The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Energy Initiative and Entergy Corp. have teamed up to come up with a blueprint for how to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from coal, and they are taking their recommendations to Congress as debate over proposed climate change measures intensifies.
In March, MIT invited 54 top scientists, policy-makers, industry executives and non-profit leaders to participate in symposium funded by Entergy to devise strategies on how to address coal's role in global warming.
"We cannot have an effective, sustainable response to climate change without finding a way to clean up emissions from existing coal plants," said Wayne Leonard, chairman and chief executive of Entergy.
Entergy believes that coal plants aren't going away anytime soon because they provide inexpensive sources of baseload electricity both in the United States and abroad. If the U.S. ignores coal in its efforts to curb global warming, the nation's efforts will be rendered useless because China is building more coal plants and needs a technological solution to make coal burn cleaner.
Leonard said Entergy funded the symposium because with less than 10 percent of its power generation capacity coming from coal, the company's interests wouldn't taint the discussion. MIT organized the conference, selected participants and published the report.
The goal was to find out what's technologically feasible, how low coal emissions can potentially go, and what it would cost to reach these goals.
Coal emissions can be reduced by improving the efficiency of existing coal plants, capturing and sequestering carbon dioxide, using bio-mass to supplement coal as a fuel or rebuilding existing coal plants. But, the report says, technologies need to be refined and their costs need to be lowered in order to be feasible for large-scale implementation.
The MIT report says that the government needs to spend $12 billion to $15 billion over the next decade to "dramatically expand" programs to demonstrate large-scale, sustained carbon capture and storage technology for existing plants, plus $1 billion annually for ten years to create other options.
Leonard is optimistic that the costs of clean coal technology can be dramatically lowered. "We'll be looking at the potential for our own coal plants. Should we be one of the commercial demonstration projects?" he said.
As results of the survey were being released during a presentation Friday morning in Washington, D.C., U.S. Rep. Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts who is chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming and a sponsor of the climate change bill, stopped by to talk about money that's available for coal research.
Now that the report is out, Leonard and Ernest J. Moniz, director of the MIT Energy Initiative and a former undersecretary of the Department of Energy, are meeting with people in Congress to promote their plan.
Leonard said that while there are many things that Entergy would like to see tweaked in the climate change bill, officially known as the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, the company is encouraged by its progress.
"It's still the best bill we've seen and a bill we can support," Leonard said. "This is just the beginning."
Rebecca Mowbray can be reached at email@example.com or 504.826.3417.