Clean Coal’s Flagship Project Has Failed

MIT Technology Review - Jamie Condliffe

A plan to slash emissions from coal burning by 65 percent has proved too problematic at the beleaguered Kemper power plant.

The Mississippi power plant widely regarded to be the biggest proof of concept yet for clean coal has failed to deliver on its promise. Its carbon capture technique has been declared too costly and problematic, and the facility will instead burn natural gas to create electricity.
The coal-fired power station in Kemper County had many hopes pinned to it since construction began in 2010. The theory was simple: if a plant could be built to cleanly burn nearby lignite coal reserves—the most heavily carbon-emitting of all coal types, per unit of heat extracted—then the fuel’s future in American energy production would be assured.
Sadly, things haven’t played out that way. The project has been mired in problems from the get-go and has run up a $7.5 billion tab—$4 billion over its planned budget—with the carbon capture scheme three years behind schedule. Now, the New York Times reports, the plant’s owner, Southern Company, has ditched its attempts to get it working as designed, following pressure from the Mississippi Public Service Commission to switch to natural gas and stop hemorrhaging money.
The plant was supposed to gasify the soft brown lignite coal to create a fuel that emits similar amounts of carbon dioxide as natural gas when burned. According to a description of the technology by Power magazine, that would in theory have reduced the carbon dioxide emissions associated with burning that coal by 65 percent.
But the gasification systems have not worked as planned, and the Kemper plant has instead been burning natural gas. Now, it will continue to do so. Southern says that it is “immediately suspending start-up and operations activities” for coal gasification at the plant.
It’s a huge blow for clean coal. Despite some successes in cutting carbon emissions from fossil-fuel power plants, by and large the process is still considered too costly to implement at scale. That’s especially true given that prices for renewable energy are continuing to decline swiftly. Indeed, a newly published analysis from the Global Warming Policy Foundation suggests that carbon capture schemes will always remain too expensive to be viable as the cost of clean energy drops.
As part of his push to reinvigorate the fossil-fuel industry, earlier this year President Donald Trump said that his administration was “putting an end to the war on coal,” providing  America with “clean coal, really clean coal.” Now more than ever, that looks like an empty promise.

Links

• The Bottomless Pit: The Economics of Carbon Capture and Storage
• A Mississippi Power Plant Highlights All That’s Wrong with ‘Clean Coal'
• A Huge Carbon Capture Scheme Provides New Hope for ‘Clean Coal'
• Clean Energy Is About to Become Cheaper Than Coal

Australian Business Is Waking Up To Climate Risks

Eco-Business - Vaidehi Shah

Climate change is causing resource scarcity, stricter laws on carbon emissions, and a push to decarbonise investment portfolios. A new course in Australia aims to educate companies on the risks — and opportunities — climate change presents.

Severe damage at Collaroy Beach in Sydney, Australia, following an intense storm in June 2016. 72 per cent of Australians today are concerned about climate change. Image: katacarix / Shutterstock.com

As the corporate world slowly but surely wakes up to the threat that climate change poses to the long-term survival of businesses, a group of sustainable business advocates and lawyers is on a mission to educate companies in Australia on how to understand and manage these risks.
Industry association Future Business Council (FBC), law firm Norton Rose Fulbright and sustainability consultancy Point Advisory, in early June teamed up to conduct the inaugural session of the 'Managing Climate Risk' workshop for corporate decision-makers.
The inaugural session, held in Sydney on June 2, was a two-hour overview of the specific ways that climate change can affect private sector bottom lines; how companies can analyse their own vulnerability to climate change, and how to manage and incorporate these risks in disclosures to investors.
James Wright, chief executive officer, Future Business Council, told workshop participants—who came from local council government, private health insurance firms, and other legal professionals—that "climate change is a material risk that organisations need to consider as part of their fiduciary duties".
The physical risks climate change poses to businesses are well documented; a recent example of this was in Phoenix, Arizona, where summer temperatures made it too hot for airplanes to fly earlier this month. The floods that struck Thailand five years ago caused widespread asset damage—such as destroying entire fleets of cars at automotive manufacturing plants which cost insurers billions.
Climate change also poses 'transitional risks'; these are the ways in which businesses could be adversely affected by changes in regulations, investment patterns, and consumer behaviours in response to climate change.
For instance, some 195 countries signed the Paris Agreement on climate change in December 2015, and committed to reducing their carbon emissions. Strategies to do so could include passing energy efficiency-related regulations or implementing a carbon price, as Singapore has recently announced it will do.
Similarly, Wright noted that financial markets are increasingly seeing carbon as a risky investment.
One initiative that demonstrates this is the Portfolio Decarbonisation Coalition, a group of 29 investors with more than US$600 billion assets under management, who have pledged to disclosing, and reducing the carbon footprint of their portfolios.
The global divestment movement—which urges investors to avoid investing in fossil fuels such as coal and oil—and moves by Norway's pension fund to drop coal companies from its investment also attest to how market forces are bringing about a low-carbon transition.
Australian regulators are now waking up to the importance of understanding climate risks, shared Wright. Earlier this year, financial services industry regulator Australian Prudential Regulation Authority executive board member Geoff Summerhayes stressed that climate risks are "distinctly financial in nature".
Speaking at the Insurance Council of Australia Annual Forum in February, he added: "Climate risks have potential system-wide implications that APRA and other regulators here and abroad are paying much closer attention to."
And as a legal opinion jointly authored by FBC and think tank Centre for Policy Development in October last year proposes, board directors who fail to perceive, disclose, or act on climate risks could be held personally liable for breaching their duties of care and diligence.

