The Politics of Clean Coal

As someone with ongoing interests in energy development and its impact on the environment and communities, I've watched the public debate over the future of coal with keen interest, and have even written about it some here.  Granted, I'm not a scientist or engineer, and certainly am not a technical expert in carbon capture and sequestration (commonly known as CCS).  But from a communication and media perspective, it's fascinating to observe the political dimensions of this debate.

So I was interested to read this short article, which appeared in the journal Nature this week.  It's called "Low-cost carbon-capture project sparks interest," and in my view, it's similar to a lot of media coverage of CCS and its more popular but also nebulous cousin, "clean coal."  By that I mean that it seems to hit a note of excitement about the potential for CCS, but when read closely, may reveal nothing about CCS's advancement or potential.

The article details possible advancements made by the Huaneng Group in China, who apparently are capturing CO2 using an already-understood method at this plant:

From Nature

Not a big deal, right?  There is not necessarily anything of note technologically happening here.

Except, of course, that they claim they are also doing it cheaply, much cheaper than anyone else in the world has been able to do it.  And this is a hugely big deal, because right now, CCS is very, very expensive.  Those high costs could keep it from being a useful technology to answer worries over climate pollution.

This strikes me as interesting for a number of reasons.  "Clean coal" is an incredibly politicized technology:  if you say you are for clean coal, you are going to be seen as a dupe of big energy, a fool who believes in magic-bullet technologies, or a manipulator only interested in the status quo.  If you are critical of clean coal technologies, you are uninformed, a naysayer, lacking vision and understanding of technical progress.  This polarization has been exacerbated by ad campaigns from both sides, which have produced the following ads:

At least, that is what the debate looks like from the outside, in general terms.  Of course, CCS continues to garner huge amounts of federal funding; scientific research in CCS proceeds apace; and some demonstration projects are nascent but on their way toward yielding interesting results.  There have been some serious and substantial setbacks that should give us pause, particularly when it comes to the "storage" aspects of CCS.  Check out this story for one such case, where a storage project in Canada seems to be going badly awry.

Stories like the Nature piece on Huaneng, however, are more optimistic.  They suggest that the technology is potentially available, and that we are in a race to get there.  Whether and how those technologies can be shared between nations is another matter.

Furthermore, we are seeing a lot of stories in which China's amazing progress in energy production and extraction (both conventional and renewables) has really got the West worried, and the Nature article has more than a little of this competitiveness narrative informing its reporting here.

But the fact is, there is still enormous uncertainty when it comes to CCS and its future.  Climate change is not waiting for us to develop CCS, nor do we know what unforeseen effects may result from individual CCS projects.  It is also, for the moment, incredibly expensive (at least, it is everywhere but China, apparently).  So whether it will be a promising pathway to explore as we pursue our climate and energy options is anyone's guess.  I'm not terribly optimistic, but that doesn't mean it's not moving forward anyway.