Climate-friendly coal faces a conundrum.
The federal government
has funneled billions of dollars over the past two administrations into
cutting carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants, but so far the
“clean coal” dream is far from reality.
Officials have been chasing a best-of-both-worlds
scenario: using abundant, cheap but relatively dirty coal for generating
power, and then eliminating the “dirty” part by capturing carbon
dioxide and other toxic emissions.
The captured CO
2 can either be stored deep underground in
geological formations in a process known as carbon capture and storage
or piped out to oil and gas fields.
While the technology is there, it’s struggling to make its way into
prime time. The reasons: It’s expensive, and there are no limits on
carbon emissions.
Without climate legislation or new regulations that mandate the
technology, companies don’t really have an incentive to deploy the
technology on a commercial scale. And some experts say billions of
federal dollars are still needed to make it more mainstream.
The likelihood that these problems can be solved in the near future
is small. The days when the federal government greatly boosted funding
for energy research, demonstration and deployment are most likely long
gone; the Environmental Protection Agency, though it has proposed
climate regulations for new power plants, currently has “no plans” to
impose the same rules on existing plants; and there is zero political
appetite for legislation that puts a price on carbon.
No comments:
Post a Comment