Coal-fired power plants produce more than 70 percent of China’s electricity—and its infamous smog and child health issues—recently vaulting China past the U.S. as the world’s largest carbon dioxide emitter. In response, the government has launched work on a pilot plant dubbed GreenGen that would eventually capture and permanently store CO₂ emissions.

As a first step, a consortium of power and coal companies will fund the construction of an integrated gasification combined-­cycle power plant, in which coal is converted into gas and the pollutants are removed before the gas is burned. The plant, in the port city of Tianjin, would produce 250 megawatts of electricity. Subsequent phases would boost output as high as 650 megawatts, a moderate size by utility standards. After that time, work would begin to capture CO₂ from the plant and sequester it in a depleted oil field nearby. Target date: 2015.

In the wake of the U.S. government’s decision to pull the plug on its own carbon capture project—FutureGen—the $1-billion GreenGen plant becomes the world’s leading effort on such technology. But because China is suffering from coal shortages, and extra energy is required to gasify the coal and to capture the CO₂, completing GreenGen may prove a challenge. “There’s an argument for doing GreenGen in terms of research and getting experience with it,” says energy technology expert Kelly Sims Gallagher of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, “but from a commercial point of view it doesn’t make sense.” GreenGen must function as a for-profit power plant, so even though Chinese officials agree on the long-term benefit of removing CO₂ from the air, the future of climate change may depend on the economic value assigned to that benefit.

Note: This article was originally printed with the title, "China Targets Cleaner Coal".

3 Comments

1. 1. Antoine Alexandre 10:32 AM 10/29/08

   Harvard does not think of profit the right way. If poeple are more healthy and happy because of cleaner air it would be a tremendous profit for society and its future. Chineses, like all of us, want cleaner air and, contrary to us, they wont spend years and years to decide. Trials an errors, this is how it works not by abandon. When democraty has turned into despotism as it has in Occident, one has to wonder that if in interval to rediscover democracy, a benevolent autoritarian society is a way to go ? Anyways, if the US put the republican in the closet for a couple generations, the military cartell might turn itself into a environmental industry making profits where decisions will stop going on the back burner.

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2. 2. sc_in_sv in reply to Antoine Alexandre 07:15 AM 10/30/08

   Antoine, carbon sequestration by compressing it and pumping it into underground fields can increase the energy consumption by 25-45%. The Chinese are moving to remove the particulate contamination in the first phase by gassifying the coal. The value of the sequestering the CO2 emissions is based upon the extent to which the global warming is considered damaging. The Chinese government has a lot of work/expense to just bring down all of the particulate pollution from it's coal generating facilities. Maybe you'd be willing to add 25-45% to your electric bill, but that is not the case for everyone.

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3. 3. alisha_4lyf 01:30 PM 5/3/10

   
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