Clean Coal: Talk Substance, Not Semantics

The public debate over clean coal technology has become counterproductive. That’s because it often fails to advance beyond a petty, semantic dispute that distracts from important policy questions.

“Clean coal” is an umbrella term used to describe technologies that mitigate coal’s greenhouse gas emissions. Most often, however, it denotes processes called “carbon capture and storage” and “carbon capture, utilization, and storage” (CCS/CCUS). The basic idea is simple: capture the carbon dioxide produced by power plants before it’s released into the atmosphere, and either store it underground forever (CCS) or sell it on a market, where various industries can use it before storing it (CCUS).

But one doesn’t hear much about that outside wonkish circles. Instead, discussion centers on the moniker itself.

“There is no such thing as clean coal,” leading environmentalist Bill McKibben said in an interview with Link TV. “Coal is dirty when you mine it, it’s dirty when you burn it, and it’s dirty…as far as we can see in the future.” Clean coal, McKibben and others on the left insist, is a myth concocted by the fossil fuel industry to allow itself to mine with abandon, disregarding the threat of climate change.

That sentiment has a strong presence on the Wash U campus. In 2009, after the establishment of the Consortium for Clean Coal Utilization—a university-affiliated research center—SU Senate passed a unanimous resolution denouncing the use of “Clean Coal” in the consortium’s name. Earlier that year, Maxine Lipeles, a senior lecturer in the Law School, said in an interview with Student Life that she considered the term unethical, despite finding nothing wrong with the technology it denotes.

“I don’t have a problem with the research,” Lipeles said, “but I do have a problem with taking [the industry’s] spin with it…I don’t think that’s consistent with the ideals of a university and the academic integrity that motivates a university.” More recently, leadership of the student group Fossil Free WashU has condemned the term—again without demonstrating any substantive opposition to the technology.

Such preoccupation with language would be silly even if clean coal had no potential. But as it stands, clean coal does show some promise. That makes fixation on semantics problematic. It obstructs potentially life-enhancing research.

Clean coal technology isn’t a magic fix. There is no silver bullet that will stop climate change or end all our energy worries. Still, clean coal has enormous potential to help humanity. Even skeptics should understand at a minimum that it’s far from a sham. At worst, it’s too little too late, and at best, a central component of a clean energy portfolio for the future.

While it’s simple in theory, carbon capture and storage is complicated in practice. It’s expensive to trap and bury CO2 emissions. Sitting in reservoirs underground, there’s no way for captured CO2 to generate a profit for coal companies. Straight CCS probably won’t be economical until the technology progresses quite a bit. That could take a few decades—we still haven’t seen a single commercially viable plant that buries the carbon it captures without using it. So to that extent, the critics are right.

But there is potential. Consider the Canadian startup Inventys. The company’s CEO, Andre Boulet, claims that Inventys’ “carbon honeycomb” can capture CO2 for $15 per ton, or about 1/6th the cost of mainstream carbon capture technologies. Inventys’ work is one example of the innovation that could conceivably bring commercial-scale CCS to fruition.

Still, the case can be made that CCS is a pipe dream. Critics say that the technology is too far from where it needs to be and that by the time it can be implemented on a large scale, climate change will be upon us. This might or might not be true as many variables are at play.

Regardless, carbon capture, utilization, and storage has more than just potential; it’s happening today. When CO2 is captured, it’s compressed into liquid form. CCUS is effective because liquid CO2 is a marketable product. It may soon be usable in the seawater desalinization process and in “waterless fracking,” a more environmentally friendly alternative to the controversial practice used to harvest natural gas from underground. The most lucrative market for CCUS, however, is in the oil industry.

Traditional drilling methods only remove about a third of the oil in any given well. It’s not economical to extract any more without the help of enhanced oil recovery (EOR). EOR is a process in which carbon dioxide is injected into aging, “depleted” oil wells. Deep underground, the CO2 increases the pressure in the wells, separating oil from the cavities in which it’s trapped and any water it mixes with. EOR can remove up to an additional third of the oil in a well, essentially doubling production. The CO2 remains sequestered underground. A negative externality goes into the ground, and a valuable commodity comes out.

