-laden cap-and-trade schemes and consider a simple carbon tax offset by payroll tax reductions or full per-capita rebate of carbon tax revenues. This is the only way to price carbon without imposing a regressive, job-killing tax burden on the struggling economy.

U.S. electricity is a legacy system that worked fine during a century when energy was "the thing to waste" in pursuit of growth. But since the end of the last century, "the thing to waste" has shifted to data (gathering, processing and transmitting). The electricity sector will need to embrace data in the form of smart grid - while managing co2 pollution costs that won't be zero for much longer. But addressing legacy industry characteristics, like the four listed below, may bring as much opportunity as challenge (EIA 2008 data, rounded):

1. Inefficient: Of our 100 quads of consumed primary energy, 40 are to provide the 4 trillion kilowatt hours of electricity we use. But of this 40, electricity-related losses from things like wasted steam heat and line losses account for 27 - so only 13 quads are actually delivered as electricity.

2. Carbon-Intensive: The electricity sector overall emits 186 million tons of co2 per quad of delivered energy - while non-electricity sectors emit just 58. That is why cap and trade is expected to have its biggest impact on utilities. And that is why CCS (as well as nuclear) is important to the industry - utilities currently project more earnings from selling clean kilowatts than having kilowatt hours reduced through efficiency.

3. Under-Utilized: We have just under a thousand giga-watts of generating capacity that (if run flat out to meet a flat load) would provide more than double the kilowatt hours we currently use. Only a little under a third of that capacity is coal-fired - though these plants run more because they are cheap to operate round the clock. As an aside, the five biggest coal-consuming states (TX, IN, OH, PA and IL) account for a third of consumption – and a fifth of electoral votes. Hence the politics of coal.

4. Economically-Small: Since we spend roughly 3% of GDP on electricity, if de-carbonizing raised this cost by, say, half, GDP would be 1.5% lower than it otherwise would have been - relatively small over a multi-decade transition period, and arguably far cheaper than the risk-adjusted economic damage from climate change.

The inter-agency report overemphasizes the 10 commercial scale CCS plants by 2016 (what exactly will we learn and will it justify the cost?) at the expense of clearly articulating what CCS needs to compete fairly against other supply and demand side co2 abatement alternatives. The most curious line in the Executive Summary may be this: "Open-ended Federal indemnification should not be used to address long-term liabilities associated with co2 storage". This is ironic. If you ranked individual Federal actions to level the playing field for CCS, a liability cap would arguably be number one. And pore rights would seem a very solid number two. The 10 plants go too far towards a picking CCS as a winner, in my view.

And what happens to the coal industry if CCS, even with a level playing field, cannot compete? Coal mining is about a $50 billion in revenue industry in the U.S. (0.4 percent of GDP) which employs less than 100,00 miners. To put that into perspective, if it held the 1.9% of the labor force it had in 1920, there would be over two and a half million coal miners today. The top 5 states (WV, KY, PA, WY, and VA) account for over two-thirds of coal mining jobs. Is this sufficient to justify guaranteeing a dominant role for coal in a re-engineering U.S. electricity system? Of course not. It would be far cheaper to just assist the workers directly. And imports aren't likely to replace coal in electricity (unless imported LNG beats our own shale gas) so the energy independence issue for coal is far less important than frequently assumed.

To its great credit, the inter-agency report states at the outset "A climate policy designed to reduce our Nation’s GHG emissions is the most important step for commercial deployment of low-carbon technologies such as CCS". Well put. Congress, can your deep freeze on climate legislation thaw like thawing calved the massive Petermann Glacier a few weeks ago? Price carbon, preferably along the lines of the Cantwell-Collins CLEAR bill, and create a level playing field for technologies like CCS to compete for CCK.