Planet Earth International 2009

Earth sciences and energy
Workers on this oil
rig in the Caspian
Sea provide the oil
to fuel our lives.
India are burning increasing amounts of is our only hope for saving the planet from Malcolm Maitland is a freelance jour-
coal to fuel their economic growth, while catastrophic climate change. nalist specialising in regional affairs, corpo-
developed countries in North America and In the UK, at Kingsnorth in Kent, the rate govenance and transport. He is also a
western Europe are turning to coal as a German energy company e.on says a new member of the UK’s Society of Editors.
way to reduce their dependence on foreign power plant in that location could be a
gas imports. flagship for a new generation of ‘clean
The price
But burning coal to produce electricity coal’ technology. Again this would involve
of fuel is
increasingly
is less efﬁ cient than burning gas and pro- the carbon dioxide emitted by the plant
high.
duces signiﬁ cantly more carbon dioxide, being captured, compressed and stored
as well as sulphur dioxide – the cause of underground, most likely in depleted North
acid rain. The problem of climate change Sea gas ﬁ elds.
has made coal controversial for many poli- Proponents of this carbon capture and
ticians and environmentalists, even more storage (CCS) claim it could cut the amount
so than nuclear power. Energy companies of carbon dioxide emitted by coal-ﬁ red
are pinning their hopes on clean coal tech- plants by 90%. As yet it is commercially
nology to clean-up the fossil fuel’s act. unproven but, if it is found to work and be
In eastern Germany the Swedish energy economically viable, CCS could change the
group Vattenfall has built a power plant face of the energy industry. The expansion
that burns coal in pure oxygen, and the of nuclear power and renewable energy
carbon dioxide that is the principal exhaust planned in many countries could be put on
gas is captured, compressed and lique- hold if it was possible to keep burning coal
ﬁ ed, then pumped into tankers. The trucks without contributing to global warming.
then drive the liquid CO
2
to an exhausted Lord Oxburgh, former chairman of
gas ﬁ eld, also in Germany, to be pumped Shell, goes so far as to suggest that clean
3.5km below the Earth’s surface. coal technology is the world’s best hope
The plant is tiny, generating a mere 30 for tackling climate change, and predicts
megawatts of power but the carbon cap- that the CCS sector will grow to become a
ture project is the ﬁ rst working example $1,000 billlion (£685 billion) industry – as
of a technology that its supporters argue big as the oil industry is today. ■
www.yearofplanetearth.org PLANET EARTH 61
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