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Friday, January 05, 2007 Part II: China's Coal FutureTo prevent massive pollution and slow its growing contribution to global warming, China will need to make advanced coal technology work on an unprecedented scale. By Peter Fairley
To read Part I of this story, click here. Carbon Power While China's desire to end its dependence on foreign oil is helping to drive huge capital investments in liquefaction technology, the country's power producers are moving much more slowly to take advantage of coal gasification. What they, like their American counterparts, are missing is an incentive to upgrade from conventional pulverized-coal plants to the more expensive gasification plants. According to Li Wenhua, the former 863 program manager (who now directs gasification research in China for General Electric), Chinese industrialists perceive pulverized-coal plants as a license to print money. "People say you shouldn't call it a power plant; it's a money-making machine," says Li. As yet, no power company has been willing to be the first to hit the off switch. Ironically, China's move to a more open economy has hampered efforts to deploy more innovative technologies. In the 1990s, it looked as if China's power sector was headed for its own gasification revolution. In 1993, China's leading power engineering firm, China Power Engineering Consulting in Beijing, began designing the country's first gasification power plant. The monopoly utility of the era, the State Power Corporation, planned to build the commercial-scale plant in Yantai, a thriving seaport not far from the Bohai Sea. The Yantai plant was to be the beginning of a transition to cleaner coal technology, says Zhao Jie, the plant's designer, now vice president of China Power Engineering. "China wanted to take a cleaner and more efficient way to produce power," says Zhao. Instead, the demonstration plant she designed went on a roller-coaster ride to nowhere. Design work was temporarily halted in 1994 when the cost of the technology was deemed unacceptably high, revived in the late 1990s, and then cut adrift after 2002 by the breakup of the State Power Corporation. The Yantai power plant was based on integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) technology. IGCC plants resemble natural-gas-fired power plants--they use two turbines to capture mechanical and heat energy from expanding combustion gases--but are fueled with syngas from an integrated coal gasification plant. They're not emissions free, but their gas streams are more concentrated, so the sulfurous soot, carbon dioxide, and other pollutants they generate are easier to separate and capture. Of course, once the carbon dioxide--the main greenhouse gas--is captured, engineers still need to find a place to stow it. The most promising strategy is to sequester it deep within saline aquifers and oil reservoirs. In preliminary analyses, Chinese geologists have estimated that aging oil fields and aquifers could absorb more than a trillion tons of carbon dioxide--more than China's coal-fired plants would emit, at their current rate, for hundreds of years. The Huaneng Group, a power producer based in Beijing, has pulled together a consortium of power and coal interests (Shenhua included) called GreenGen to build the first Chinese IGCC demo plant by 2010; like the related FutureGen project organized by the U.S. Department of Energy, GreenGen is to start with power production, then add carbon capture and storage. China's vice premier, Zeng Peiyan, made an appearance at GreenGen's ceremonial debut last summer, indicating Beijing's support for the project.
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Comments
giffut on 01/05/2007 at 3:02 AM
1
China couldn´t possibly run efficient plants for this method. Those coal fires can´t be stopped right now and are delivering around 3% of worldwide carbondioxide pollution, maybe even more, as exact figures are hard to come by.
This is a disaster and already happening.
http://www.gi.alaska.edu/~prakash/coalfires/causes_hazards.html
Ecowriter on 01/06/2007 at 1:50 AM
7
We really need to do whatever is necessary to HELP China to use alternative, clean energy sources, not poison the world with the same stuff that already poisoned places such as early industrial England and America.
Lisa Hart
kailangyu on 01/06/2007 at 2:03 PM
1
AY
BandOfGypsies on 01/11/2007 at 1:58 PM
2
lawrenceindyk on 01/18/2007 at 10:39 AM
1
Canada: 18.2
US: 14.1
France: 9.4
Japan: 8.9
UK: 6.6
Mexico: 2.2
China: 1.7
India: 0.6
Most Development agencies think 5 is a valid long term target for emerging economies and China and India have both expressed interest in getting there eventually. If just China and India were to do that, it would require raising total global electricity generation by 55%.
So far, both these countries are fueling their expanding generation capacity primarily (over 75%) on coal.
India has begun constructing the world's biggest coal-fired plant in Orissa state at 10 Gigawatts which will consume about a ton a second.
China will do that 20 times over in short order. Its 11th 5 year plan calls for an increase of 200 GW by 2012 (which in total would then equal US consumption) and again, almost all the increase through giant conventional coal plants.
I think it is unrealistic to expect these still very poor countries to do anything but expand their energy consumption as quickly and cheaply as possible (which unfortunately means in a dirtiert way than we might like) and even massive changes in first-world emissions and technology (itself somewhat unlikely) simply cannot even begin to compensate for this Asian growth. Call me a pessimist but it's hard for me to see how the war on CO2 isn't lost unless some miracle occurs.
pjduncan on 03/06/2007 at 7:18 PM
3
It would seem that it is up to men of reason and science to come up with convincing arguments that clearly demonstrate that the likely economic costs in the mid and long term of not acting far outweigh the economic gains in the short term. Then it is up to the politicians to find the courage to be leaders, and develop the popular support necessary to prevail in the face of entrenched financial interests opposing change.
Gee... now I've just convinced myself there is little hope.