Reducing CO2 emissions by targeting the world’s hyper-polluting power plants
oilprice.com
oilprice.com
A friend here in NSW Australia told me some years ago, while working at one of the larger coal-fired power plants we have, that emissions are measured on only one of the four stacks, and the results are then extrapolated.
Obviously this was ripe to be gamed, which is precisely what happened. Good coal (black, low-emission, cleaner-burning) was used to power that turbine, the other three turbines got the low-quality / high-emissions brown coal.
Either way, studies like TFA rely on the accuracy of the data that different nation states collect and publish, and I seriously doubt the accuracy of much of those data.
"Worse" is kind of better, because big improvements can be made by focusing on these big polluters.
If the findings here are true, it sounds like it's one of the cheapest ways to cut a big chunk of our emissions. All nations should have an interest in funding the rapid construction of alternatives to these power plants.
Seems more likely that there's some random efficiency differences between the units due to differences in build/maintenance history and the monitoring is done on the unit that's known to be the best-performing one, and that's been exaggerated as it goes through the rumour mill.
I've mucked up with the brown coal assumption (mining and power generation are not my thing) but I don't doubt the accuracy of the report from my engineer friend that the highest quality coal they shipped in went into the one burner that was carefully monitored, and the cheapest / lowest quality material went into the others.
https://goo.gl/maps/tNMeDzyrgwtFsiE67
You can see the enormous pile of washed and graded coal at the southern end, fed by a network of conveyors that leads to the Ravensworth CHPP to the southeast.
But NSW does not mine brown coal or have brown coal power plants, and buying brown coal from other mines would obviously attract attention. But the design differences between brown and black coal plants at all stages from fuel processing, injection, burning, and waste extraction are so different between brown and black fuel that you couldn't just flip between them even if you had the fuel on hand. So I doubt the accuracy of this rumor too.
Referring to http://www.resourcesandenergy.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_f...
- it looks like NSW has a range of coal qualities being mined, and I'm sure even slight deltas in price, at the quantities we'd be looking at for a power station that size, would reward this behaviour.
"Clean Coal" is actually a joke and I'm genuinely shocked people fell for it. Murdoch has A LOT of control here.
I don't know what you're getting at or how it relates to what I wrote. Black coal generation is about twice as good as brown coal for emissions intensity of production of electricity and gas is about twice as good as black coal. These differences and other differences in efficiency are extremely important if you're looking to minimize emissions, which is the subject of the article.
"it is healthier to drink 2 liters of whiskey than 2 liters of bleach, and the bleach is healthier than 2 liters of dimethylmercury"
In some ways, yes, correct. In ways that are important, though, no.
They have plenty of "ads" treating other topics as well.
I would love to know about how efficiency varies with plant size (are bigger plants more efficient?) but this study is _mostly_ just stating that bigger power plants produce more emissions in absolute terms, which should be obvious to pretty much anyone.
Quote: “If the top 5 percent of polluters lowered their emission intensity to the global average for fossil fuel plants, the world’s CO2 emissions could drop by 25 percent, the study found.”
So while these plants emit a lot due to their size, they are also much worse (28%-75% per the article) on a co2/kw generated basis as well. (At least according to this article)
That's impossible, as the total power-generation related emissions count for less than 25 % of the total emissions [1].
[1] https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2016-05/global_emiss...
It's repeated several times through the article, though it may not be super clear. I think they just wanted to avoid repeating themselves all the time
Sadly, I doubt that will happen.
> “Another major reason is that many high-carbon production chains were outsourced from developed nations to Chinese cities, thus increasing the export-related emissions of the latter.”
The solution possibly is something more radical than what you're thinking, because the PRC forcing emissions reductions and driving up manufacturing costs could just cause these industries to jump to the next exploitable developing region. I'm thinking more along the lines of strategies to reduce consumerism in general, or match global product prices to their "true" cost considering environmental damage - ideas most pro-infinite-growth capitalists find untenable.
