What is a resource?

Fossil fuels? Uranium? Land? Carbon dioxide?

Probably all four.

When we generate electricity we need to balance these against each other.

This means that understandably people can be as against wind power as they are against coal power.

I realise that we need all forms of power to keep this country going - which brings its own challenges of intermitency, as shown in this article by the scotsman.

Of course we could use gas, rather than coal - but it needs to be fossil.

I like the way that WWF argue that we don't need to plan for the worst possible scenario.

Hang on - actually we do.

Moron.

CCS in Norway - 2014

Reuters is reporting that Statoil (from Norway) is looking to expend on their Sleipner experience (which has been sequestering carbon under the north sea since 1990) and fit CCS to a power station.

Details are, quite frankly, sketchy - but it looks like they will start sometime between 2010 and 2014, with an amine capture system being fitted to the oil refinery and attached CHP plant.

The Democratic National Convention

As we all probably know the Democratic National Convention (DNC) has been going on in the states for some time now.

It's being attended by a few people from a America's Power - an industrial pressure group who are lobbying candidates and generally keeping an eye on what is being said.

They were delighted to hear that new coal power stations (with carbon capture and storage) were mentioned in a speech by Jay Rockefeller, a Senator from West Virginina (lots of coal over there - it's one state over from the coal research centre I was recently at).

"We need a leader who will re-establish America as an energy superpower by pursuing every resource at our disposal: alternative fuels, drilling and our most abundant domestic resource, tomorrow's clean coal".

Yep, that's the American way.

Carbon Capture Ready consultation

I was asked to put together a response to question 15 of the governments CCS consultation.

Here's what I wrote - it's not exactly brief.

What might be the impact of the potential costs of CCR [carbon capture ready] for 100% biomass power plants and so the implications for their future build? Should the Government explore excluding 100% Biomass schemes from the proposed Article 32?

The implication of a CCR requirement is that the plant will, one day, be required to fit CCS technology.
As a fuel biomass contains more hydrogen and oxygen than coal – meaning that it contains much less carbon (perhaps only 45% for Switchgrass whereas a bituminous coal may contain 85% carbon). Equally the calorific value of biomass is normally lower than that for coal. BCURA report a calorific value of approx 34 Mj/Kg for Pittsburgh No. 8 (daf basis), whilst Bridgeman et al (2007) report a value of around 17 Mj/kg for switchgrass.
This suggests that the flue gas coming from a 100% biomass plant is likely (on a constant energy out basis) to not only be of substantially greater volume (perhaps twice the volume) but also to be of lower CO2 intensity. Both these factors will combine to make CCS with amines more difficult and expensive.
As such it is likely that the cost associated with any CCS (and therefore by extension CCR) requirement for 100% biomass plants would be – when compared against the cost of the plant – greater for a biomass plant than for a coal fired plant.

This suggests that power generation companies may choose to spend their capital by investing in co-firing facilities (where the small biomass component will have a marginal effect on the CO2 stream) rather than dedicated biomass plants.
This decision will of course be influenced by many other parameters (including the RO) upon which I don’t feel qualified to comment.

I know of 5 reasonably sized proposed / existing 100% biomass plants in the UK. Lockerbie (44MW, Eon), Ely (38MW, EPR), Sheffield (Proposed 25MW, Eon), Bristol (Proposed 150MW, Eon), Port Talbot (Consented / Under construction 350MW, Prenergy Power).
I would suggest that to date there is no conclusive evidence as to the optimum size of a 100% biomass power station (largely it depends on what fuel can be made to be available). As such any requirement for 100% biomass plants to be CCR (and by extension for future CCS) may have the effect of limiting the size of such plants to sub 300MW.
As such it is probably desirable for the government to investigate excluding 100% biomass plants from the mandatory CCR requirement.

This assumes that 100% biomass plants continue to be seen as carbon neutral whereas they should probably be seen as low carbon (especially the Port Talbot and Bristol 100% biomass plants which may emit large quantities of green house gasses in the transport of their fuel from North America).

Energy windfall taxes

Compass (direction for the democratic left) has made the headlines today by calling for a windfall tax on energy compaines.

They argue that with the rising cost of oil these companies are making extra un-earned profits, to which the state is as enititled to as the companies are.

I'm not sure that I agree. If you tax a multi-national too heavily you risk driving their investment abroad.
Equally something does need to be done about insulating the homes of the worst off.

It comes down to the conflict for investment - does the government know what to do with it better than the energy companies - and believe me, there are some large financial calls on the electricity generators at the moment.

CCS - ready when?

Getting CCS ready for commercial use is a complex affair - it's never been tried before at the scale required on power stations.

This is something which requires money - and if this money is not available the whole project can be set back.

Theage has just published something suggesting that CCS won't be in a position to contribute to the countries energy mix before 2020.
That's possible.

We shouldn't forget though that this applies to economies as a whole, and that to get it this far we need to apply the technology to individual power stations - which means CCS will be used well before this date.
For example, if we could get two learning cycles in before this date we're likely to assist in strenghening this deadline.
http://www.co2storage.org.uk/Publications/UKCCS/Gibbins08.pdf

Largely this is happening - amine capture (which is regarded as the most promising type of CCS in the short term) is being demonstrated with RWEnpower at Didcott, and then Aberthaw by around 2010.
I would guess that the governments CCS competition winner would also use this technology.

So;

CCS by 2020? Yes, of course.

CCS capturing 90% of the emissions of a power station by 2020? Probably a policital rather than a technical challenge.

CCS in in all of the countrys power stations by 2020? Possibly not.

Price rises

Implementing low carbon electrical systems costs money - as does the need to fix the looming energy gap (as power stations reach the end of their lives and need to be decomissioned with new ones built to replace them).

Eon's biomass Bristol biomass press release was surprisingly candid about the investment program that they are undergoing, which struck me as odd at the time.

I now realise that they were warning the general population about forthcoming price rises - which were announced yesterday.

Two things stike me:

The price of gas is rising by more than the price of electricity. This suggests that we would do better to minimise our dependence upon gas within electrical generation (actually this is probably too simplistic since the price they can charge is set by the market, and is only marginally driven by costs - this can be seen by Scottish & Southern putting up their prices immediately after Eon announced their price rises).

We really now have a choice between cheap fuel and renewable energy - we can't have cheap renewable energy. I would hope that we would keep piling on down the renewable energy path as hard as we can - after all, if a rich nation isn't going to do it, how can we expect a poor nation to?

There really is only one way out of this problem - and a recent Friends of the Earth press release has hit the nail right on the head.