This week, the New York Times spotlighted China’s emerging leadership in building coal-fired power plants that incorporate new technology to reduce emissions, including greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (read the article “China Outpaces U.S. in Cleaner Coal-Fired Plants”).

The report was framed not so much to praise China but to point out that (shock, horror!), in the high-tech war against climate change, the U.S. has fallen behind a much poorer country widely perceived as less sophisticated and more “dirty” environmentally. Shame, shame.

Fair point, but a few comments are needed to put this fine piece of reporting from correspondent Keith Bradsher into perspective:

(1) People are building power plants in China willy-nilly …

They have no choice — the country is in a losing battle with runaway growth in electricity demand from the consumer and industrial sectors. Thus, opportunities to experiment with new techniques (like the hotter-steam, higher-efficiency plants mentioned) are abundant. Sure, any aggressiveness in this area is good to see, but a little dabbling here and there with new ideas shouldn’t be such a tremendous surprise.

(2) It’s a big leap of logic to assume all new Chinese plants constructed will be the cleaner types … at least right now.

Decisionmaking about power generation infrastructure is highly distributed and subject to local interests that aren’t necessarily so enlightened. The common American view of China as a beehive that operates in lockstep with the directives of a central bureaucracy in Beijing is a fallacy. In my opinion, this article is a bit thin on evidence that cleaner techniques will account for even a majority of new construction … The anecdotal examples cited (notably the Tianjin plant) could turn out to be highly touted exceptions, rather than the rule.

(3) The preponderance of China’s coal-fired power generation is dirty today … and that won’t change overnight.

Even if we took the most optimistic scenario (cleaner plants accounting for 100% of new coal-fired capacity built going forward), the country will still be among the biggest producers of greenhouse gases for decades to come. I am especially skeptical about one of the statements in the article: “China has begun requiring power companies to retire an older, more polluting power plant for each new one they build.” As noted above, in the face of skyrocketing demand, the country is fighting hard to install generation capacity fast enough to avoid brown-outs. Under these circumstances, you are trying to keep aggregate capacity growing as fast as possible — and retiring older plants is a luxury the country can ill afford.

One final little gripe … The Times report also singles out the experimental sequestration plant outside Beijing, but as highlighted in this blog in February, visitors noted that the plant’s design principle is practically impossible to scale — it would produce far more carbon gas than could ever be consumed by the carbonated beverage industry.

Nevertheless, a very interesting read!

(Image by Doug Kanter courtesy of the New York Times)

A coalition of environmental groups has gotten together to run a “Reality” campaign challenging the notion of “clean coal” technology as a myth. The goal is clearly to counter mass-marketing spend by the coal industry to plant the unproven concept in the minds of US voters and officials.

As noted in this blog previously, clean coal remains attractive as a concept — especially in energy-poor, coal-rich countries like China and India — despite skepticism about its feasibility .

The Reality campaign is using a variety of channels including humorous — and more than a little biting — television ads, YouTube videos, and Web banner ads to deliver its message, cleverly branding itself with a yellow canary. (Caged canaries were used in coal mines traditionally as an early warning system against excessive buildups of deadly coal gas. The little birds would drop dead long before human miners could detect the gas’s presence.)

Check out the Website or the Blog.

A little more on the subject of “clean coal” technology and its status as a holy grail in countries where coal appears to be an unavoidably important energy source in the coming decades.

The last post focused on a proof of concept in China. (Hopefully the testing is yielding usable data and not just good P.R.) Today, I just wanted to share some nuggets on recent activity across the Himalaya in neighboring India.

Fresh in the news are plans for an unspecified Indo-French tie-up in clean coal. According to this brief report in the Hindu, the Minister of State for Power is talking up plans to leverage French company Alstom in clean coal the way India is working with France’s Areva in nuclear. Although some sort of agreement was hinted, the report gave disappointingly few details.

But also in recent months, US-based EnergyQuest announced that it had been tapped to provide coal-gasification technology for two plants just east of Mumbai with total generation capacity of 1,200 megawatts. (Details in this article from greentechmedia.) EnergyQuest’s CEO is quoted as saying the gasification process increases the efficiency of coal use by 30% and removes as much as 20% of the carbon that would normally end up flowing out of the plant smokestack into the atmosphere — but there’s a catch. Even he admits no proven means exists at present to store the captured carbon, with underground sequestration remaining only a “theoretical” option.

Sound familiar?

Wanted to share with all of you the following article from Thomas R. Blakeslee, who gives a first-hand account of his recent visit to a showcase 845-megawatt “clean coal” power plant, the Huaneng Beijing Co-Generation plant.

There is a fierce debate about the merits of so-called “clean coal” technologies raging worldwide, and the stakes are especially high for China and India. As we’ve noted in this blog (statistics here), both share a severe dependency on coal that’s widely expected to worsen in the decades ahead, as supplies of imported oil become unaffordable or difficult to secure. This is painful, because although both have fast-rising energy needs and abundant domestic coal resources, burning coal has a notorious impact on quality of life (air pollution, acid rain) and on global warming.

Thus the allure of new “clean coal” technology, which promises to bring all the benefits of an existing industry while transforming it into something green. Too good to be true? Critics like Mr. Blakeslee think so, but you have to recognize that they have an axe to grind: most of them are supporters of renewable technologies competing for government support. In their view, clean coal is nothing more than an expensive mirage, while more reliable technologies for solving the sustainable energy problem aren’t getting the funding they need.

The strongest advocates of clean coal technology, not surprisingly, are from the coal industry and coal-producing areas. The US Senate draft of President Obama’s pro-green economic stimulus legislation would allocate a whopping $3 billion for clean coal and carbon-capture & sequestration technology development (news report here), and Senator Robert Byrd of coal-rich West Virginia was behind these provisions. Mr. Obama himself often spoke about clean coal technology as a senator and presidential candidate (his home state of Illinois also having significant coal mining), but it remains to be seen whether his enthusiasm will persist as president. Outcomes in the US are meaningful for China and India, as the multibillion-dollar R&D programs (if succesful) would lead to technology and industrial scale that will be transferrable worldwide.

One thing’s for sure: No-matter how clean technical advances can make the coal-burning process or how good or bad the ROI involved, coal will remain a non-renewable fossil fuel.

(Image courtesy of ecoworld.com)