It sounds almost too good to be true and it apparently is.
A few years ago, trying to keep burning coal while dealing with carbon dioxide pollution, the Southern Co. announced plans for a $1.8 billion coal-fired generating plant in eastern Mississippi that would do the near impossible.
Some 65 percent of the plant’s carbon dioxide would be captured, put through a 62-mile-long pipeline and used underground to boost oil production from reserves near the Gulf Coast that were thought to be worn out.
But the price tag has risen to $5.2 billion and the plant won’t be ready for another year. Its cost means that “clean” coal will be $6,800 per kilowatt hour compared to $5,500 from nuclear stations and about $1,000 per kilowatt hour from natural gas plants.
The Kemper County plant only underlines the predicament of burning coal. It is still the single biggest contributor to carbon dioxide emissions which contribute to climate change. Efforts to strip it from air pollution emissions are proving too expensive to be practical.
It’s too bad because the Obama Administration had been promoting the Kemper plant as one way that coal might have a healthy future. The administration is striking out for good media coverage since it is due to announce new proposed rules to stem carbon dioxide pollution at existing coal-fired plants on June 2. They are being strongly resisted by coal operators, some utilities and conservative groups.
Yet it’s not the first similar plant to be swallowed up in cost. Ohio-based American Electric Power built a pilot plant in West Virginia – half funded by the U.S. Department of Energy – that would capture and bury carbon dioxide. But, it, too, went down the tubes because it was too expensive.
A few years ago, there was some enthusiasm that China, one of the world’s largest, if not the largest, air polluters, would use its tremendous cache of cash from exports to build state-of-the-art coal plants. A Duke Energy official did the math and found that the Chinese might be able to capture CO2 at $16 a ton. But then Duke found that if they took the plant out of China, the expense increased four times. Why? The Chinese figures involved ultra-cheap Chinese labor and capital.
Perhaps someday cheaper technologies will make abundant coal useable without so much pollution. At the moment, it does not might sense, pricewise, regardless of whether there is a “War on Coal.”