‘Clean Coal’ Technology Not Yet Viable, CLP Says BUSINESS ASIA By Bloomberg

By Angela Macdonald-Smith

Clean coal technology, involving trapping carbon in waste gases from coal-fired power plants and disposing it underground, may not be commercially viable until 2025, CLP’s Australian unit said. Generators like the TRUenergy unit of CLP that use brown coal, or lignite, as a fuel, need to invest in other technologies to help reduce gases blamed for global warming, Richard McIndoe, the managing director of the company said Tuesday.

Companies around the world are looking for ways to curb emissions of carbon dioxide to meet standards imposed by governments trying to slow climate change. Brown coal has a higher moisture content than black coal, making it a more polluting fuel. Technologies that dry brown coal and improve boiler technology are more advanced than so- called clean coal, McIndoe said.

“We’re not going to wait for one end-to-end solution,” McIndoe said at the Auswind 2007 wind energy conference in Melbourne. “We can start implementing the coal-drying technology now. We can look at improving boiler capabilities to improve efficiency over the next 5 to 10 years.”

TRUenergy owns the 1,480-megawatt Yallourn brown coal-fired power plant in Victoria state, which emits about 14 million metric tons a year of carbon dioxide. The company has a target to cut carbon emissions by 35 percent of 1990 levels by 2035, and by 60 percent by 2050.

TRUenergy, which owns a 50 percent stake in the Roaring 40s Renewable Energy wind energy unit, intends to invest in other renewable energy technologies to help meet the emissions targets, McIndoe said. It is also building a natural gas-fired power plant in New South Wales state.

Australia, which uses coal for about 85 percent of its electricity generation, in May reported a 1.3 percent annual increase in greenhouse gas emissions from power generation and transport in 2005.

Prime Minister John Howard last month set a target for an additional 30,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity, or about 15 percent of supplies, to come from low-polluting sources, including clean coal power plants, by 2020.

Originally published by Bloomberg News.

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