The New York Times and other media question clean coal’s prospects
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8181
Recently a Republican platform-writing committee unanimously inserted the word clean in a sentence that then charged, “The Democrat party does not understand that coal is an abundant clean affordable reliable domestic energy resource.” Texas delegate David Barton, an evangelical leader known for insisting that the US was founded explicitly on religion, had proposed the insertion because of what he called “the technology we have now.”
Clean coal thanks to technology in hand? Most experts consulted for recent media reports on clean coal agree that although achievable, it remains way too expensive.
On the 5 July New York Times front page, above the fold, the article “A model for ‘clean coal’ goes awry” renewed and expanded attention to the issue. The subhead announced, “Amid allegations of fraud, a $4 billion cost overrun.” The article extended to two full interior pages. Online, its headline and subhead emphasized the suggestion of scandal. The headline cited “piles of dirty secrets.” The subhead reported, “A Mississippi project, a centerpiece of President Obama’s climate plan, has been plagued by problems that managers tried to conceal, and by cost overruns and questions of who will pay.”
Early in the piece, Times reporter Ian Urbina explained that he had reviewed “thousands of pages of public records, previously undisclosed internal documents and emails, and 200 hours of secretly though legally recorded conversations among more than a dozen” employees. The project’s original “sense of hope is fading fast,” he wrote. The Kemper County coal plant is more than two years behind schedule and still not operational.
Urbina continued:
The plant and its owner, Southern Company, are the focus of a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation, and ratepayers, alleging fraud, are suing the company. Members of Congress have described the project as more boondoggle than boon. The mismanagement is particularly egregious, they say, given the urgent need to rein in the largest source of dangerous emissions around the world: coal plants.
The plant’s backers, including federal energy officials, have defended their work in recent years by saying that delays and cost overruns are inevitable with innovative projects of this scale. In this case, they say, the difficulties stem largely from unforeseen factors—or “unknown unknowns,” as Tom Fanning, the chief executive of Southern Company, has often called them—like bad weather, labor shortages and design uncertainties.
Within hours after Urbina’s Times exposé appeared, articles at Fortune and Popular Science were echoing it. At the business site Forbes.com , a headline paraded the phrase “the Solyndra of coal,” alluding to a failed project regularly cited in criticism of alleged Obama administration green-energy excesses. The Forbes piece drew out the comparison: “The principal similarities stem from the fact both were expensive technologies designed to take advantage of federal money, and both were responding to temporary market cycles as if they were permanent.”
On NPR’s All Things Considered on the afternoon of 5 July, Ari Shapiro interviewed Urbina, who also appeared the next day on PBS’s Newshour. Urbina explained to Shapiro that the Kemper plant, as he put it, “burns coal in a different way":
It superheats coal and it doesn’t use oxygen so you’re not supposed to say burn, and it turns it into synthetic gas and then it burns the synthetic gas and it uses that to turn the turbines that produce electricity. And the carbon capture stage is at the synthetic-gas-burning moment. They pull out the carbon and liquefy it and pipe it elsewhere. That’s how the technology works, and the big problem with this plant is the economics more than the technology.
“Elsewhere” means that the carbon dioxide is captured and compressed, then piped away to be pumped underground, where it helps force oil upward for extraction. When asked why the economics had gone “so dramatically wrong,” Urbina gave Shapiro two reasons, starting with fracking: “The natural gas boom occurred in the interim and the price of the competitor fell through the floor.” Second, “they underestimated how much the plant would cost because they began building too early. They had only done 10, 20 percent of the design and so they misstated the overall cost.”
Also within hours of the Times piece’s appearance, the Washington Examiner tied the problems to the Obama administration in an article headlined “Obama’s clean coal dream goes ‘off the tracks': NYT.” The Daily Caller reported similarly .
MIT Technology Review exclaimed that the Mississippi power plant “highlights all that’s wrong with ‘clean coal.’” The article elaborated:
Unfortunately, Kemper is just the latest sign that clean coal, after decades of research and billions of dollars of development, is an oxymoron—at least in any economically realistic sense. From the ill-fated FutureGen plant, which foundered before being shuttered under President George W. Bush’s administration, to Canada’s Boundary Dam project to the bankruptcy of the coal giant Peabody Energy , which bet heavily on the idea of carbon-free coal power, success stories have been few and far between.
