End of efficient coal in the UK

The guardian is reporting today that the government has again deferred the decision on whether or not to permit new coal fired power stations.

This may mean the decision is getting too close to the next election, and won't happen until the next government - the last possible date for an election being the 3rd June 2010.

It takes three years to build a coal fired power station, and it is required by around 2012-15 (although I know there is a lot of gas fired capacity being built).

Faced with this I wouldn't now expect any new coal fired power stations to be built in the UK - the government has quashed them.

This means that the old ones will be kept running, almost at any cost - if they can't be replaced the energy companies will do what E.on is doing at Ratcliffe on Soar, and life extend their plants.
These emit around 20% more CO2 because of the old technology that they are using.

All the government is doing is increasing the price of our electricity (by mandating gas), failing to test CCS (so the E7 can't use it and won't reduce their emissions - meaning there is no point in us reducing ours) and failing to tackle older plant and bring them off grid.

All in all my opinion is that this policy is completely f*cked.

John Constable, director of policy and research at the Renewable Energy Foundation

I've just received a press release from the Institution of Chemical Engineers - they're advertising the The 9th European Gasification Conference. It goes like this:

Constable writes: "Industry analysts have for some time been predicting that the lack of reliable capacity in the UK electricity industry would force the Government to seek humiliating exemptions from the EU Large Combustion Plant Directive and its successor legislation in order to keep dirty power stations online that would otherwise be phased out by the directive. The Government has underestimated the impact of the regulations and has failed to recognise that the LCPD would probably require the closure of the bulk of the UK's coal generation fleet by 2016."

Constable also describes the UK's "extreme dependence" on imported gas as "reckless" and warns that ministers have failed to understand that the security of supply contribution from renewables, even if built, would be modest.

"A modern diversified power fleet must consist of nuclear plants, high-efficiency and therefore cleaner coal-fired power stations, including gasifiers predesigned to be ready to capture CO2 for the purpose of enhanced oil (and gas) recovery in the North Sea," writes Constable.
"Dedicated biomass and unlimited co-firing of biomass with coal [that's where I come in!] might also help here, although most of this fuel will have to be imported. Offshore wind will also assist," he adds.

[Copied and pasted from an e-mail from the IChemE].

See, it's not just me who thinks that we need coal. Yey.

RWE freezes new coal investment inside of EU

Power Engineering is reporting that RWE will not build any new coal fired power stations in western europe.

This is big news.

"A result of full auctioning of CO2 rights from 2013 RWE will suspend large scale coal or lignite power plant projects in western European countries such as Germany and the UK".

Power stations that have begun construction will be finished - and new ones might be re-started once the price of electricity rises to sufficient levels.

My understanding is that this cancels Blyth and Tilbury. I might be wrong.

I thought that Tilbury was entered into the UK governments CCS competion, maybe I'm wrong?

Update: The Guardian have a slightly more in depth piece, and suggest the Tilbury will go ahead. I'm not sure how far the planning for Blyth is.
This also could not affect very much - and just be RWE rattling the sabre - afterall there were ammendments going through the EU parliament on Carbon trading the other day.

Lies and lies and lies

The website "no new coal" is reporting the 30 000 could be made homeless by Kingsnorth.

Pardon?

I'm not sure if these people quite understand how many emissions any new Kingsnorth will be responsible for (they certainly don't realise it will be responsible for 20% less than the current power station).

Let's have a look.

The UK is responsible for around 3.5% of global emissions.
The electricity sector is responsible for around 35% of UK emissions.
Perhaps 30% is generated by coal (over the course of a year, although Coal is mainly used in the winter as the price of gas rises) and 40-45% is generated by gas.
Coal emits CO2 at just over twice the rate that gas does, so it's responsible for just 60% of UK electrical emissions - or 0.8% of global CO2 emissions.

Meanwhile there are, of course, more than one coal fired power station in the UK - currently 20. A new Kingsnorth will be at least 20% more efficient than these current stations. This means a new Kingsnorth, per year, will approximately be responsible for 0.03% of global emissions.

Okay this is a back of the envelope calculation done at 8am, but all the same - 0.03% of global emissions - and remember that China still has a long way to go in expanding it's coal fired fleet.

Update: I've just had another think about this. No new coal is claiming that 30 000 will be turned into refugees by 0.03% of emissions. Well this suggests that 100 million people worldwide are going to loose their homes because of global warming. The worlds population is 6600 million (give or take). This means that one in 66 is going to loose their house from global warming - according to these figures.

I still just don't believe them.

Another thing - I don't believe that penalties should fall equally across all carbon emitters. We need steel and electricity to do anything. Rather those trips to the shops where people drive rather than cycle or walk should be hit the most. Double count those with refugees rather than making a political statement about a commodity that we all need...

...and which generates around 0.03% of global emissions.

Underground coal gasification

Professional Engineering, the magazine from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, has just produced an excellent report on underground coal gasification (they also ran a great one on Carbon Capture and Storage).

Underground coal gasification injects water and oxygen into deep, unmineable, coal seems where the coal is part burnt to form carbon mon-oxide, hydrogen and methane. This mix is pumped to the surface where it is possible to clean up, (I think the carbon monoxide is reacted with more water to produce more hydrogen and carbon dioxide) and separate the gas. The carbon di-oxide goes back underground to safe long-term storage, whilst the hydrogen goes either to be burnt in a turbine, or to fuel the hydrogen economy.

Now you might think that the UK is running out of coal - well sort of. We might be getting towards the end of the easily extractable stuff, where you can get a man to.
Of course you can always drill to these other places - such as under the north sea, and perform underground coal gasification there.
This gives us another 300 years of hydrogen production.

Further this isn't a new technology - it's been around for years (I know that the Soviets spent a lot of time working on it, and that a recent (small) project in South Africa went quite well).

Will it happen? PE has a great quote "Partly to blame is the dirty, unfashionable, image of coal, which as seen energy firms and governments opt for gas and, increasingly, nuclear power stations."

Coal in the UK

Some patient soul has put together a map of all current and proposed power stations and coal mines.

They must have the patience of a saint.

Sadly they've not included the research centre's (and there are quite a number of them), so it's not quite a complete list of all the UK jobs that depend on coal - a close second though!