Coal- firedpowergeneration worthalookbyBCHydro

The B.C. Progress Board’s report on the province’s energy future was critical of both the provincial government and BC Hydro for allowing the province to become a net importer of electricity, after decades of money-generating surpluses available for export.

“We do need to do something,” the report said. “We haven’t done anything significant to increase our electricity supply for 20 years ... the least we can do is to take the opportunity to responsibly meet our own energy requirements.”

Hydro will soon file its latest Integrated Electricity Plan with the B.C. Utilities Commission. Along with commitments to pursue conservation and green energy, the power utility is expected to put the Site C Dam proposal forward as its recommended big future supply project.

I wonder if they are missing the boat here. A number of recent developments suggest that B.C. should fully explore coal-fired power generation as the big-ticket item, instead of another hydro-electric dam.

Coal-fired power generation is only a couple of points below nuclear energy on this province’s irrational hysteria index, largely due to coal’s reputation as a dirty fuel and its contribution to global warming through CO2 emissions.

But the coal industry is well on the way toward solving that problem. The Canadian Clean Power Coalition ( CCPC), an association of coal- fired generating companies and utilities, has completed the first phase of what will ultimately be a pilot plant to test commercial feasibility of what could be an emissions- free coal- fired generating plant.

“The fundamental principle underlying the goals of the CCPC was to identify a process that would produce electricity from coal in some fashion and that would also provide a relatively pure stream of CO2 that could be captured, further processed as necessary, and subsequently used or stored,” says a report on the first phase of the project.

The goal is to get all the pollutants out of the emissions, except CO2, which could then be captured and stored.

And on that score, the U.S. Department of Energy announced just a week ago the completion of a successful pilot project using CO2 for enhanced oil recovery in southern Saskatchewan. The Weyburn Project took five million tons of CO2 extracted from a coal gasification plant in Montana, and used it to breathe life back into a moribund oil reservoir.

“The success of the Weyburn Project could have incredible implications for reducing CO2 emissions and increasing America’s oil production,” said U. S. Energy Secretary Samuel W. Bodman in a press release. “Just by applying this technique to the oil fields of Western Canada we would see billions of additional barrels of oil and a reduction in CO2 emissions equivalent to pulling more than 200 million cars off the road for a year.”

Mark Jaccard, a professor of resource and environmental management at SFU, has just published a book called Sustainable Fossil Fuels: An Unusual Suspect in the Quest for Clean and Enduring Energy, in which he writes extensively about this project and its potential to help with global warming.

“ I should emphasize that when we talk about clean coal technology, I mean clean — nothing,” Jaccard said in an interview. While the Weyburn project used CO2 from a coal gasification project, the gas can just as readily be captured from a generating station that burns the coal. He explained that CO2 injection to enhance oil recovery will provide just the kind of economic jump-start that clean coal technologies need.

CO2 injection to enhance oil recovery is not new — it has been underway for nearly 30 years. The technique was out of favour when oil prices were low, but with crude oil expected to remain well above $40 US a barrel for the foreseeable future, the economics look good.

Another piece to the puzzle, from a B. C. perspective, is that North America’s biggest supplier and distributor of CO2 for enhanced oil recovery is Kinder Morgan, the company that just completed its purchase of Terasen.

In the press release announcing completion of the acquisition, Kinder Morgan said it will “ conduct a comprehensive feasibility analysis of CO2- related opportunities in Canada utilizing this expertise for the purpose of identifying and pursuing viable projects.”

B. C. has huge coal reserves in almost every part of the province. More than 25 years ago, BC Hydro was considering a coal-fired generating plant at Hat Creek, but emissions technology was in its infancy at that stage and the impact was anything but zero.

Hydro spokesperson Elisha Moreno said the company turned its Hat Creek coal licences back to the provincial government more than a year ago, and is not pursuing any coal- fired power generation at the moment.

“Someone can make a proposal,” she said, referring to Hydro’s commitment to purchase energy from independent power producers.

“ We’d look at it on costs. We still have our 50-per-cent clean criteria to meet. Obviously coal challenges that. The resource is there, but the challenge is public perception.”

But if Hydro is willing to consider spending $ 3.5 billion on its own account to build a new hydro dam on the Peace River, why wouldn’t it consider the same kind of investment in other technologies — and not just coal? don_whiteley@telus.net