Recently,
John Kerry
, a former Democratic senator, former secretary of state, failed presidential candidate, and current climate envoy for the Biden administration, rode his private jet to the
United Nations
COP28 conference in Dubai and
strongly suggested
that no new coal-fired power plants should be built anywhere in the world. Moreover, he said, existing coal plants should be decommissioned as fast as possible.
If Kerry’s policy were to be implemented in the United States, it would have little or no effect on greenhouse gases. Countries such as China and India will continue to build coal-fired plants to feed their growing power needs, thus counteracting any positive effect the U.S. might have.
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It would also be political suicide. Eliminating coal as a power source would be a gift to former President Donald Trump, or whoever wins the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. Blue-collar workers who depend on coal will turn out against President Joe Biden in droves as they lose their jobs.
Kerry’s meat-ax approach also ignores emerging technologies, grouped together under the term “Clean Coal,” which promises to cut greenhouse gas emissions while still using coal as a power source.
Clean Coal includes carbon capture, which extracts carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that is emitted by fossil fuel power plants, and sequesters it, possibly for later industrial use,
according to How Stuff Works
.
NET Power has had some success
with carbon capture with a natural gas-fired power plant in La Porte, Texas. Coal can also be treated in some fashion, usually by gasification, to remove the carbon dioxide even before the substance is burned.
Yet the concept of clean coal has gotten short shrift by environmental groups and some parts of the media.
A 5-year-old story by
Reuters
dismissed
the notion that coal could ever be burned cleanly.
However,
according to Nikkei Asia
, Japan may well have succeeded in developing a clean coal power plant that emits 90% less carbon dioxide than a regular coal plant. The project, called Osaki CoolGen, was developed in the town of Osakikamijima by a joint venture between Electric Power Development, also known as J-Power, and Chugoku Electric Power.
The plant uses a three-stage process to turn coal into electricity. The first stage involves blowing oxygen on the coal as it burns. The process produces a heated gas and increases the plant’s efficiency by 15%.
The second stage captures the carbon dioxide from the gas and sequesters it. This stage reduces the greenhouse gas emissions by 90%.
The third stage also extracts hydrogen from the gas and diverts it to a nearby fuel cell to generate more electricity. In effect, the test power plant generates electricity in two different ways.
Japan has good hopes of using its clean coal power plant technology to arrive at net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The country also hopes to export the technology, primarily to developing world countries.
Carbon capture, utilization, and storage, or CCUS, technology promises to revive coal as a power source even as it grows out of favor due to climate change worries and competition from cheaper sources such as natural gas. Osaki CoolGen plans to retrofit a 42-year-old style coal plant near Nagasaki in an attempt to revive coal as an energy source,
according to Asia Matters for America
. Japanese companies are also developing CCUS technology for a project in Wyoming, a large coal state.
No one can know for certain whether the Japanese low-emission carbon plant can be a model for reviving coal use in the Western world. But it seems a better alternative than Kerry’s announcement that the coal industry must be shut down by government fiat.
The
New York Post
reports
that Kerry was not just mouthing off. He was reflecting Biden administration policy. The White House is preparing to shut down the coal industry by 2035.
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Coal provides 20% of American energy. What will replace coal, considering the growth of American energy demand, especially with electric vehicle mandates? Who knows?
It could be that with renewed interest in nuclear energy and recent breakthroughs in fusion power, coal will decline as a source of energy naturally. But the market should decide the future mix of world energy sources, not political elites whose wealth and power shield them from the real-world consequences of their edicts.
Mark Whittington, who writes frequently about space policy, has published a political study of space exploration entitled
Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?
as well as
The Moon, Mars and Beyond
, and, most recently,
Why is America Going Back to the Moon?
He blogs at
Curmudgeons Corner.
He is published in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The Hill, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post, among other venues.
