A Charred Life 
Three Generations of Texas Wind Men 
Coal Hard Facts
Climate change, shrinking ice caps, rising seas, air pollution, asthma at epidemic levels: GOOD THING Texas hasn’t built any soot-belching coal plants in the past FIFTEEN years. But with our population booming, and an energy crisis looming, The black rock is back. Let’s take a deep breath—while we still can.
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THERE IS SOMETHING ANCIENT and primitive about the hulking steam boilers that rise from the pasturelands near Fairfield, about ninety miles southeast of Dallas. Though they were built in 1971, they seem to have more kinship with an older era of coal-powered locomotives and coal-stoked home furnaces. They stand 22 stories high, cloaked in intricate tangles of conveyors, grinding mills, and piping, flanked by twin four-hundred-foot-tall smokestacks, and ringed by a small mountain range of ink-black coal, some 400,000 tons of it. The boilers are the guts of a TXU power plant known as Big Brown, but “big” doesn’t even begin to describe it. Just beyond the plant is the strip mine, a five-mile-long furrow in the earth that represents the last clawings and scrapings of a 35-year dig that has moved enough dirt to excavate five Panama Canals. The plant consumes a ton of coal every four seconds—20,000 tons a day.
Big Brown is a typical American coal plant of its era in that it runs on pulverized coal—a technology that represents everything that is environmentally harmful about how we get our electricity. At a pulverized-coal plant, the rock is ground to a fine talcum-like powder, then blown under high pressure into a furnace and ignited in order to make steam in a giant boiler, which turns a turbine, which creates electricity. It also creates loads of unwanted by-products. Every year Big Brown emits 82,000 tons of sulfur dioxide (think: acid rain), 6,700 tons of nitrogen oxide (smog), and 1,200 pounds of mercury (toxins in fish). Big Brown ranks third among all power plants in the country in its rate of mercury emissions, largely because it burns Texas lignite, one of the dirtiest coals to combust. Lignite is also inefficient, which means you have to burn more of it than of other fuels to get similar power, thus creating more carbon dioxide. Each year the plant spews forth 10.6 million tons of it. Though Big Brown has had a few environmental upgrades in its 36 years of operation—the addition of some nitrogen oxide controls and a “baghouse” to trap particulate emissions—it is fundamentally the same old pulverized-coal soot belcher it was when it was built.
And so environmentalists were predictably outraged when TXU announced that all eleven of its proposed plants would use this same pulverized-coal technology (though only one would run on lignite). This fact, more than anything else, is what has been motivating the opposition to TXU’s plan. It’s not that its plants won’t be cleaner than Big Brown. They will—90 percent or more cleaner, in terms of emissions of regulated pollutants. The objection is that, by using this older technology, the plants will not be as clean as they could be. Of course, environmentalists would prefer to find a solution that involves no new coal plants at all, but since Republican, business-friendly, free-market Texas is not about to usher in a utopian era of conservation and alternative power anytime soon, they have arrived, along with the dissident mayors, at a fallback argument: If we are going to build new coal plants, let’s build the cleanest coal plants we can, even if they’re more expensive. “We are burning dirty fuel with nineteenth-century technology,” says Laura Miller. “It is going up a smokestack and into the air that we breathe, and the whole state needs to find a better way to do this.”
That better way goes by the name of integrated gasification combined cycle. Get used to the term, and its acronym, IGCC. You are going to be hearing it a lot in years to come. For environmentalists, it has become something of a mantra. Any new coal-fueled plants, they say, should be built with IGCC. And a number of power companies agree. Despite the considerably greater expense of building with IGCC—some $200 million or more per plant—6.5 percent of the coal plants now being proposed in America will use that technology. Several major utilities, including American Electric Power, the largest utility in the country, with the largest fleet of coal plants, have stated that IGCC is now their future technology of choice for burning coal.
