Coal industry kicks own goal as Obama calls bluff on CCS

When the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced on Saturday (Australian time) that any new coal fired power station must be fitted with Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technology, you would have thought the coal industry would have been ecstatic.

After all, for years the coal industry has been the biggest cheerleader for CCS, a technology for extracting carbon dioxide from coal-fired power station emissions and dumping it underground. When critics of CCS such as Greenpeace argued that the technology was unproven and mega-expensive, the coal industry disagreed.

But now Big Coal just can’t seem to get its story straight about whether it loves or hates CCS.  Instead of celebrating the US EPA’s announcement, the US coal industry is outraged. Peabody Energy, which has mines in both Australia and the US, thundered that CCS “is simply not commercially available”. The National Mining Association complained of “potential high cost” for such “theoretical“ systems.

“Carbon capture is a pipe dream”, said FreedomWorks, the influential right wing think tank that is credited with forming the Tea Party and is one of Big Coal’s noisiest backers.

“Never before has the federal government forced an industry to do something that is technologically impossible,” said Democrat Senator Joe Manchin, who represents the coal state West Virginia in Washington and is its former governor.

Industry threats of legal challenges are flying thick and fast.

The impact of the new rule is likely to be minimal as most of the over 230 new coal plants proposed in the US over the last decade have been defeated by community pressure or withered from financial pressures.

While the electricity market has largely moved on from building new coal plants, the EPA announcement is a bold marker that it is likely to be all downhill for the US coal industry from here. With the accelerating retirement of old coal plants in response to legal challenges and high costs and strong opposition to new coal export ports, the US coal industry is besieged.

The US coal industry opposition to the new EPA rule puts the Australian coal industry in an impossible position.

When in 2009 the Australian Coal Association (ACA) was opposing the emissions trading scheme proposed by Kevin Rudd, it blitzed Australia with advertisements proclaiming that CCS was a “practical solution” which “can make a real difference.”

In March 2012 Megan Davison, the executive director of the Victorian division of the Minerals Council of Australia (MCA), went so far as to claim that ‘clean coal’ technologies could happen “in the blink of an eye.” The ACA and MCA both represent companies such as Peabody Energy, Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton which – either directly or via their industry associations – are now ridiculing CCS in the US.

If CCS is the expensive fantasy the US mining insists it is then the Australian coal industry’s PR cover for coal exports has been blown. The message is clear: CCS will do nothing anytime soon to curb the global warming contribution from Australia’s growing coal exports. And for Treasurer Joe Hockey it just became a whole lot easier to end taxpayer handouts for further R&D work on CCS.

Bob Burton is co-author with Guy Pearse and David McKnight of Big Coal: Australia’s dirtiest habit (NewSouth Books, August 2013). He is also a Contributing Editor of CoalSwarm, a coal wiki and a director of The Sunrise Project, an Australian group promoting a renewable energy economy).

You will find that corporations dealing with oi l& gas, coal and any other energy source that produces CO2 after combusting are all in favour of pricing carbon and all the bells and wistles that come with it.

They are starting to become the front runners in getting the $2 trillion dollar carbon credit derivatives market up and running.

So I don't get your point.

These guys are on your side........!!!

And its not so much that they want to clean up manmade CO2 from the atmosphere but rather the creation of the new market that drives them to support it.

muso wrote on Sep 24^th, 2013 at 5:34pm:


If the European Emissions Trading scheme is a failure, why should we join it and send out billions of Australian tax payer dollars to overseas foreign institutions and corporations.......?????

Why not clean up the CO2 level here in Australia, instead of pumping money into the United Nations Environmental Fund and wall street.

Why not use those billions here in Australia.......???????

Ajax wrote on Sep 24^th, 2013 at 3:14pm:

lol, what an idiot: this is the denier brigade breaking up!!

Does the nuclear power industry need to have nuclear waste disposal or treatment sorted out before a nuclear power station license is issued?

Does the nuclear power industry need to ensure public safety and compensation or liability if one of its reactor fails or melts downs?

Why are nuclear power stations allowed to routinely discharge and release radionuclides such as tritium and isotopes of Nobel gases when these substances are carcinogenic and produce cancer clusters in regions surrounding the reactors?

Ajax wrote on Sep 24^th, 2013 at 5:57pm:


You should probably be better to ask the companies concerned. They trade on carbon markets overseas because they make money. 

If you had a company that had invested in low emission technology in Australia, and suddenly there was no prospect of carbon trading in Australia, it would make sense to trade overseas.

The fact is that many Australian companies have been trading carbon credits on overseas markets for over a decade. Even the government may have to do the same:

http://www.afr.com/p/australia2-0/coalition_may_buy_overseas_carbon_LCTaiAkZGy32...

muso wrote on Sep 24^th, 2013 at 6:16am:



 

Remember, Abbott-oir planned to implement his DIRECT ACTION plan in order to tackle AGW, even though he reckons its a load of crap.

A multi billion dollar plan that directs funding to the actual carbon emitters.

Amazing - you cannot get more sociopathic and OWNED by corporate interests than that.

And everything under Abbott-oir will be secret. No boats because the Murdoch papers will reward young Abbott with NO NEWS on any new boats. No daily front page sensationalism. No regular Bolt editorial garbage on how evil these People smugglers and queue jumpers are



shhhhhhhhhhhhh

Of course things take time: but certain changes in law make and break business models.

Government intervention in the free-market ideal is government intervention in the free market ideal afterall!

Anyways, it will be interesting to follow where this rabbit hole goes: the audacity of it all is rather encompassing I must say!