This weekend the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee swapped added some new faces to the 9-man Politburo that actually runs what is or will soon be the world’s largest producer of greenhouse gases. Among the four new members is a chemical engineer named He Guoqiang. As the New York Times reported, Mr. He is tasked with running the party’s corruption-fighting Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. He is less well known as the innovator behind China’s adoption of advanced coal gasification technology to turn coal into chemicals and, increasingly, fuels.

I discovered He Guoqiang while visiting coal mines and chemical plants last fall. One of my stops was at the Lunan Chemical Fertilizer Plant in Shandong Province, about halfway between Shanghai and Beijing, where He got his first job in 1967 and oversaw China’s first application of advanced gasification in the 1980s.

When He arrived Lunan was producing ammonia fertilizer from coal using a gasifier little evolved from the coal-gas plants that lit up Western cities in the 19th C, and almost as dirty, yielding a partially-burned char leftover packed with poisons and a choking sulfurous gas. (More than 8000 such small gasifiers still operate in China, including six at Lunan.) He cut through red tape and restrictions on spending hard-currency (remember that China was still dirt poor 20 years ago) to import China’s first modern gasifiers. These Texaco-designed gasifiers, still running today, break down coal at higher pressures and temperatures that preclude the formation of char and captured the sulfur. 

Lunan’s success set off what has become exponential growth in the use of such advanced gasifiers. There are now over 40 plants using advanced gasifiers from GE (which bought the Texaco technology in 2004) and Shell and more players entering the market, including Siemens, South Africa’s Sasol, and Chinese groups such as East China University of Science and Technology’s Institute of Clean Coal Technology. According to the U.S.-based Gasification Technologies Council, an industry group, China will add 29 large gasifiers between 2004 and 2010.

It was such domestic innovation that brought me to Lunan last October. In what many considered a sign of He’s continued influence, the Yankuang Group that runs Lunan gained Beijing’s support to build a new plant adjacent to Lunan that is China’s first significant coal-fired power project using gasification technology — a development with significant environmental implications. Let’s hope He continues to support R&D to take coal gasification to the next level: capturing CO2 to help slow China’s ballooning greenhouse gas emissions. 

For details on He’s latest good deeds, see “Syn City” — my profile of Yankuang’s combined power and chemicals plant in IEEE Spectrum. For the broader story on China’s increasing adoption of coal gasification see “China’s Coal Future” in MIT Technology Review.

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Biofuels are growing at an explosive pace. Especially in Brazil, where output of sugar-cane ethanol has increased almost 10% per year since 2000. No suprise, given the high price of oil.

Markets like this one have powerful effects. We’ve all read about the threat of rising food prices, for instance, as food crops are diverted to fuel production (though in Brazil the price of sugar has actually crashed amid the boom: see “Brazil ethanol sector fears ‘delirious’ growth”).

But the market also provides a powerful incentive to innovate. This morning MIT Technology Review is running a quick take of mine on one sign of the ethanol innovation boom: research espousing the growth-enhancing benefits of magnetic fields. See “Can Magnets Boost Ethanol Production?”

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Last week I passed on a recent U.S. Department of Energy study calculating just how cheap it should be to zero-out emissions of CO2 from coal-fired power plants (CN Factoid #1: Cleaning Up Coal is Cheap). Now it’s time, as promised, to follow up with why the Bush Administration is not forcing use of Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle or ‘IGCC’ power plants, which excel at capturing CO2.

The short answer is that the Bush Administration has opposed the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions, including CO2 from coal. That ideological impediment is on the way out thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in April that “The harms associated with climate change are serious and well recognized” and that the EPA must therefore consider regulating CO2.

The longer answer is that the Bush EPA has followed neither the spirit or the letter of the Clean Air Act. EPA should be mandating IGCC technology for new coal-fired power plants, irrespective of its position on CO2, because IGCC plants also excel at capturing more conventional pollutants such as smog-forming NOx, sulfur and especially mercury. As the Clean Air Act stipulates that new power plants must be built using the best pollution control technology available, new coal plants dirtier than IGCCs should thus be technology-non-grata.

