Newswise — At the back of Ernest Moniz's mind a clock is ticking. Moniz is director of the Laboratory for Energy and the Environment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His mental countdown marks the narrowing window of time that remains for the US to address a looming environmental disaster fuelled by the burning of mountains of cheap American coal.
"It's going to be used," says Moniz, who co-chaired a report " The Future of Coal " that was released this week. His assertion is the result of three years of economic modelling which predicts that coal consumption in the US will grow significantly by mid-century. "In virtually any scenario that we've explored, coal use increases " even when you place a substantial price on CO2 emissions."
Unlike oil, which is expensive and concentrated in geopolitically problematic locations, coal is plentiful in those countries where future demand is likely to be greatest, notably the US, China and India. Given that coal generates the most CO2 per unit energy of any fossil fuel, the implications for climate change are serious.
The report recommends a massive scale-up of technologies that capture the carbon released by coal burning and sequester it underground in porous rock formations. Such technologies have been tried on a small scale, but no single project covers the entire process.
"We believe the United States and the rest of the world is not demonstrating the necessary urgency," says Moniz. A big increase in funding is needed to develop infrastructure for CO2 capture. What is most needed, he says, is a regulatory framework to select geological sites for carbon sequestration on the scale of 1 million tonnes per year.
"Our understanding of the technology is better than most people realise," says Howard Herzog, who heads the lab's research on sequestration. A greater obstacle is the lack of incentive for utility companies to invest in carbon capture. "The key thing is to attach a price to carbon emissions," says Moniz. "Without that it can never cost less to capture and sequester CO2 than it would to simply let it go into the atmosphere."
The MIT report also urges Congress to ensure that existing coal-fired plants will not be exempt from future emissions charges. Without such legislation there could be a rush to build power stations with no provision for carbon capture. The Texas utility giant TXU, which has been in a fight with environmentalists over plans to build 11 old-style coal-fired power stations, said recently that it has dropped eight of them. Meanwhile, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts has said he will introduce a bill to block companies from building plants without carbon capture. The goal is to force owners to use up-to-date technology for storing carbon emissions.
According to David Keith at the University of Calgary in Alberta, who chairs the CO2 storage group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the US and Canada must start building commercial-scale coal-fired plants that incorporate carbon capture. The US government currently has plans for one, dubbed FutureGen, which is scheduled to begin operating in 2013. To be ready for the approaching coal rush, the MIT report calls on the Department of Energy to fund at least three projects on a similar scale. The report is available at http://web.mit.edu/coal
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