Editorial note: Current social and political barriers to adopting carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) are not insurmountable, Mackler argues. The first step toward a solution lies with the coalitions that are developing to drive the legislation that will provide acceptable regulation of the capture and storage industry. The stage is set for emerging entrepreneurs.

Dear David,

Thanks. It’s clear to me and hopefully to our readers that we do share an awful lot of commonality in how we view the climate problem and where we see its ultimate solutions. I’d like to conclude this exchange with a few other points on the imperative of finding a path for coal that doesn’t destroy our climate and in the process attempt to persuade you that if we don’t do this in the next two decades, everything else is academic.

Two points are crucial. The first is that the technologies to capture and store CO₂ are not “out there” but “right here.” I’m glad to hear you mostly agree on this point. The second is that if we’re serious about saving the climate someone must take advantage of them. Let me explain.

More on point 1. The combination of technical, economic, and social hurdles preventing CCS [carbon dioxide capture and storage] from taking hold are quite nuanced and deserve a little more attention. As a friend of mine suggests, saying that we don’t know how to do CCS today is a little like saying in June of 1969 that we didn’t know how to put a man on the moon. Sure it hadn’t been done before, but we had put men in orbit of the earth and the moon and successfully performed unmanned lunar landings. A manned lunar landing just hadn’t yet been tried. The fact that an executive of an electric company with lots of conventional coal assets doesn’t think CCS is ready for prime time is not exactly a cold shower in my view. Look to the drivers of innovation — the technology companies — and you’ll find several commercial options to do this, available today, with performance guaranties. It’s not surprising that coal with CCS hasn’t been tried yet, why would anyone have done it without an incentive to do so? I also would suggest that if we got serious about wanting to deploy CCS, the storage regulations would come together pretty quickly. Many quite capable people are deeply engaged in this as we speak. Your point on the looming NIMBY [not in my back yard] barrier is probably the most troubling. I will return to this shortly.

More on point 2: I wish I had time to get into the details of the enormously rich analytical information that has been generated by economic and climate models. These are, of course, quite imperfect forecasting tools but they do represent the best information we have from some of our best thinkers. And almost universally, these show the slow lags in our energy system and its ability to transform over the course of the century. They also show great agreement on the fact that if CCS is available as an option (i.e. NIMBY concerns are overcome) it almost certainly is one of the least cost options available for decarbonizing power production in the next few decades. See analysis from the EPA [PDF] and the EIA for starters. If coal is outcompeted by other alternatives, then all the better but ruling it out from the get-go clearly makes a tough climb even steeper.

As the world struggles to find the willpower to take meaningful steps to dampen our climate risks, there are powerful interests pushing against the realignment of our traditional energy markets. Even just the narrative of a positive future for coal in a climate constrained economy has helped to bring important voices, such as the labor movement, onto the right side of this issue politically. Let’s not ignore the pragmatics of how legislation comes together in this country, and on that score I think it’s safe to say that we’re likely to see at least a few CCS plants on our soil. Turning attention to other big coal consuming nations — namely China and India — the recent vintage of their new coal fleets, their coal resource endowments, and their public postures on energy all indicate that it’s not likely we’ll see those facilities turned off soon. We would all be better off if there were a way to decarbonize them. As you suggest, we as a society need to come to grips with our situation and make some tough decisions. In a country that is stumbling in its attempts to build offshore wind farms, solar infrastructure in the desert, and transmission lines just about anywhere, it’s high time that we became a nation that can build things again. In that spirit, I think acceptability of CCS should be presumed if the case can be made it is safe (all indications point to the affirmative on that front). If we can’t get there, I still think that China will, and perhaps low-carbon coal doesn’t emerge in the U.S. as a climate solution; it will likely still be an important global technology.

Finally, the serious possibility of future carbon regulations has already catalyzed marvelous activity in the research community. I hope and expect the emerging entrepreneurs in this space will develop unexpected options to help us solve this problem.  Some interesting pathways are emerging as offshoots of flue-gas capture of CO₂ from coal plants that just might have wider applications with profound implications. Removing CO₂ directly from the atmosphere is one promising possibility that could open up a host of technological, financial, and political pathways previously unimagined. Closing our minds to climate solutions at this stage of the game is likely to constrain our solution set in unintended ways. So, by all means let’s aim high in our efforts to deal with climate change but rejecting some technology options outright before we’ve even really begun does not suggest a serious effort is underway. And I think we both agree that it’s time to get serious.