But when officials in Illinois, Montana and New Mexico began requiring consideration of IGCC technology when issuing air permits for new power plants, EPA issued a policy blocking such consideration. That prompted the Clean Air Task Force, a Boston-based environmental consulting firm, to sue EPA on procedural grounds. In a settlement reached last year EPA dropped the anti-IGCC policy, but the agency is still a ways from becoming an agent for positive change.

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What do I mean when I say that we are scared to death of controlling CO2?

Consider the continued construction of conventional coal-fired power plants, which spew 2-3 times as much CO2 skyward per kilowatt-hour of electricity produced than a natural gas fired generator. Despite that, coal remains popular with utilities because the cost of cleaner-burning gas has gone through the roof.

But we should be having our cake and eating it too, because the added cost of capturing and burying the CO2 from a coal-fired power plant is negligible relative to the benefit.

According to the latest numbers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Lab, building and running the equipment needed to capture CO2 from a coal-fired generator would add about 2.2 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity delivered (increasing the cost of coal power from a new plant from 4.98 cents/kWh to 7.2 cents/kWh). That includes: the cost of building and operating Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (or IGCC) power plants, which excel at capturing CO2; transporting CO2 to a site where it can be sequestered deep underground; and monitoring the buried CO2 for 100 years

For context, consider that the average price of electricity in the U.S. was 10.04 cents/kWh in the U.S. according to the latest federal stats, and in many places like California and New England average power costs exceed 14 cents/kWh. That means coal plants with carbon capture would still cost half what many American routinely pay for electricity.

Some major utilities such as AEP say they are ready to embrace IGCC technology and carbon capture, but they won’t make the switch until the public demands the extra investment.

For details on the DOE study, download the March 2007 presentation by NETL’s Jared Ciferno: Carbon Capture – Comparison of Cost & Performance for Gasification and Combustion-Based Plants. For more on the potential of coal gasification, check out my recent feature story for MIT Technology Review magazine — “China’s Energy Future” — on gasification’s extensive and growing use in China.

Up next: Why the Clean Air Act, which stipulates that utilities must use the best pollution control technology available, is not delivering when it comes to new coal plants. (Or for the policy wonks out there: IGCC’s struggle to get BACT)

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We are suddenly petrified by carbon dioxide. Not because the risk of climate change is overblown, but because our technological mastery over this simple gas has been vastly undersold. By applying this technological mastery, readily-available carbon-neutral energy sources and efficient vehicles we can stop treating Earth’s atmosphere like a garbage dump, just as cities in the industrial world (and increasingly beyond) no longer flush refuse into rivers and bays. That is the message of Carbon-Nation, a blog to blow off the haze of claims and counter-claims obscuring climate change solutions, charting the technological paths available today to re-energize our economies.

Starting with carbon capture. Why do so many still view the capture of CO2 from power plants as science fiction, or at best impractical? CO2 leavens our bread, bubbles our soda, animates the pistons powering our combustion engines, and even dry cleans our best ensembles. We know how to handle this stuff. In fact, CO2 is rapidly becoming the key to domestic oil production: Since the 1970s U.S. oil producers have pumped millions of tons of CO2 into their rapidly maturing oil wells to free up the liquid gold trapped within (collecting handsome tax breaks in the process).

They’ll use hundreds of millions of tons more in the decades to come. In other words storing carbon underground is already standard practice in the oilpatch — and profitable to boot. See, for example, my story “Carbon Dioxide for Sale” in MIT’s Technology Review on Dakota Gasification, which buries more CO2 pollution in oilfields in a year than a hundred thousand cars release in their operational lifetime.

If the technology to capture and store CO2 is viable today, why does CO2’s growing concentration in Earth’s atmosphere leave us feeling so powerless? Why do we let utilities build new carbon-spewing coal plants and automakers build unreformed combustion engines? Because the anti-climate PR campaigns financed by oil companies, automakers, coal producers and utilities told us that reforming our energy systems would bankrupt the economy.

Carbon-Nation will seek to deliver the knowledge available to master that fear and to implement solutions that will give us cleaner, higher-performing energy system.

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