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The HARP database allows Building Energy Rating assessors to enter real performance data for heating appliances when calculating Building Energy Ratings rather than low default scores - but few renewable appliances are listed, and the industry appears confused and deterred by the application process. Lenny Antonelli investigates.
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In recent years it’s become increasingly accepted that the age of cheap and abundant oil and gas supplies is coming to an end, and that future energy needs will have to be met from cleaner, more widely available fuel sources. According to Richard Douthwaite, the prospects of exponentially rising costs and failure to ramp up carbon capture and storage will mitigate against coal’s ability to take up the slack.
As supplies of oil and natural gas are expected to decline over the next 25 years, the thoughts of electricity generators throughout the world are increasingly turning to coal. According to estimates from the Natural Resources Defense Council in the US, the CO2 emissions from all the coal-fired power plants built or planned since 2000 will total 660 billion tonnes over the next 25 years.
This is alarming since the figure is about 25 per cent greater than the total emissions from all the coal burned in the world, from the dawn of the industrial revolution up to the end of 1999. Consequently, if the plants still at the planning stage actually get built, the only way that they can be used without hastening the start of a catastrophic change in the world's climate would be for their emissions to be captured and stored underground.
The world's most senior climate civil servant, Yvo de Boer, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, thinks this is possible. In a speech in March at OPEC's 4th international seminar on petroleum in Vienna he said: “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has identified carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) as one of the most promising technologies for the rapid reduction of global emissions.”
He continued: “CCS pilot projects are promising. The oldest project off the coast of Norway has been running for 13 years without any sign of CO2 leakage. Last year, the Swedish utility Vattenfall opened the first power plant to incorporate CCS in Germany. Several other firms hope to start similar pilot projects this year. OPEC's initiative to establish a CCS research and development fund is encouraging. Last year, the European Union passed a law requiring its members to draw up rules and regulations for CCS.”
Note how de Boer used the word “promising” twice. That's because he could not say anything more definite about CCS as it is still years away from being ready for full-scale commercial use. The Vattenfall CCS plant he mentioned only involves a 30MW boiler that burns lignite in pure oxygen. This produces steam and CO2. The steam is condensed to leave 99.7 per cent pure CO2. "The plant captures nine tonnes of CO2 per hour at full load," Staffan Gortz, a Vattenfall spokesman, says. “We don't have a storage site yet." About five per cent of the CO2 in the lignite escapes.
The Norwegian project de Boer mentioned separates CO2 from the natural gas coming from Statoil's Sleipner gas field and injects it back into the permeable rock beneath the seabed. As this avoids the release of over one million tonnes of CO2 per year, the project is well worthwhile but all it proves is that pumping CO2 back underground is feasible and that the gas doesn't seem to leak.
These two projects provide almost the entire foundation for a key component of the EU's energy and climate policy. "We have to continue to be able to exploit fossil fuels as a key source of energy for decades to come,” commission president José Manuel Barroso said in January last year. “But this risks ballooning global emissions by mid-century. So we need to make CCS the norm for new power plants, and to set up twelve demonstration plants by 2015.” The possibility that Ireland should try to get funding for one of these demonstration plants is being discussed.
Until CCS technology is proven, all new coal-fired power plants built within the EU are likely to be required to be “capture-ready” so that they can be fitted with CCS equipment when, as the International Energy Agency puts it “the necessary regulatory or economic drivers are in place.” For example, it is promised that the power station proposed to replace the old one at Kingsnorth in Kent will be built this way if the go-ahead is given. Objectors point out that no-one has any idea if and when the technology will be ready and that until it is, the new Kingsnorth (if built) will pump out around 8m tonnes of CO2 per year, an amount equivalent to the total annual CO2 emissions of Ghana.
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