A gentler approach would be a well designed cross border emission tax. This could make operation of these plants economically impractical.
Merely adding a new tax would be the most regressive solution available, as it disproportionately hurts the poorest- the consequences would take longer but could end up just as severe. Maybe they dont have access to plentiful natural gas, or grid storage for renewables. Maybe they simply dont have an economy healthy or government free enough of corruption to invest in the capital required to transition.
A more reasonable approach would be to set up a program that fronts the necessary investments while letting the locals retain control... effectively a free loan. It would certainly meet the criterion of "gentler", at least, and probably cheaper than fuelling the planes and the bombs as well- those things are crazy expensive.
Germany in particular made the stupid decision of shutting down nuclear plants (Fukushima overreaction) and it is pushing this narrative of being a green energy country… to me it sounds like an easy problem to solve once there is enough political attention.
Most likely you fell victim to American newspapers lying to you that Germany is pushing a green narrative. After all they lied about Germany moving back to coal. What happened is that Germany willingly delayed reductions in CO2 emissions. It clearly cared about the nuclear shutdown more than the coal shutdown. However, the articles are always about how emissions went up "because more coal" when that never happened. It's lies upon lies.
Germany is a country that is standing still, neither getting better nor worse and likes it that way. It's not green and nobody pretended that it is green.
What should have happened 20-60 years ago is modular LFTR reactors, they had them at Oak Ridge. Closet sized reactors could probably scale quickly.
"If coal and oil plants in the top 5 percent of polluters switched to natural gas, global emissions would drop by 29.5 percent."
So, if top 5% just switch to natural gas of the same electrical generation capacity, the global emission still drops by ~30%.
Reading the actual study, it does seem their rank for "top 5% polluting" is total emissions. They do calculate relative intensity, as you say. But the ranking for plants with greatest emissions was done without regard for capacity.
Also, the "73%" reduction would only be for GHG's from electricity-generation, not all sources.
I mean, obviously coal is a pretty awful fuel from an environmental standpoint and it's good to quantify these things. Just reading these are hard when the authors didn't necessarily make 100% clear the last few tables.
> Reducing CO2 emissions by targeting the world’s hyper-polluting power plants
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac13f1/...
0: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac13f1/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_power_stations
Kind of insane the article and the linked discussion don't include HOW MUCH POWER these places make. I've been reading through those two and I can't find that simple fact.
The top ten most polluting plants were in Poland, India, South Korea, Taiwan, China, Germany, and Japan. South Korea has three coal-fired power plants among the top ten super polluters. India has two, and the other countries mentioned above have one each.
It could be the UN leading the way on this, with a budget and a mandate to have these plants shut down or modified.
The timeframe must be ambitious, as the world really doesn't have the time for long schedules.
China and Taiwan seem to be the hardest to reason with, so additional pressure might be needed.
But it looks promising if these plants can really be changed or phased out.
How is the next generation of nuclear power supposed to avoid that problem if people build everything at once and then stop again for 50 years?
Time of construction and cost of these plants far outweigh its benefits when compared to easier and cheaper alternatives in the renewable sector.
The first step would be the set a definitive date when the coal plant will get demolished. Once that is done, people can continue to debating what optimal alternative should be constructed but if the date come and there is nothing built then what people get is no power, and the blame then goes to those who refused to build new power plants when they knew ahead that the coal plant is getting demolished.
"Carbon capture initiative at the Belchatow thermal power plant PGE signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Alstom in December 2008 for the design and construction of a pilot carbon capture plant (CCP) at the latest unit of the plant.
PGE signed a grant agreement of €180m ($245m) for the installation of carbon capture, transport, and geological storage facilities in May 2010.
The project was expected to be completed by 2015, but canceled in 2013 following environmental opposition to underground storage of carbon.
If completed, it would have captured 1.8 million tonnes of CO2 a year."
I don't understand why there would be opposition to storage of carbon?