It’s been a pleasure.

Cheers,
Sasha

Editorial note: Mackler argues that the world lacks time for its leaders to navigate the political process necessary for a complete change of energy policy direction. Large-scale efforts to reduce carbon emissions are necessary now, and the energy industry is a good place to start because it is one of the largest carbon sources and because the technology to contain that source, at least in the short run, is available now.

Dear David,

Nice to hear from you. And sorry to learn that you’ve been hit by the flu. That sounds awful. I trust you and your family are back on your feet by now.

Lots of good points raised in your note. And especially interesting to me is the realization that I don’t find myself disagreeing with much of what you say and yet I remain convinced that we can and must develop low-carbon coal as soon as possible. As I respond here I want to touch on a few of your comments while also trying to make it clear why I think we can do this. My next response will focus on why we must.

I want to return to the main point on which we seem to miss each other, which is the nature of the problem we’re facing in climate change. The fundamental cause of climate change is in some sense both an energy engineering problem as well as a larger problem of philosophical proportions. Neither viewpoint is necessarily incorrect but they certainly lead to divergent societal discussions on solutions and, most importantly, wholly different timeframes upon which any responses are likely to emerge. Now you may accuse me of narrow-mindedness with my singular focus on energy — I do work for the National Commission on Energy Policy after all — but I think that this focus is critically important if we’re to take the necessary steps to avoid the impending climate calamity facing us.

I too am deeply concerned about our planet’s vanishing forests and darkening seas. There are indeed seemingly innumerable crises mankind is inflicting on the world, environmental and social. Addressing these existential problems, as you call them, is vitally important to our way our life and our ability to continue to inhabit this place. I couldn’t agree more. However, if we don’t start responding to climate change very soon, the rest of these problems will be exacerbated and quite possibly overwhelmed. My focus on energy is based not on philosophy but on arithmetic. It’s simply where the lion’s share of carbon emissions have come from and, importantly, where the future carbon sits. When I said previously that we must break old habits if we’re to successfully deal with climate risks, what I was really trying to say was that if we attempt to deal with climate as we have historically dealt with other environmental problems, we’re cooked. We simply haven’t got the time to push for the perfect solutions in 2030.

Engineering an energy solution would buy time and enable the larger discussion on how to more sustainably organize our society. As one of the more savvy political writers on environmental issues, I think you understand better than most the nature of the hurdles we face just in the energy domain. I see the continued skepticism toward climate science despite all the facts, I see the political obstacles in getting modest energy legislation through Congress despite endorsements from many key industrial sectors, I see the economy continuing to sputter despite soaring rhetoric on green jobs and plenty of money spent chasing them, and I get nervous. We need to quickly start building things that reduce carbon emissions while we figure out the longer-term answers.

The good news is that low-carbon coal technology is pretty much ready to go today. It’s true that lots of questions remain unanswered about its ultimate cost and performance. It’s also true that no commercial low-carbon coal power plant is in operation today. However, the most significant truth is that the technologies necessary are all out in the commercial marketplace today with decades of operating experience already in the books. The chemicals and refining industries have been gasifying heavy carbon products, including coal, for quite a long time in non-power applications. The oil and gas industry has been injecting CO2 underground for over 30 years to enhance productivity. True, these components haven’t been integrated in one facility for the purposes of electricity production but there’s very little question as to whether it can be done. We know it can. In fact, there are commercial projects being proposed today to do just this with warranties and customers lined up.

See the Texas Clean Energy Project for more information on one particularly promising effort. Of course there are other options for producing clean power, some of which have great potential in the long run. But in the next decade or two, there aren’t many tools available to us that can provide energy low on carbon and high on reliability. Climate friendly coal is a step in the right direction that is available today.

We should be getting serious about a lot of planetary problems and really putting the pieces in place for long-term solutions. In the meantime, we should be developing low-carbon coal. Transitioning coal from climate offender to climate neutrality certainly won’t resolve the myriad other problems caused by the coal industry (and believe me; I’m aware of most of them — see the study we sponsored last year — but it’s an on-ramp to the clean world we both want. Whether there’s enough coal for 50 or 250 years is somewhat irrelevant; there’s still too much carbon sitting underground in easy to reach places that we cannot let into the atmosphere. We have the technology to keep it out of the air, so by all means let’s utilize that in the meantime while we figure out how to keep the rest of it underground where it belongs.

