By Richard Martin, Contributing Editor

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Gov. Bill Ritter headlined a forum in Fort Collins last week to promote President Obama’s plan for a national energy policy. More specifically, they were stumping for the Administration’s climate-change bill, which was narrowly passed by the U.S. House earlier this summer and will be taken up by the Senate in the fall.

Along with Democratic Rep. Betsy Markey and the natural resources directors from California and Washington state, the secretary and the governor discussed wind farms, energy policy on federal lands, energy policy’s impacts on water and agriculture, and Ritter’s scheme for a “New Energy Economy” in the Rocky Mountain West.

 What they didn’t talk about, at least according to news accounts of the forum was eliminating carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants. That’s a big omission: no amount of renewable-energy subsidies, replacement of gas-guzzlers with hybrid vehicles, or R&D on solar power technology is going to mitigate global climate change unless we do something about coal plants, existing and future.

Nearly half of America’s electricity comes from burning coal. “Coal plants in the United States account for a third of U.S. greenhouse emissions,” reported The Washington Post in an exceedingly bleak story on the challenge of CO2 emissions from coal. “In the past five years China has brought online coal-fired electricity equal in size to total U.S. installed capacity.” A new coal-fired plant comes online somewhere in the world almost every day.

Coal “is still the elephant in the room,” John Ashton, Britain’s special representative for climate change, said at a conference in Washington earlier this summer. “There is no credible pathway towards prudent greenhouse gas stabilization targets without CO2 emissions reduction from existing coal power plants,” Ernest Moniz, a professor at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology wrote in a recent report entitled “The Future of Coal.” 

The federal government is not inactive on the coal front. The economic stimulus bill passed earlier this year included $2.4 billion for pilot projects carbon-capture projects. And last week the Dept. of Energy announced that it has awarded $27.6 million to a group of universities and companies to conduct research into underground storage of carbon separated from coal-plant smokestacks. The money will be matched by the awardees for a total of $35.8 million. The grants include $1.6 million to the Colorado School of Mines to “develop a comprehensive reservoir simulator for modeling non-isothermal multiphase flow and transport of CO2 in saline reservoirs with heterogeneity, anisotropy, and fractures and faults, coupled with geochemical and geomechanical processes that would occur during CO2 geologic sequestration.” In other words, CSM will be looking at what happens to CO2 injected into deep saline aquifers.

The Administration has also has restarted the FutureGen project to build a new coal plant equipped with carbon-capture technology in Mattoon, Ill. Projected to cost $2.4 billion, FutureGen is being developed by a consortium of coal producers and electric utilities.

The problem is that, as these projects indicate, carbon capture and sequestration technology is costly and largely untested in commercial applications. The FutureGen project will create a coal-fired plant of 275MW – modest by modern utility standards — and would remove only 60% of the carbon from its emissions. Much more is needed to make a serious dent in Big Coal’s contribution to global warming.

The other obstacle is ideological. Many vociferous opponents of coal, like Greenpeace, maintain that “clean coal” is a myth and that any form of carbon capture R&D only transfers funding away from truly clean, renewable energy sources like wind and solar, supporting and sustaining the coal industry. That’s an unrealistic position: coal is not going away in the next 50 years. The challenge of scrubbing its exhaust of CO2 is a daunting one – but it’s the only serious way of grappling with the elephant in the energy-policy room.