'Clean coal' technology not yet viable, CLP says By Angela Macdonald-Smith Bloomberg News Tuesday, October 9, 2007 SYDNEY: Clean coal technology, involving trapping carbon in waste gases from coal-fired power plants and disposing it underground, may not be commercially viable until 2025, CLP's Australian unit said.
Generators like the TRUenergy unit of CLP that use brown coal, or lignite, as a fuel, need to invest in other technologies to help reduce gases blamed for global warming, Richard McIndoe, the managing director of the company said Tuesday.
Companies around the world are looking for ways to curb emissions of carbon dioxide to meet standards imposed by governments trying to slow climate change. Brown coal has a higher moisture content than black coal, making it a more polluting fuel. Technologies that dry brown coal and improve boiler technology are more advanced than so-called clean coal, McIndoe said.
"We're not going to wait for one end-to-end solution," McIndoe said at the Auswind 2007 wind energy conference in Melbourne. "We can start implementing the coal-drying technology now. We can look at improving boiler capabilities to improve efficiency over the next 5 to 10 years."
TRUenergy owns the 1,480-megawatt Yallourn brown coal-fired power plant in Victoria state, which emits about 14 million metric tons a year of carbon dioxide. The company has a target to cut carbon emissions by 35 percent of 1990 levels by 2035, and by 60 percent by 2050.
TRUenergy, which owns a 50 percent stake in the Roaring 40s Renewable Energy wind energy unit, intends to invest in other renewable energy technologies to help meet the emissions targets, McIndoe said. It is also building a natural gas-fired power plant in New South Wales state.
Australia, which uses coal for about 85 percent of its electricity generation, in May reported a 1.3 percent annual increase in greenhouse gas emissions from power generation and transport in 2005.
Prime Minister John Howard last month set a target for an additional 30,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity, or about 15 percent of supplies, to come from low-polluting sources, including clean coal power plants, by 2020.
Wind farms may increase Australia may get as much as a fifth of its electricity supplies from wind power by 2020, up from less than 1 percent at present, a lobby group for the renewable-energy industry in the nation said.
Conergy AG's announcement Monday of a planned 1,000-megawatt, 2 billion Australian dollar, or $1.8 billion, wind project already represents a more than doubling of the existing installed capacity in the nation, Dominique La Fontaine, the chief executive officer of the Clean Energy Council, said Tuesday. It demonstrates the potential for the renewable energy source, she said.
Conergy, the biggest solar power company in Germany, wants to start building the Silverton wind farm in 2009 as long as high-enough prices are provided for renewable energy under proposed legislation by the New South Wales government, Andrew Durran, the executive director of the company's Australian unit, said Monday.
Australia currently has 817 megawatts of wind power capacity.
The proposed Silverton project "is the size of two coal-fired power stations or one nuclear power station," La Fontaine said.
"It's demonstrating beyond doubt that the development of the wind industry is now mainstream, large-scale, " she said.
Australia has a further 6,500 megawatts of proposed wind energy projects, representing 14 billion dollars of investment, the Clean Energy Council estimates.
Development of the projects will depend on state-based targets for renewable energy use and a smooth transition to the federal government's proposed national target for low-emissions energy use, La Fontaine said.
