India's energy compulsions and carbon footprint

It is not uncommon for households and industries in India to keep backups for energy supply. After all, load shedding has been a regular menace even in metro and urban areas. As per World Bank, in 2008, India faced a 16.6% shortfall of electricity during hours of peak consumption. This was on the back of a 9.9% gap in energy generation. Coal is seen as the key solution to India's power shortage, a daunting barrier to the country's development. Primarily because people in semi urban and rural areas cannot afford costly electricity produced from renewable sources. India has 10% of the world's coal reserves. India's reserves are the biggest after the US, Russia and China. However, it had to import about 70 m tonnes of high grade coal in FY09, mostly for making steel. The country plans to add 78.7 gigawatts of power generation during the five years ending March 2012. Most of it will be from coal, which now accounts for about 60% of India's energy mix. Even if India is on track with its renewable energy plans, coal will still account for about 55% of its power supply by 2030. The emerging economies have often insisted that rich nations have caused global warming. The developed ones that are done with their industrial growth are happy to comply with emission norms. Renewable energy is steadily gaining ground in the West. However, looking at the high cost of solar and wind energy, the questions that arises is - can India afford them? India, the world's fourth largest greenhouse gas emitter is still very low on per-capita emission. The country's industrial electricity tariffs are amongst the highest in the world, a measure aimed at deterring wastage. Nevertheless, it is under pressure to cut pollution to battle climate change. This is at a time when the nation's demand for power is rising with more Indian middle class buying houses and electronic items. India has committed to contributing towards reducing "carbon intensity". It has set a goal to rein the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted per unit of economic output by 20 - 25% until 2020. However, what is the price that the nation will have to pay? Does this mean that India's future will once again be pushed into 'darkness'? The 5 minute wrap-up, December 7, 09

Can Captured Carbon save coal? Biello, David .

Scientific American Earth (2009/06/10) Capturing carbon dioxide may be the only hope to avoid a climate change catastrophe from burning fossil fuels. OXYFUEL: In September 2007 the oxyfuel combustion chamber is lifted into place at the Schwarze Pumpe power plant in Germany--one of the first power plants in the world to capture carbon dioxide. Courtesy of Vattenfall Like all big coal-fired power plants, the 1,600-megawatt-capacity Schwarze Pumpe plant in Spremberg, Germany, is undeniably dirty. Yet a small addition to the facility-a tiny boiler that pipes 30 MW worth of steam to local industrial customers-represents a hope for salvation from the global climate-changing consequences of burning fossil fuel. To heat that boiler, the damp, crumbly brown coal known as lignite-which is even more polluting than the harder black anthracite variety-burns in the presence of pure oxygen, a process known as oxyfuel, releasing as waste both water vapor and that more notorious greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (CO2). By condensing the water in a simple pipe, Vattenfall, the Swedish utility that owns the power plant, captures and isolates nearly 95 percent of the CO2 in a 99.7 percent pure form. That CO2 is then compressed into a liquid and given to another company, Linde, for sale; potential users range from the makers of carbonated beverages, such as Coca-Cola, to oil firms that use it to squeeze more petroleum out of declining deposits. In principle, however, the CO2 could also be pumped deep underground and locked safely away in specific rock formations for millennia. From the International Energy Agency to the United Nations-sanctioned Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), such carbon capture and storage (CCS), particularly for coal-fired power plants, has been identified as a technology critical to enabling deep, rapid cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. After all, coal burning is responsible for 40 percent of the 30 billion metric tons of CO2 emitted by human activity every year. "There is the potential for the U.S. and other countries to continue to rely on coal as a source of energy while at the same time protecting the climate from the massive greenhouse gas emissions associated with coal," says Steve Caldwell, coordinator for regional climate change policy at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, a Washington, D.C. think tank. Even President Barack Obama has labeled the technology as important for "energy independence" and included $3.4 billion in the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act for "clean coal" power. Today three types of technology can capture CO2 at a power plant. One, as at Schwarze Pumpe, involves the oxyfuel process: burning coal in pure oxygen to produce a stream of CO2-rich emissions. The second uses various forms of chemistry-in the form of amine scrubbers, special membranes or ionic liquids-to pull carbon dioxide out of a more mixed set of exhaust gases. The third is gasification, in which liquid or solid fuels are first turned into synthetic natural gas; CO2 from the conversion of the gas can be siphoned off. Some U.S. utilities have already built or upgraded plants to capture CO2, which they either store or sell. The 180-MW Warrior Run coal-fired power plant in Cumberland, Md., already captures 96 percent of its CO2 emissions to sell for use as a fire extinguisher or dry ice. The Kingsport power plant in Kingsport, Tenn., has been capturing CO2 since 1984 to sell to carbonated beverage makers. The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) has invested more than $3 billion since 2001 to fund multiple CCS projects being conducted by seven regional partnerships, including demonstrations of ammonia capture technology at the massive coal-fired Pleasant Prairie power plant in Kenosha County, Wisc., and the R. E. Burger plant in Shadyside, Ohio. The Obama administration may even resurrect the FutureGen project-a 275-MW IGCC power plant that would capture 90 percent of its emissions; the Bush administration had canceled it because of spiraling costs (which may have been miscalculated). And the DoE has offered at least $8 billion in loan guarantees for coal-fired power plants with CCS. Australia and China have demonstrated that postcombustion capture is possible in pilot plants. At Loy Yang Power Station in Victoria, a pilot plant run by Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) will capture 1,000 metric tons of CO2 a year; the Australian research organization has also collaborated with China's Huaneng Group to use an amine scrubber to capture CO2 from a co-generation power plant in Beijing and then sell it. But although multiple projects around the world examine or test aspects of CCS, few of them have been connected to a full-size power plant: one producing on average 500 MW and upward of 10,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide a day-the core of the emissions problem. And the few that have been are either venting the CO2 after capturing it or selling it, instead of taking the next step and storing the greenhouse gas underground. "It makes nine metric tons of CO2 per hour at full load," says Staffan Gortz, Vattenfall's CCS spokesman, of the $100-million CCS demonstration boiler at Schwarze Pumpe. But he acknowledges that "we don't have a storage site yet."