[1] https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/projects/belchatow-power-pl...
They didn't get the money from the European Union and therefore it wasn't built.
The opposition to carbon capture thing isn't even in the wikipedia article about the plant, looks like your source isn't the most trustworthy.
That is a very strange inference to make.
Here's an abstract that claims environmental risks for ccs, and lack of political support (which I understand tends to come in the form of funding?) as a result: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03062...
This PDF says it was cancelled due to delays in "transposing" (implementing at country level I think?) the necessary regulations to allow funding: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/154669777.pdf
The Wikipedia article about the plant references this politico article, which does mention environmentalist opposition to ccs (that's not what they referenced it for, of course): https://www.politico.eu/article/paperthe-eus-failed-ccs-ambi...
"We, the energy industry, came up with a Green Solution but environmental groups stopped it for reasons x, y, z"
Where x, y, z is some plausible, fungible combination of "they care more about the spotted owl/some other endangered species" and "they care more about punishing us than being solution-focused" and "it's more of a modern-day religion" -- whatever the reader needs to be willing to accept the energy industry's story about how they're trying to do better but it's the environmental groups' fault.
What's interesting about this to me is, where seeing the propaganda round the Iraq War was obvious and obviously crafted, this is much sneakier.
But I think you'll see this more and more -- the energy industry is trying to solve our environmental problems, they say, and would be able to lead us to a greener world if not for those irrational, quasi-religious, badly-prioritizing environmental groups.
This site has an extensive archive of such DEIR comments and subsequent lawsuits for hundreds of projects around the state. It's just how labor negotiations are done in California, now. All the letters and motions are the same, all the front groups have the same name except with different cities or counties, and they are all drafted by the same law firm. A typical example is at [1].
https://phonyuniontreehuggers.com/
1: https://phonyuniontreehuggers.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01...
The biggest reason is that most of the time "we're gonna store carbon" is just smoke and mirrors and in practice never happens. It's the biggest excuse for fossil fuel companies to continue business as usual while promising some solution in the future that never comes.
But there's also practical risks, there have been leaks from carbon capture sites in the past if they aren't handled properly, see e.g.: http://insideenergy.org/2016/11/05/what-happened-in-midwest-...
Second, CSS has never worked to date and probably won't work for at least the medium term - meaning we cannot solve the current climate crisis with it.
https://theconversation.com/its-time-to-accept-carbon-captur...
Which leads to the conclusion that cutting electrical CO2 emissions which account for about 25% percent of total emissions by 30% won't cut it in the least. Also we'd then have built gas-fired power plants with a lifetime of 30+ years, when really we need carbon neutrality by 2050.
This is really encouraging news, and good example of why I personally don't like getting distracted by per capita and other similar metrics that draw attention away from raw output.
https://www.facebook.com/gcaa.org.tw/
What are you doing to help? If you live in Poland, India, South Korea, Taiwan, China, Germany, or Japan - contact an activism group, and ask them to gather support! It is shameful for the governments of those countries to read reports like this about themselves, so I hope that they might be stirred to action that will help improve the environment and save the world :)
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/new-eu-climate-proposal...
https://www.fitchratings.com/research/corporate-finance/risi...
„As a result, environmental advocates have characterized lignite as the most harmful coal to human health.“ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lignite
For me, who lives in Germany and always thinks that the Germans have a good environmental awareness, it is quite remarkable that they have not yet switched off. But fortunately there are elections in September.
Switching to renewables is a laudable goal but the steps should have been phasing out coal first instead of nuclear first.
Blaming them on this specific issue is just odd when they literally had the least fault out of everyone.
Laschet has time and again defended lignite ("Braunkohle" in german) and will probably become the next chancellor. Write an email to your local green party branch and ask how you can help!
https://wwfeu.awsassets.panda.org/downloads/european_dirty_t...
Nothing has changed since then. The two most polluting powerplants in Europe are still running:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be%C5%82chat%C3%B3w_Power_Stat...