The advantage of gasified coal comes in the sequence of emissions controls. Unlike pulverized coal, which requires a chemical plant on the back end of the factory to remove pollutants, gasified coal allows acidic and particulate components to be removed before they are burned, thus keeping them out of the stack and reducing the cost and difficulty of their removal. After that, the process is in many ways the same. The synthetic gas feeds a combustion turbine, whose exhaust heat is then reused to drive a steam turbine. IGCC is indeed a cleaner way to burn coal, though advancements in pulverized-coal technology have rendered the IGCC advantage modest in terms of local air pollution. According to numbers from the Environmental Protection Agency, a new and improved pulverized plant burning Powder River Basin coal (a fairly clean coal mined in Wyoming that TXU plans to use in all but one of its new facilities) would achieve a 90 percent reduction in sulfur dioxide emissions compared with an average U.S. coal plant, such as Big Brown, in 2004; IGCC does only a little bit better, achieving a 93 percent reduction. Both achieve the same 83 percent decrease in nitrogen oxide. The major difference between IGCC and pulverized-coal systems is that the former provides a much easier and cheaper way of taking carbon dioxide out of the stack.
But IGCC is an expensive, commercially unproven technology, and according to TXU, it does not perform well with the Western coal used in Texas. Eastern coal, from West Virginia, Ohio, and other states, has a higher BTU value and more moisture and performs better with the gasification process. “We cannot make it work with the coal that is available here,” says Michael McCall, the chairman and CEO of TXU’s wholesale division. Why can’t the plants use Eastern coal? That’s logistically impossible, TXU maintains. Since each plant consumes 140 train cars of coal per day, 1,400 such cars would have to make the trip from West Virginia to Texas every 24 hours.
“We have spent a tremendous amount of engineering time on this, and we know that technology, I think, better than anyone in the industry,” John Wilder, the chairman and CEO of TXU, told me. “We know how it performs. We know when it is economically viable. It isn’t right now. We are not going to put our customers at risk by experimenting around with an unproven technology that doesn’t run off of our coal and is high cost. We will not do it.”
Though Wilder’s concern may sound misplaced to some, the fact is that IGCC’s ability to deliver the environmentalists’ claims is far from guaranteed. It is still a developing technology with few working models anywhere in the world. There are only two IGCC plants in the United States (in Florida and Indiana), both set up as demonstration facilities by the U.S. Department of Energy and partly subsidized by the government. Plagued by technical troubles, they have had a mixed record of success. Like TXU, most power companies regard these results with skepticism. Seventy-nine percent of the coal plants currently being proposed in America will use pulverized coal (another 15 percent will use a coal-burning technology called circulating fluidized bed). The first private IGCC plant will likely belong to AEP, which has contracted with GE Energy and Bechtel to produce two big, 630-megawatt gasification facilities in Ohio and West Virginia. Construction on the two has not yet begun. They are years from operation.
Even officials at GE Energy and AEP acknowledge that there are several significant barriers to building an IGCC plant in Texas. “In Texas there is mostly lignite and PRB [Powder River Basin] coal, and the GE/IGCC technology does not work well with those coals,” says AEP spokesperson Melissa McHenry. Thus, despite the company’s public commitment to IGCC, a proposed new AEP plant in Texarkana, Arkansas, will be designed for pulverized coal. “We would prefer to do IGCC, but this would be operated with PRB coal, and we have not been able to get a performance guarantee for that kind of coal.” By that she means that Shell Oil, which has developed an IGCC technology specifically for Western coal, will not in effect share the risk that the technology may not perform—something that GE and Bechtel have agreed to do with AEP’s Eastern coal—fueled IGCC plants. There are also two proposals in Minnesota and Washington for IGCC plants that would use Conoco-Phillips technology to burn Western coal, but they face similar problems. According to TXU spokesperson Kim Morgan, “Neither of these plants have the necessary performance guarantees that TXU would require.” As for building IGCC plants in Texas that would run on Eastern coal, AEP’s supply problem is the same as TXU’s: the difficulty of shipping massive amounts of Eastern coal here on a daily basis.
Supply problems, unproven technologies, astronomical construction costs—it all adds up to a tremendous amount of risk for a private company to take. It is no surprise, then, that most of the serious proposals for IGCC plants are in regulated markets, meaning that the companies that are investing a billion-plus dollars in them are guaranteed not to lose money. “In Ohio AEP wants a guarantee from regulators affirming that we recover the costs of the plant,” says McHenry. “And in West Virginia we want the same regulatory guarantee before we go forward.” In Texas, however, TXU’s investment would be entirely exposed. “We could get the technology choice wrong,” Wilder acknowledged. “If we do and someone else gets it right, what just happened to us? We just blew eleven billion dollars.”
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