Bloomberg Businessweek
Go To Businessweek.com
During the past 20 years, the author has watch China move from being a developing country into an industrial superpower
Money Moves, 5/24: Chocomize Co-Founder Fabian Kaempfer talks with Bloomberg’s Deirdre Bolton about the business of customizing chocolate
The president's campaign has a new rule—no cell phones allowed
In honor of remote control inventor Eugene Polley, we recognize other influential but neglected inventors who have felt the sting of stolen glory
Forget Adderall. Traders now pop chia seeds to stay focused and energized
The Italian automaker and others are adding hybrid technology to elite cars
The storied bridge that links San Francisco and Marin County changed the face of California
Schools cultivate ties with startups before they're big successes
Dave McClure's traveling venture capital show scours the world for promising startups
New Haven, WV Floto + Warner
On a brittle, blustery afternoon on the outskirts of New Haven, W. Va., the faint odor of ammonia isn’t the only sour note in the air. New Haven, an Ohio River coal mining town of 1,550, is home to American Electric Power’s 1,300-megawatt Mountaineer Plant. The plant has a 1,103-foot-tall chimney and burns 12,000 tons of coal a day to generate electricity for AEP’s 11-state grid, which supplies power to 5.3 million customers. In the process, it annually belches out 8.5 million metric tons of greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.
Abutting the plant is an ambitious $100 million experiment: a seven-story, steel-and-fiberglass rectangle, corralled by dull metal catwalks and rattled by motors and pumps. The apparatus traps a portion of the plant’s carbon-dioxide-rich exhaust using an ammonia-based catalyst. (Hence the acrid smell.) The reclaimed CO₂ is pumped 8,000 feet underground, where, in theory, it will remain harmlessly out of the atmosphere. The goal of the experiment is to prove that carbon capture and storage technology, or CCS, works, and in so doing, provide one possible solution to global warming.
This year catastrophic storms, drought, and relentless heat have underscored how welcome such a solution would be. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2011 continues the trend of rising temperatures that has seen nearly every year of the 2000s hotter, on average, than the 1990s, and the 1990s hotter than the ’80s.
Coal generates 40 percent of the world’s electricity—a number that could grow to 60 percent by 2030, according to a 2009 report by the Coal Industry Advisory Board of the International Energy Agency. (Developing countries are expected to account for 97 percent of that growth because they have almost no alternatives.) Coal is also “the world’s most CO₂-intensive fossil fuel,” accounting for more than 40 percent of all energy-related CO₂ emissions, the report says.
CCS, say climate scientists, has emerged as the lead technology in the race to reduce global greenhouse gases 50 percent by 2050. And when the New Haven project—hitching one of America’s largest power companies to the U.S. Energy Dept.’s carbon capture bandwagon—was launched in 2009, there was a sense of determination and common cause. “It’s time to advance this technology for commercial use,” declared AEP Chief Executive Officer Michael G. Morris. The company planned to replace its pilot with a larger $668 million CCS facility, which would bury more than 1 million metric tons of CO₂ a year, splitting construction costs evenly with the Energy Dept. Environmentalists heralded the project. Timothy O’Connor, a climate-change policy analyst for the Environmental Defense Fund, a New York-based advocacy group, says “carbon storage can help serve as a bridge until we get to those zero and ultralow carbon energy sources that wean us from fossil fuels.”
Yet only two years in, the future of CCS is in jeopardy. On July 14, AEP pulled the plug on its CCS efforts, citing a weak economy and the “uncertain status of U.S. climate policy.” CEO Morris said AEP and its partners “have advanced CCS technology more than any other power generator with our successful two-year project to validate the technology. But at this time it doesn’t make economic sense to continue.”
The dimming of CCS’s promise reflects a broader national retreat from the goal of reversing climate change. In private and, to some degree, in public, the company and its executives express frustration that they tried to do the right thing—only to end up burned. With the Obama Administration’s political capital spent on a bruising fight to adopt health care in 2010, the prospects for meaningful climate legislation dimmed. The Republican takeover of the House last November made climate policy even more remote. Outside Washington, interest in funding carbon capture technology has also withered. AEP sought to recover a portion of its CCS pilot costs by asking for a $74 million rate increase from Virginia utility regulators. The reply was a brusque no.
