Electricity generation – who let the gas out ?

DO you know that there are some lost souls claiming Nuclear Energy is green? Low-carbon technologies not necessarily equate to sustainable development parameters. By the way, according to Energy Commission’s Electricity Supply Outlook 2014, the first nuclear power plant is expected to be operational by 2025 and the report noted that “nuclear power programme needs to be further studied”. Another agency that is overseeing nuclear development has also claimed that it has been doing its own studies transparently but the contents and outcomes of the study are unknown to many stakeholders to date. Let’s leave the transparency issue surrounding nuclear power and open the dirty fuel chapter.

At the moment, the power sector utilises 21 million metric tonnes of coal annually and will increase to 40 million metric tonnes in the next five years. There is also an attempt to introduce “clean coal technology” (CCT), which consists of generation efficiency improvement and emission management. While increasing generation efficiency via super critical and ultra super critical technology is an applaudable engineering achievement, carbon capture and storage (CCS) is like sweeping the gas (emission) under the carpet (earth).

Higher combustion efficiency of power plants will reduce usage of fossil fuel in electricity generation and thus reduce overall emission. However, the CCS technology which is the second part of CCT does not mitigate the emission issue directly. The emission from stack are pumped and stored in geological formations. Based on a presentation to International Energy Agency by a senior government official in 2012, infrastructure cost, transportation cost and site availability are some of the main issues to be addressed if CCS were to be adopted in Malaysia.

Let’s look at costing. The new Prai power plant (natural gas-powered) won a competitive bid at 34.7 cents/kWh and the Jimah East power plant (coal-powered) won a competitive bid at 25.33 cents/kWh. If CCS were to be adopted in Jimah East power plant and the levellised tariff for “clean” coal power plant were to double due to the need for suitable site and infrastructure cost, the levellised tariff of Jimah East power plant will be 50.66 cents/ kWh and not 25.33 cents/kWh anymore. This defeats the purpose of coal- based electricity generation mix to keep the electricity pricing affordable. If the suitable geological formation site is located further, the infrastructure cost for transporting coal power plant emission is likely to make CCS more expensive.

Some might argue that there are successful CCS projects in the world. However, these successful CCS projects (in terms of cost) have different partners. The gas emissions are used as compressed gas to pump more oil out using “enhanced oil recovery” method. Unfortunately, the recent drop in crude oil price has also given impact to the viability of this approach. It has also been reported that the US Department of Energy has pulled back its support to a “near zero” CCT recently.

If Malaysia were to use CCS for enhanced oil recovery, it may not be viable. The coal power plant sites are far away from the demand zones. At the end of the day, who is going to pay for the cost of this CCS technology?

Did it occur to Energy Commission that extending old and inefficient gas power plants due to claimed “insufficient time to plant up” reason actually increases carbon emission in electricity generation sector?

Now, who let the gas out?

This article was contributed by Piarapakaran S., president of the Association of Water and Energy

Research Malaysia (Awer), a non-government organisation involved in research and development

in the fields of water, energy and environment.