Climate change is a material risk that organisations need to consider as part of their fiduciary duties.
James Wright, chief executive officer, Future Business Council

Managing through mitigation, adaptation
To help organisations better understand how to understand, manage, and disclose their risks, workshop facilitators Neil Salisbury and Ben Sichlau from Point Advisory shared strategies and frameworks that participants can use.
Where risk management is concerned, companies must simultaneously adapt to, and mitigate the onset of climate change. Adaptation strategies include undertaking research to better understand risks on the horizon, diversifying business models, or as a last option, abandoning vulnerable assets. An example of the latter is waterfront properties in areas where sea levels are expected to rise over the next few decades.
To mitigate climate change, organisations can tap on a wide range of solutions ranging from energy efficiency, renewable energy adoption, and carbon offsetting.
One framework companies can use to determine the scale of their commitment to reducing emissions is science-based targets. This is a system where companies calculate how much they need to cut emissions by, based on scientific analysis of global emissions, the sector's contribution to this, and a company's economic responsibility for emissions, based on its profits.

Pressure to disclose grows 
Eliza de Wit, partner, Norton Rose Fulbright, shared that in addition to internal risk management, companies can expect more pressure in coming years to disclose these risks to investors and other stakeholders.
Pointing to a vote in May this year by oil giant Exxon's shareholders forcing the company to disclose its climate risks—the same vote received support from only 38 per cent of shareholders last year—de Wit said there is a "seminal shift that is taking place in the corporate community".
"We will see change in our regulatory settings," said de Wit. Even though there is lots of uncertainty about the future of regulation in Australia, it is inevitable; we must prepare now for what future policy could look like."
For workshop participant Uttam Mukherjee, chief risk officer at health insurer CBHS Health Fund Limited, the course was a useful first step towards integrating climate issues into the firm's existing risk management framework.
"For us, the board is interested (in the issue)," he told Eco-Business. "They have been asking questions, especially of me as a chief risk officer."
FBC's Wright told Eco-Business that there are plans to conduct more editions of the Managing Climate Risk workshop, perhaps tailored to specific sectors. FBC is accepting expressions of interest for future workshops on its website.

Links

• Companies cooling on global warming
• More US insurers to reveal climate risks
• Too few banks in Asia Pacific looking at climate change risk
• Corporate climate risk is all about turning a profit, not fixing the problem
• 'Sustainable insurance': Seven takeaways from the first-ever summit of insurers and city leaders

Climate Change Sceptics Suffer Blow As Satellite Data Correction Shows 140% Faster Global Warming

The Independent - Ian Johnston

New research 'substantially undermines' claims that satellite data proved the Earth was not warming as quickly as thought, Dr Zeke Hausfather says

Climate change deniers and sceptics have long pointed to satellite data showing lower temperatures than those recorded on the ground.
However, new research has found an explanation for this apparent discrepancy.
The orbit of satellites around the Earth gradually decays over time due to friction in the Earth’s atmosphere and this gradually changes the time they pass over any one spot and this obviously has a significant effect on the temperature.
Using information from the satellites, the scientists, Dr Carl Mears and Frank Wentz, of Remote Sensing Systems, a California-based research company, developed a new method of correcting for the changes.
And what they found was startling.
The rate of warming was about a third higher at 0.174 degrees Celsius per decade between 1976 and 2016, compared to 0.134C per decade.
Writing in the Journal of Climate, the scientists said: “The changes result in global-scale warming … about 30 per cent larger than our previous version of the dataset.
“This change is primarily due to the changes in the adjustment for drifting local measurement time. The new dataset shows more warming than most similar datasets constructed from satellites or radiosonde [weather balloon] data.”
In an article on the Carbon Brief website about the new research, data scientist Dr Zeke Hausfather said it showed an even faster rate of warming since 1998 – at nearly 140 per cent – than previous satellite-based studies.
“Climate sceptics have long claimed that satellite data shows global warming to be less pronounced that observational data collected on the Earth’s surface,” he said.

Delaware-sized iceberg set to send Trump message about global warming

“This new correction to the … data substantially undermines that argument. The new data actually shows more warming than has been observed on the surface, though still slightly less than predicted in most climate models.”
Dr Hausfather explained the problem with interpreting climate data from satellites due to their subtly changing orbit.
“As these satellites circle the Earth, their orbits slowly decay over time due to drag from the upper atmosphere,” he wrote.
“While the satellites are designed to fly over the same spot on the Earth at the same time every day – a precondition to accurately estimating changes in temperatures over time – this orbital decay causes their flyover time to change.
“Some satellites have fairly large orbital drifts, going from measuring temperatures at 2pm to 6pm or 8pm.
“Since the temperature changes since 1979 are on the order of 0.6C or so, it is relatively easy for bias, due to changing observation times, to swamp the underlying climate signal.”

A group of emperor penguins face a crack in the sea ice, near McMurdo Station, Antarctica. Kira Morris

Surface temperature records, Dr Hausfather added, “all tend to agree quite closely with each other, despite different groups using different datasets”.
“Unlike the satellite temperature record, where only a few satellites are measuring temperatures at any given point of time, there is a large amount of redundancy in surface temperature observations, with multiple independent sets of data producing consistent results,” he said.
“Therefore, it is not too surprising that corrections to problems with satellite data would move them closer to surface records.”

Links

• Angela Merkel promises to tackle Donald Trump on climate change at G20 summit
• World has 3 years to prevent dangerous climate change, experts warn
• World’s food supplies 'at risk as climate change threatens trade'
• Swiss firm begins sucking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere