[Blog Action Day] What will it take to get rid of coal?

Well since today is Blog Action Day, I thought I’d make it up for the fact that I haven’t blogged for a few days now. I’ve been trying very hard to bite my tongue about some of the stupid things both Westminster and Holyrood are planning to do to meet those so-called ambitious targets they’ve set themselves. I’m of course talking about Carbon Capture and Storage / Sequestration (the meaning of the acronym varies apparently).

But before that, some good news that have been popping up in the last few days:

First of all, plans to build a new coal power station at Kingsnorth, Kent, have been shelved by E.ON. Much has been written about why this is good news but in a nutshell, this was to be the experimental playground for the government to try setting up a CCS power plant. Except CCS is nowhere near ready to be tried in this sort of scale so the plant would have had to work as a regular CO2 spewing station until such times as it’s scientifically and economically viable to set it up, thus doing nothing to reduce emissions at all. The irony of course is that it’s not so much that E.ON have gone all green but that in the current economic climate, the demand for energy has diminished and it is therefore not worth spending the money in a brand new plant. On the flip side, it won’t stop Ed Milliband to keep lobbying about putting the technology in place one way or the other, but more on that later.

On a similar note, Danish energy company Dong has withdrawn support for a new coal power station at Hunterston in Ayrshire. That’s not to say that plans to build the station have been withdrawn altogether but with a major source of funds pulling the plug, it’s going to take longer for this to be built. Again this was going to be fitted with CCS technology in the long run, but certainly not to begin with. If this is what Holyrood was relying on to have the Scottish emissions cut by 42% by 2020, this is quite a big mistake indeed.

Now before I try to make some sort of coherent rant about why I think CCS is a bad idea (I can’t actually remember if I’ve ranted about it before if it just happened in my head 😉 ), here’s a few more good news from a transportation point of view:

BAA is holding off on Heathrow’s Third Runway. Note that I haven’t said “cancelled”, because it’s not quite gone down to that just yet but it’s a move in the right direction and we can now only hope that it will end up being definitely scrapped altogether. Meanwhile, if you feel like making sure this won’t happen, you can join Greenpeace UK’s Airplot Scheme, something I came across from my local MP of all people (he suggested it to me after I asked him whether he’s taken the 10:10 pledge to reduce emissions by 10% by December 2010).

Aviation industry to reduce emissions by 50% by 2050. I’m just going to link the article for that one because I’d quite like to know just how they intend to achieve that.

Right so what about CCS then?

The big news of this week is how the big Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum decided that CCS should be a key element to be discussed at Copenhagen this December.

Umm, I’m sorry what?

Let me make this clear: Carbon emissions have to go down NOW! Not in 10 or 20 years, if we want to have any chance to avert irrevertible dangerous climate change, we have to do something about it now! Unfortunately, CCS is nowhere near viable and costs a fortune to implement, so of course coal producing nations are going to spend millions to put a lid over the chimneys and pump that CO2 into depleted oil reserves.

But here’s the catch, the power plants will still use coal. Coal that will need to be mined, transported and refined before the emissions from its being burnt are being captured and stored. Do they plan to implement coal mining with zero emissions? Is the coal going to be transported on electric / hydrogen cell vehicles? I don’t see anything about that in their implementation plans (but hey maybe I missed it).

Now I know it’s a complex issue, one I’m still trying to decipher (I swear reading about Climate Science is far easier than reading about the engineering aspects of CCS), so for more info, I found the Wikipedia entry to be reasonably easy to understand.

To conclude, my main worry is that governments will spend too much money on CCS instead of investing in 100% clean energy such as renewables, including research to make those technologies more efficient. One day we will run out of coal, it’s inevitable, just as oil will but wind and sun will always be there (unless bioengineering experiments go pear-shaped, but let’s not go there) so let’s put our money where the future is!

Edit: To expand on points I’ve not even touched on but which reinforces my belief that CCS is definitely not the solution, check out this blog entry from thinkaboutit.eu