E3G

NY Times: United Kingdom Faces a Quandary Over New Nuclear or Coal Power

By Tom Burke

That can be through a combination of increased combustion efficiency and carbon capture and storage—the latter being the much sought-after climate silver bullet. However, the technology is untried on a commercial scale.

Added to that is the fact that as it stands, capturing emissions from burning fossil fuels like coal and gas for electricity production requires so much energy that it reduces burning efficiency by around one quarter. In short, to produce a given electricity output with capture and storage technology fitted to the power plant means burning 25 percent to 30 percent more fuel.

Age and regulation takes its toll on existing plants

One factor that is pushing the United Kingdom to make a prompt policy decision is the fact that around one-third of the country’s electricity generating capacity will be taken out of service by 2016 due to a combination of old age and E.U. emission reduction legislation aimed specifically at fossil-fueled power plants.

Currently renewables like wind, waves, tidal, hydro and solar supply barely 5 percent of the country’s electricity—a figure that under E.U. rules must rise to around 35 percent by 2020. And they have their own set of problems, not least of which are cost and the production of a sometimes wildly fluctuating output.

Gas is a potential interim answer, as although it still produces carbon emissions they are far less than from coal. But gas has its own political dynamic with Britain’s North Sea reserves rapidly running out. That leaves gas-rich Russia, with its looming potential of tieing political strings to future supplies.

Once a net exporter of gas, Britain now expects up to half of supplies expected to be imported within a decade. Because gas supplies have for years been literally in the backyard, Britain has neglected to build gas storage facilities. Some experts fear this lack of storage will become an Achilles heel, exposing consumers to the more expensive price gyrations of the spot market.

“Nuclear will not be able to bridge the electricity generation gap in time and nor will renewables, so it comes down to a choice between coal and gas—whether carbon abated, partially abated or unabated,” said David Brewer of Coalpro, the confederation of UK coal producers.

“Of those two energy sources coal comes from a wider variety of places and is far less open to political instability than gas,” he added.

Is the answer in Alaska?

Indeed coal is very widely available and in plentiful—although not infinite—supply. It is also in steeply rising demand as countries such as India and China fuel their booming economic growth with its power. The U.S. Energy Information Administration sees world coal demand rising by 49 percent between 2006 and 2030, with almost all of that rise occurring in developing non-OECD countries.

A recent report from the clean coal section of the International Energy Agency noted that coal demand was roughly 5.5 gigatonnes a year, but it warned that declared commercially proven reserves looked likely to be insufficient to meet predicted demand in 2030. However, commercially proven reserves are a fraction of the Earth’s mineable coal deposits.

The IEA report notes that estimates of coal resources in Alaska—the amount of coal that is assumed to be in the ground but that has not yet been fully measured—at just over 5,000 gigatonnes, or about 1,000 years’ supply at current levels of demand.

“There is an absolutely enormous amount of coal in the world. The extent of its exploitability will depend on price and that will rise over this century as the gas and oil run out,” said Coalpro’s Brewer. “The world is not going to run out of coal anytime soon.”