That judgment was nothing new for MIT Technology Review, which had warned in 2012 that “large-scale CCS [carbon capture and storage/sequestration] is poorly understood and prohibitively expensive” and had lamented in 2014 that the CCS outlook was “grim.” In April 2016, the magazine declared again, in a headline, that “Peabody Energy’s bankruptcy shows the limits of ‘clean coal’” and in a subhead that “investments in carbon capture and storage technology have largely been failures.” The April piece argued that “capturing the carbon dioxide from coal plant smokestacks and burying it far underground has proved stubbornly cost-prohibitive, particularly in an era of cheap natural gas.” It reported that “despite some $13 billion in worldwide R&D investment over the last decade, carbon capture would still add 30 to 40 percent to the cost of power generation from coal plants—a nonstarter if it’s to be competitive with inexpensive natural gas.” It also noted that although the clean coal effort may be “misguided,” some 14 large-scale projects still operate.
The gloom was also apparent at Fortune back in February 2015, when a headline reported, “As the Feds pull out, dreams of ‘clean coal’ fade.” The thumbnail summary, referring to a project in Illinois to capture smokestack carbon and store it in geological formations, predicted that “the death of the flagship FutureGen project could spell the end of U.S. government investment in carbon capture and storage in the industry.” In April 2016, US News & World Report published a commentary arguing that “Congress is throwing good money after bad in pursuit of far-off clean coal technology.”
Much in Urbina’s widely discussed, high-visibility 5 July Times piece had actually been reported in the Wall Street Journal in May. In particular, the WSJ discussed a whistleblower on whom Urbina would focus extensively. The WSJ piece said:
A former Kemper project manager said he was let go after complaining to top company officials that public estimates for the project’s completion were unrealistic and misleading.
Brett Wingo, who was a project manager for the gasification portion of the plant, said he thinks the company put a positive spin on construction so it wouldn’t have to acknowledge to investors it was likely to lose federal subsidies due to delays.
To date, Southern has paid back $368 million in federal tax credits for missing deadlines, but believes it will be able to keep $407 million in grants from the Energy Department.
“I think they fired me because I wouldn’t quit raising ethics issues,” said Mr. Wingo, who was put on paid administrative leave in August 2014 and was let go this past February.
[A Southern official] said the company wouldn’t comment on Mr. Wingo’s termination. But he said the company has fully investigated and concluded “his concerns were unsubstantiated and not otherwise supported by the facts.”
In an online sidebar , Urbina pointed to a decade-long “wave of optimism” concerning CCS. Now, though, there’s growing “skepticism,” he wrote, “that the technology can be scaled up affordably, reliably and soon enough to make a difference.” The problem is that though CCS works, it costs way too much, he explained, even though a pair of coal plants in Saskatchewan and North Dakota do capture and store carbon on a commercial scale.
The sidebar reported as well that 22 large-scale CCS projects have been initiated worldwide, with 16 operating, four (including Kemper in Mississippi) under construction, one awaiting a permit, and one closed. Four of the 22 are coal plants, including the two operational ones; the rest are refineries, or natural gas, fertilizer, ethanol, or steel plants, the sidebar said.
A few days after Urbina’s big Times article appeared, the newspaper drew additional attention to the question of clean coal by inviting four observers to express their views under the overall opinion-page headline “Clean coal, or a dirty shame?” Giving a mix of answers, the four engaged the specific question “Should carbon capture technology be pursued or should coal be phased out in favor of renewable energy?”
So what about it? Is coal not only abundant, affordable, and reliable but—adding the adjective that David Barton of Texas, crediting “the technology we have now,” persuaded his platform-writing colleagues to accept unanimously—clean?
The answer can’t be decided in this anecdotal review of news articles any more than in a political committee composing political statements. But Texan Barton might find it interesting that on 15 July, Bloomberg reported on a project that “was once viewed as a promising potential showcase of how carbon capture technology could clean up coal-fired power generation, but ... has come under increasing scrutiny,” with the Energy Department’s acting inspector general quoted as being “concerned about the viability” and as questioning “continued government support.” It’s the Texas Clean Energy Project.
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.