In Germany and Denmark, where coal generates about half of their electricity, clean-coal technologies have achieved dramatic reductions in smog and mercury emissions.
CLEAN COAL GENERATION CAN IMPROVE OUR ENVIRONMENT
Earth Day began as an environmental awareness event and now includes among its objectives creating positive public awareness about existing and developing environmental solutions.
Earth Day 2007 should educate people – especially Ontarians, whose government still plans to close its remaining coal-fuelled, electricitygenerating plants – about clean-coal technologies and how European electricity producers have used them to significantly reduce smog and greenhouse gas emissions. The time for politics is over.
Making smart investments means Ontario will continue to have reliable, safe, secure and reasonably priced electricity and a better environment, too. It’s important this Earth Day that Ontarians see the facts clearly — a better environment and a strong economy can go hand in hand.
Consumers rate their electricity systems using a few key benchmarks: reliability, safety, price, security of supply and environmental impact. Coal-fuelled generation can be regarded positively in each of these areas, and that’s why coal has been, is now, and will remain critical to the world’s energy supply mix.
System reliability depends on coal-fuelled plants, which, compared to other forms of electricity generation, have superior “load following” characteristics – i.e., production can be more easily manoeuvred to match fluctuating consumer demand.
The costs of fuel directly affect the prices consumers pay for electricity. Historically, coal has been the price-setter in Ontario and, given its low operating costs, has had a moderating influence on electricity prices. But lately, new gasfired facilities – with natural gas prices increasing 136 per cent over a recent five-year period – have caused electricity prices to increase. In 2005, according to Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator, when gas-fired generation set the average rate, it did so at an average of $95 per megawatt hour (MWh), compared to coal at $47/MWh.
The supply of coal is plentiful. And coal reserves, unlike oil and natural gas, tend to be found in less politically volatile areas of the globe. Canada’s eight billion tonnes of proven coal reserves – more than all of our oil, natural gas and oil sands combined – afford us considerable fuel security.
Significant environmental performance improvements, driven by technological advances, have contributed to a global resurgence of coal-fuelled generation. In Germany and Denmark, where coal generates about half of their electricity, clean-coal technologies have achieved dramatic reductions in smog and mercury emissions.
Retrofitting existing coal plants with proven, clean-coal technologies such as scrubbers, low nitrogen oxide burners, electrostatic precipitators and selective catalytic reduction equipment (much like that on your family car) can reduce smog and mercury emissions by as much as 96.4 per cent and 90 per cent, respectively. Some units at Ontario’s coal stations already outfitted with these technologies are producing these kinds of results.
As well, in Europe, other readily available approaches have been used to effectively reduce greenhouse gas emissions. By using waste heat from their electricity-generating plants for industrial process and for residential and commercial heating, they have improved fuel efficiency.
In Toronto, for example, district heating, based on waste heat, could displace natural gas – identified in the recently released Change is in the Air report as the city’s largest source of greenhouse gases – in the heating of homes and other buildings.
Mixing biomass, e.g., straw and municipal waste, with coal, as the Europeans have demonstrated, also achieves substantial, greenhousegas emission reductions. According to Ontario Power Generation (OPG – operator of the province’s four coal stations), an estimated 500,000 tonnes of agricultural waste byproducts are available annually in southern Ontario.
Biomass research is being conducted by OPG. Test burns of surplus grain screenings were successfully completed at its fossil plants in the 1980s and, last year, pelletized grain screenings at Thunder Bay.
Milling byproducts continue to be co-fired at the Nanticoke generating station. The Ontario government is also supporting a bio-energy research centre at OPG’s Atikokan generating station.
Around the world – including Canada, through Natural Resources Canada’s “Clean Coal Technology Roadmap” – billions of R & D dollars are being poured into “zero emission” coal-fuelled generation.
The objects of such research include the conversion of coal to liquid or gas, enhanced oil recovery, and carbon capture and storage.
In Ontario, NRCan’s CANMET Energy Technology Centre has been exploring the storage of Nanticoke’s CO2 emissions underneath Lake Erie.
Along with nuclear, hydroelectric, renewables such as wind, and natural gas, coal generation is critical to Ontario’s energy mix. This importance is exemplified by the two occasions the government has changed the closure date and that it remains uncertain today.
By not finishing the job of retrofitting Ontario’s coal plants with clean coal technology and adopting the European approaches to CO2 reductions now, Ontarians are being unnecessarily exposed to more smog and greenhouse gas emissions.
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Associations and Partners also appearing in this report:
DON MACKINNON
President and CEO of Power Workers Union
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