Of course, this will strike many as counterproductive. Oil is valuable, but it also produces greenhouse gases. EOR would seem to exacerbate the very problem CCS supposedly addresses. But Samuel Thernstrom, the founder and executive director of the Energy Innovation Reform Project, explains that oil produced by EOR won’t actually do much harm at all. “EOR’s direct effect on carbon emissions may be somewhat uncertain,” he wrote in a December 2014 Weekly Standard article, “but at worst  it’s a wash, and more likely it sequesters more carbon than it produces.”

Skeptical? Look at the numbers. A barrel of oil contains 0.43 metric tons of CO2. EOR operations in the Permian Basin (as of December 2014) sequestered 0.4 metric tons of CO2 for each barrel extracted. That’s already close to carbon-neutral, even under the questionable assumption that emissions are additive. In other words, what’s produced by EOR won’t displace any oil currently on the market, but will only add to it. Paulina Jaramillo of Carnegie Mellon University and her coauthors made that assumption in a widely cited 2009 study, which predicted each ton of CO2 injected in EOR would produce 3.7-4.7 tons of net emissions. But the same study acknowledges that, absent the assumption about the oil market, the data would show EOR reducing net emissions by at least 20 percent.

Then again, a 20 percent emissions reduction isn’t that great in the grand scheme of things. That’s why EOR is only a temporary solution. It won’t stop climate change, but it will slow it down in the absence of a longer-term fix. It will also help pay down the innovation and infrastructure investment costs of CCS.

Still, if EOR is such an exciting CCUS market, why hasn’t it been explored on a large scale? The answer, according to Thernstrom, is that “the costs and benefits don’t quite align—yet.” The cost of carbon capture hovers around $80 per ton, and the market price of liquid CO2 is in the $30-40 range. In fact, because captured CO2 is so expensive, oil companies have resorted to using naturally occurring underground CO2 in EOR.

We have a substance that’s dangerously overabundant in the atmosphere, and also happens to be useful to corporations. They know how to capture it, but because that’s expensive they’re taking it out of the ground, where it’s harmless. That’s illustrative of the power of markets. It demands a manipulation of the market.

That’s where the government comes in. “Imagine what would happen,” Thernstrom posits in the Weekly Standard, “if the federal government provided a tax credit that bridged the difference [between the cost of capture and the price of CO2]—a credit, say, of $40 a ton. All of a sudden, we would have a market.” A tax credit for EOR would be a win-win for taxpayers, because “over time, its net effect on the Treasury would be positive to the tune of tens of billions of dollars.”

Again, the numbers add up nicely. “Pumping a ton of carbon dioxide into a well produces roughly two-and-a-half to three barrels of oil; on average, each barrel generates $23 or so in federal and state taxes and royalties,” Thernstrom writes. “Each ton of carbon dioxide used for enhanced oil recovery would create about $58 in revenues. Even after covering the cost of a $40 per ton tax credit, the Treasury would come out ahead.”

EOR clearly has potential. But, environmentalists may ask, what about renewable energy?

I’m all for renewables— a diverse clean energy portfolio will be necessary in the fight against global warming. But, to quote Thernstrom, “anyone who thinks the world is just going to leave coal in the ground is dreaming.” Coal is by far the most abundant, reliable source of energy out there. Until wind and solar can compete with it in terms of both productivity and price, they’ll never take its place—least of all in fast growing economies like China and India, which produce an ever-larger percentage of global greenhouse gas emissions.

We will eventually need to abandon coal; after all, it is a finite resource. But it could be tens or hundreds of years before that’s necessary. In the meantime, climate change looms. To avoid its effects, we must strive to eliminate CO2 emissions. We must do so while working with coal, because coal is what we have. That may prove difficult, but it will be even harder to drastically limit energy use.

So when it comes to the clean coal debate, by all means, question the research. Question the policy. But don’t ignore the substance entirely on account of terminology. That’s not just petty—it could deprive us of a tremendous opportunity.