More to say, but will have to wait till next time.

Best,
Sasha

Editoral note: While Sasha Mackler agrees that coal is one of the primary contributors to detrimental climate change, he argues that using current technology to develop low-carbon coal is imperative. Humankind’s demand for an efficient way to generate energy will grow faster than technologies for mass-producing alternate forms of energy, and if coal cannot be used in a way that is climate friendly, it will be used anyway.

Dear David,

When the good people at the State Department reached out to me to see whether I’d be game for a short email exchange on a few questions related to the future of coal and climate change, I was intrigued enough to ask them for more information. Their idea to host a series of a point-counterpoint letter exchanges on important climate policy questions in advance of the Copenhagen meetings struck me as a good one and I agreed to jump in. It was then they informed me that I would be corresponding with you on the topic of coal. Let me begin by saying that I am a Grist reader and fan and know your work quite well. Furthermore, I find myself nearly always agreeing with the line of thinking you put forward. Hence, it is with some trepidation that I step into this discussion.

First things first. To make sure that we (and our readers) appreciate what we’re up to: I will basically attempt to make a persuasive case over the course of three short emails that the answer to the following two questions is “yes.” You, I presume, will take a different viewpoint. The questions at hand are (1) Can new technologies produce economically viable “clean coal”? and (2) Is clean coal a necessary component of combating climate change? This should be fun.

I want to start off by making a few basic assertions that will drive my argument. These are not meant to be provocative. On the contrary, I hope by now they come off as slightly banal.

• Climate change presents a profound risk to our society and our planet.
• Climate change is being driven by mankind’s industrial activities.
• Climate change is mostly an energy problem.
• The world’s energy system needs to cease emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Next, I’d like to lay out a few very simple energy facts that I have no doubt you already know:

• Coal is currently a major source of CO2 into the atmosphere. It is responsible for more than 40 percent of all global energy system carbon emissions.
• Coal is the most carbon intensive fossil fuel.
• Today’s economies are heavily reliant on coal. Coal is the cheapest and most widely distributed fossil fuel. The U.S. today relies on coal for more than half of its electricity production. In China, the world’s largest consumer of coal, the number is somewhere around 80 percent.
• Coal investment in the developing world — primarily China and India — is growing rapidly. In the last several years, China has added as many coal plants as the entire U.S. coal power fleet, which took over 60 years to build out.

So in many respects, dealing with energy from coal is the central piece of any meaningful effort to seriously address the climate challenge. The second question above ponders whether clean coal is a necessary component of the climate solution — and I say, as no fan of coal mining or other nasty power plant emissions, that it had better be. In my next two emails, I will do my best to outline my thinking on both the technical and political factors that must be considered when viewing the future of coal. I’ll touch on why it’s not realistic to think that coal will be phased out anytime soon (i.e. the next couple decades) and that time won’t allow for any other option other than capturing the CO2 from the coal we do decide to use and disposing of it underground. (I refer to this as “climate friendly” or “low carbon coal” rather than “clean” coal, for a number of pretty obvious reasons.)

To be sure, there are lots of things standing in the way of this widespread deployment of climate friendly coal plants. I’ll also say a bit more about these barriers and where the most promising technologies stand today.  Mostly, I’ll try to make the plain case that we must move beyond our old policymaking habits; that this is not a matter of choosing which low carbon technology-solar, nuclear, etc.-one likes best and then advocate for its success. The climate problem is enormous, the scale of mankind’s energy appetite is unfathomably large, and every single option we have for producing carbon-free energy (and reducing carbon-based energy) will be necessary if we’re to even have a chance of stabilizing atmospheric carbon concentrations. Layer on top of this the traditional political forces typically leveraged by incumbent industries (such as coal) that can play such a strong role in shaping policy around the world and hopefully you’ll come to agree that, in fact, the future we should be most fearful of is the one where we fail to develop climate friendly coal. It is possible and it is necessary.

My best regards,
Sasha