High cost to rapid emissions cuts
Expert predicts 50% jump in price of power generation
Gordon Jaremko
The Edmonton Journal
Sunday, May 25, 2008
The cost of generating electricity will jump by 50 per cent if the province orders Alberta coal-fired power stations to stop venting carbon dioxide too quickly, a senior greenhouse gas cleanup specialist predicted Saturday.
Gradual action to install new equipment and replace old plants will be required to keep energy prices reasonable by giving industry time to hit emissions reduction targets, said Bill Gunter, the Alberta Research Council's principal carbon capture and storage scientist.
"It's something we have to deal with -- it won't go away," he told teachers and professors attending a national chemistry conference and exhibition being held in Edmonton.
"Alberta has overtaken Ontario as the emissions capital of Canada."
Industrial expansion that includes the oilsands, population growth and reliance on coal-fired plants for more than half the province's electricity supplies have inflated annual Alberta carbon-dioxide emissions to 224 million tonnes, Gunter reported. Ontario ranks second at 206 million tonnes.
In the Alberta Industrial Heartland district northeast of Edmonton, carbon dioxide emissions will roughly triple to 65,000 tonnes a day by 2015 if all current oilsands projects are built on announced schedules, Gunter told the conference, which ends Wednesday.
"Capture (of greenhouse gas waste) is a very expensive process. There is a clear need for technology to be advanced."
Separating carbon dioxide, now thinly mixed with other materials in coal-plant exhaust, by adding new collection equipment to existing operations would cost $30 to $50 per tonne of emissions cut, he estimated.
Compressing greenhouse gas waste into a form fit for shipping would be the cheapest part of industrial cleanups, at eight to 10 cents per tonne, he said.
Pipeline delivery to disposal sites is expected to cost 70 cents to $4 per tonne of compressed carbon dioxide. Another $2 to $8 a tonne would cover injections into permanent underground storage, Gunter said.
The next generation of coal-fired power stations can cut the cost of these emission reductions by following designs that include changing how they use their fuel, Gunter said.
Building "gasification" into new plants, which extracts clean fuel gas from coal instead of burning it as a solid, enables low-cost collection of waste carbon dioxide as a concentrated byproduct, he said.
The next bitumen upgrader plants, led by the Long Lake project nearing completion south of Fort McMurray, could also reduce emissions because they replace expensive natural gas with fuel taken out of leftover petroleum coke and asphalt, he said.
His forecast of sharply rising electricity costs if the province ordered a rapid environmental cleanup was not a precise prediction of monthly consumer bills.
Retail power prices include long-distance transmission charges, local distribution expenses and service fees.
But his expectations echoed recent warnings against hasty action by Epcor Utilities president Don Lowry and his TransAlta Corp. counterpart Steve Snyder at their companies' respective annual general meetings this month.
Lowry said there are economic risks to environmental policies that demand the rapid use of untried greenhouse gas capture and storage systems.
"It's not like shooting for the moon. It's like shooting for Mars," said Lowry, a member of a provincial carbon capture and storage development council.
"To meet growing demand for electricity, investments in transformative technology must be made, and public policy must take scale, timelines and cost into careful consideration."
Snyder said TransAlta has teamed up with a French firm to try adding new cleanup technology to one of its power stations in the Wabamun area west of Edmonton.
A provincial green plan relies on a disposal system to make 70 per cent of the promised 200 million tonnes in cuts from projected annual Alberta emissions by 2050.
A national industry task force, appointed by Stelmach and Prime Minister Stephen Harper, has called for immediate creation of a $2-billion federal and provincial fund for government contributions to carbon capture and storage projects.
gjaremko@thejournal.canwest.comc
© The Edmonton Journal 2008