Edit: COVAX was a bad example to use, my bad.
Does a first-world country offer to pay them billions...?
Or perhaps a first-world country should blacklist them from global trade until they become compliant. Perhaps they can't afford it, and it would be seen as a bad act. Either way, what they dump in the atmosphere affects everyone. What they dump in the ocean, too.
Also sad to see Japan on that list. I thought that they were generally more technologically advanced than the other countries on the 'blame list' which tend to be generally 2nd/3rd world. After all, they have pioneered robotics, process engineering, cutting edge trains, and electric/hydrogen/hybrid automotive for several decades now.
Still, the moment that the government says "you need to pay big for your CO2" and the company decides "OK, let's buy some carbon offset futures offshore", that distills down to "let's send a billion dollars offshore for no tangible product", in which case from a capitalist POV they've basically donated the money. What would motivate the government not to just take it as tax money instead and use it to build more energy in their own country.
From https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-scienc... :
> When you buy an offset, you fund projects that reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
Edit: maybe you meant "how is it reducing carbon in the atmosphere today?" whereas I meant reducing total emissions over a period of time that extends into the future. A sibling comment brought this up as well.
A common theme among these technologies is that they make for lucrative business. Automotive business is big, robotics and process engineering make for better yield (as for trains, maybe they just have passion for trains). Not so for clean energy. Japan had a large chunk of energy generation coming from nuclear power until 2011 so there wasn't any incentive for looking for alternative solutions as what they had was already clean and cheap. It's been 10 years since the disaster but I think that is still not enough time for them to have an alternative solution running.
Still, that means retrofitting the worst power plants with CCS systems could have massive benefits.
I don't know much about oilprice.com, but aside from the obvious information we can get from its name and general presentation, the first ad I see going on the site is a sponsored article from Saudi Aramco (the national Saudi oil company).
I'm confident saying this is the exact kind of lobbying outlet that would have the strongest incentives to deflect attention away from the oil industry by publishing articles about how the coal industry is worse, regardless of whether these articles actually help environmental policy.
That doesn't mean the article's claims are automatically false, just that we should be skeptical of them... and with this skepticism in mind, I'm not impressed with the headline "Top 5% Polluting Power Plants Account For 73% Of Global Emissions" implies that you could remove 73% of all CO2 emissions, whereas they're actually talking about CO2 emissions from electricity production, a much smaller fraction.
tldr Maybe there's an insight in there, but it's drowned in the corporate hot-potato throwing.
No. Even though researching these power plants is valuable to find low effort / high reward actions, blaming buildings is almost as bad as blaming each individual separately with carbon footprints. Both are diversions meant to make people not look closely at colonial fossil capitalism.
The problem is systemic and only system level solutions can be effective.
The EU has about 300 coal power plants.
With 100 people at each, that's only 30,000 people.
In 2019, 300,000 people joined the 'climate strike' in the UK alone:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_2019_climate_strikes....
At this coal plant in Germany, just five people were able to shut it down for several hours, saving 26,000 tonnes of CO2:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/04/no-regre...
We could probably pull this off just with the backing and resources of a multi-millionaire, to pay someone to organise the activists, identify the locations and equipment, and to bail them out of jail and defend them in courts.
Basically a 'people-driven' carbon tax.
I do believe that we need to close coal powered plants. I do not believe that taking private, unannounced, disorganised and illegal initiatives is the way to do it.
The rule of law, and the expectation that society's problems won't be solved through violence, are important pillars of our civilizations and shouldn't be discarded lightly.
On the other hand, there's a very real possibility that climate change will destroy our civilization. When the greater good is "avoid the death of billions"... then yeah, private illegal action is starting to look good.
Not that good. If you look at the fact that associations like Greenpeace that were built on doing what OP suggests have probably offset the development of nuclear power by decades, and gotten us that much closer to global disaster, you realize that direct activism can have bad consequences too.
But good enough I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand.