Carbon-cutting tech: Key is to distinguish 'possible' from 'viable'

To better understand which technologies can reduce carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants, we need to  know first how well those technologies work in real life as opposed to on paper. But the US Department of Energy (DOE) isn’t doing enough to provide that kind of information to officials and policy-makers, a recent report has found.

The report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) says the DOE doesn’t currently have a system in place for assessing the maturity of various carbon-cutting technologies that could be used at coal plants.

“This lack of information limits congressional oversight of DOE’s expenditures on these efforts, and it hampers policymakers’ efforts to gauge the maturity of these technologies as they consider climate change policies,” the report stated.

Based on their own independent research, GAO investigators concluded that efficiency improvements to help coal plants use less coal are both more mature and more widely used than carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies. While CCS is viewed as key to allowing us to continue burning cheap and readily available coal without making climate change even worse, the actual technologies have a long way to go before they’re likely to see widespread commercial adoption, the report found.

“While all of the components of CCS — CO2 capture, transportation and storage — have been used commercially in other industries, such as natural gas processing and oil production, stakeholders generally reported that the application of these technologies remains at small scale in coal plants,” the GAO report stated. “Moreover, stakeholders identified only one integrated CCS system in a coal power plant — the Mountaineer Plant in West Virginia — which aims to capture and store more than 100,000 tonnes of CO2.  This project captures CO2 from a portion of the plant’s exhaust — 20 megawatts or about 4 per cent the size of a typical 500-megawatt coal plant.”

The report also pointed to two key obstacles standing in the way of carbon capture and storage: the lack of a national policy for cutting carbon dioxide emissions and unresolved liability issues concerning the storage of large amounts of carbon dioxide.

The GAO recommends that the Energy Department begin assessing the various carbon-reducing technologies for coal plants using Technology Readiness Levels, or TRLs, such as those used by NASA and the Department of Defense. TRLs rank the viability of technologies on a numerical scale with, for example, 1 being “Basic principles observed” and 9 being “Commercial operation in relevant environment.”

In a response to the study sent back to the GAO by the DOE, Assistant Secretary for the Office of Fossil Energy James Markowsky wrote that, while the department to “some exception” to the report, his office did acknowledge that it “could improve upon its current process of providing a clearer picture of technology maturity.” He added that his office would commit to developing a corrective action plan and would report back to Congress regularly on its progress in that area.