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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Coal pollution mitigation | 2/3 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_pollution_mitigation | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T10:46:44.547833+00:00 | kb-cron |
An early example of a coal-based plant using (oxy-fuel) carbon-capture technology is Swedish company Vattenfall’s Schwarze Pumpe power station located in Spremberg, Germany, built by German firm Siemens, which went on-line in September 2008. The facility captures CO2 and acid rain producing pollutants, separates them, and compresses the CO2 into a liquid. Plans are to inject the CO2 into depleted natural gas fields or other geological formations. Vattenfall opines that this technology is considered not to be a final solution for CO2 reduction in the atmosphere, but provides an achievable solution in the near term while more desirable alternative solutions to power generation can be made economically practical. Other examples of oxy-combustion carbon capture are in progress. Callide Power Station has retrofitted a 30-MWth existing PC-fired power plant to operate in oxy-fuel mode; in Ciuden, Spain, Endesa has a newly built 30-MWth oxy-fuel plant using circulating fluidized bed combustion (CFBC) technology. Babcock-ThermoEnergy's Zero Emission Boiler System (ZEBS) is oxy-combustion-based; this system features near 100% carbon-capture and according to company information virtually no air-emissions. Other carbon capture and storage technologies include those that dewater low-rank coals. Low-rank coals often contain a higher level of moisture content which contains a lower energy content per tonne. This causes a reduced burning efficiency and an increased emissions output. Reduction of moisture from the coal prior to combustion can reduce emissions by up to 50 percent. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) conducted projects called the Clean Coal Technology & Clean Coal Power Initiative (CCPI).
== Financial impact == Whether carbon capture and storage technology is adopted worldwide will "...depend less on science than on economics. Cleaning coal is very expensive."
=== Cost of converting a single coal-fired power plant === Conversion of a conventional coal-fired power plant is done by injecting the CO2 into ammonium carbonate after which it is then transported and deposited underground (preferably in soil beneath the sea). This injection process however is by far the most expensive. Besides the cost of the equipment and the ammonium carbonate, the coal-fired power plant also needs to use 30% of its generated heat to do the injection (parasitic load). A test-setup has been done in the American Electric Power Mountaineer coal-burning power plant. One solution to reduce this thermal loss/parasitic load is to burn the pulverised load with pure oxygen instead of air.
=== Cost implications for new coal-fired power plants === Newly built coal-fired power plants can be made to immediately use gasification of the coal prior to combustion. This makes it much easier to separate off the CO2 from the exhaust fumes, making the process cheaper. This gasification process is done in new coal-burning power plants such as the coal-burning power plant at Tianjin, called "GreenGen".
== Country by country experiences == Local pollution standards include GB13223-2011 (China), India, the Industrial Emissions Directive (EU) and the Clean Air Act (United States).
=== China === Since 2006, China releases more CO2 than any other country. Researchers in China are focusing on increasing efficiency of burning coal so they can get more power out of less coal. It is estimated that new high efficiency power plants could reduce CO2 emission by 7% because they won't have to burn as much coal to get the same amount of power. As of 2019 costs of retrofitting CCS are unclear and the economics depends partly on how the Chinese national carbon trading scheme progresses.
=== India === Pollution led to more than 2.3 million premature deaths in India in 2019, according to a new Lancet study. Nearly 1.6 million deaths were due to air pollution alone, and more than 500,000 were caused by water pollution. India has developed instruments and regulatory powers to mitigate pollution sources but there is no centralized system to drive pollution control efforts and achieve substantial improvements," the study said adding that in 93% of the country, the amount of pollution remains well above the World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines.
=== Canada === In 2014 SaskPower a provincial-owned electric utility finished renovations on Boundary Dam's boiler number 3 making it the world's first post-combustion carbon capture storage facility. The renovation project ended up costing a little over $1.2 billion and can scrub out CO2 and toxins from up to 90 percent of the flue gas that it emits.
=== Japan === Following the catastrophic failure of the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant in Japan that resulted from the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, and the subsequent widespread public opposition against nuclear power, high energy, lower emission (HELE) coal power plants were increasingly favored by the Shinzō Abe-led government to recoup lost energy capacity from the partial shutdown of nuclear power plants in Japan and to replace aging coal and oil-fired power plants, while meeting 2030 emission targets of the Paris Agreement. 45 HELE power plants have been planned, purportedly to employ integrated gasification fuel cell cycle, a further development of integrated gasification combined cycle. Japan had adopted prior pilot projects on IGCC coal power plants in the early-1990s and late-2000s.
=== U.S. ===