Firms tell US govt to foot pollution bill

Rio Tinto Group and utilities are urging the US government to spend $20 billion on a technology they say has the best chance for eliminating pollution linked to global warming.

The energy companies are lobbying Congress to help create devices that can trap carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants and bury the gas in underground caverns. Environmental groups, labor unions and members of Congress from coal states say pilot projects won't begin without US support that is unlikely to come this year.

As the Senate yesterday started debating the first US curbs on greenhouse gases blamed for climate change, coal companies say they won't provide most of the money for capture-and-storage technology. The industry has spent "tens of millions of dollars", on development, and it's too costly for companies alone to finance, said Rio Tinto Chief Executive Officer for Energy Preston Chiaro.

"We can't do it without government support for the early projects," said Chiaro, who also is chairman of the London-based World Coal Institute. "Shareholders simply won't stand for it unless there's a commercial return." The institute is an international trade group for coal producers such as London-based Rio Tinto.

Power plants are the world's biggest source of carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas blamed for global warming, after vehicles, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency. Rising temperatures driven by human greenhouse-gas emissions are causing Arctic ice to melt and rain to decline in Africa and the Mediterranean, United Nations-sponsored researchers said in 2007.

Deeper hole

Coal-burning plants supply about half of US power demand. Taxpayer dollars would be better spent on reducing greenhouse gases by expanding solar and wind power, said Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research of Takoma Park, Maryland. He suggests linking the wind-rich Midwest part of the US to cities that require more electricity instead of building expensive gas-scrubbing machinery.

"There's no shortage of energy sources with low carbon dioxide," Makhijani said. "If we're going to invest in something that isn't going to pay off for 15 or 20 years, we're going to dig a much deeper hole and make it much more costly to solve the problem."

Fifteen years of tests are needed before capture and storage can be installed at generators, the US Energy Department has said. Worldwide, $4 billion a year is needed for pilot projects, quadruple the current spending, said Howard Herzog, principal research engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Energy Initiative, who has studied carbon capture since 1989.

"I don't think it's a question of the fundamental science," Herzog said. "It's a question of the commercial viability of doing this in an integrated fashion and at a large scale."

One method would trap CO2, the chemical name for carbon dioxide, and pressurize it into a liquid that's injected underground. There the substance would dissolve in brine, form lumps of carbonates or be absorbed in porous rock, according to a report by the Arlington, Virginia-based Pew Center on Global Climate Change.

The US, Canada, Australia and Algeria have dabbled in capture-and-storage experiments. The most advanced US project, called FutureGen in Illinois, was suspended this year after the government balked at the project's $1.8 billion price tag.

The US coal industry's pitch for public funding is beginning to gain support. Climate change legislation co-sponsored by Connecticut Independent Joseph Lieberman and Virginia Republican John Warner provides $15.7 billion for research into carbon capture through 2050 and $307 billion to help coal utilities "transition to the new low-carbon economy".

While coal companies already have spent "tens of millions" of dollars on tests so far, they need $1 billion of public money a year for 20 years until the technology is proven, the coal institute's Chiaro said.

The bill is a first step in climate legislation for the US, which has rejected the Kyoto Protocol, an emissions limiting accord among industrialized countries. The Senate measure faces opposition from President George W. Bush and House members who are drafting their own climate change bill.

Agencies

(China Daily 06/03/2008 page16)