Georgia: Coal and Carbon - Enhanced Transcript

Published: May 19th, 2009 in Causes, Greenhouse Gases, United States, South, Carbon Storage, Water, Snow & Ice, Oceans & Coasts, Sea Level, Food & Agriculture, Flora & Fauna, Policy, Energy, Efficiency, Fossil Fuels, Landscapes
Originally broadcast on: May 19th, 2009 on PBS's The News Hour with Jim Lehrer

Direct link to this post:

I. Coal and Ash Spills
II. Coal, Carbon, Warming and the Sea
III. Clean Coal?

IV. Carbon Capture and Storage

Time

0:40
1:11
1:31
1:45
1:52
2:06
2:16
2:25
2:37
2:52
2:55
3:15
3:24
3:38
3:43
3:57
4:04
4:11
4:21
4:35
4:43
4:55
5:01
5:15
5:20
5:35
5:48
6:02
6:05
6:07
6:15
6:26
6:41
6:51
6:55
7:08
7:17
7:29
7:43
8:04
8:14
8:21
8:28
8:41
8:48
8:57

Coal and Ash Spills

0:40

Heidi Cullen (for Climate Central): Plant Scherer, in the small town of Juliette, Georgia, is the largest coal-fired power plant in the country. An average of three freight trains, each over a mile long, pull in here every day. They are filled with coal,
- Georgia gets more electricity from coal than any other source.
1:11

Heidi Cullen: The recent coal ash spill in Harriman, Tennessee, about 300 miles north of here, left a toxic sludge in the Emory river, and increased concern about the broader environmental impacts of burning coal. That ash spill, and what it might mean for the future o
1:31

Stephen Smith: We have seen huge devastation come from great ash spills, like we saw late last year. Coal is a dirty business, mountain top removal, combustion practices, and then dealing with the post combustion waste. Cradle to grave it's a problem.
1:45

Heidi Cullen: Chris Hobson says there won’t be an ash spill at Scherer. He's a vice president at the Southern Company, the majority owner of the plant.
1:52

Chris Hobson: We have been very aggressive in making sure that our facilities are as safe as they can be and we inspect them routinely and we feel very confident that kind of event won’t happen here in the Southern system.

Coal, Carbon, Warming and the Sea

2:06

Heidi Cullen: Today's debate about coal extends well beyond Juliette and coal ash. People across Georgia are concerned about how the state's dependence on coal could affect their lives.
2:16

Gordon Rogers: Yeah, this is a cedar and um it's losing its life due to an increase in salinity.
- Sea level rise threatens plant life in estuaries and salt marshes.
2:25

Heidi Cullen: A river-keeper on the Little Satilla River, about 75 miles south of Savannah, Gordon Rogers has seen the ocean's salt water creep farther inland and mix with fresh water, in part, he says, due to sea-level rise.
- Sea level is rising.
- Rising sea level is pushing saltwater farther up estuaries.
2:37

Heidi Cullen: Sea-level rise is a signature of global warming, which scientists say is a consequence of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Most of that increase has come from burning fossil fuels, and forty-percent of this carbon dioxide comes from coal.
- Climate change is causing sea level to rise.
- Climbing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are causing global warming.
2:52

Heidi Cullen: What makes saltwater intrusion so bad?
2:55

Gordon Rogers: Some of the fundamental pillars in our marine economy are built on this proper mix of fresh and salt, and a good example, perhaps a poster child, is the blue crab. Blue crab production is down on the average about 60 percent since about 1970.
- Increased salinity is a danger to blue crabs.
3:15

Heidi Cullen: And scientists believe carbon dioxide is contributing to an increase in such changes. It all has to do with climate change—which takes time to see.
3:24

Heidi Cullen: Scientists say that if the world continues emitting carbon dioxide at its current rate, the average global temperature could rise by 7-degrees Fahrenheit or possibly more by the year 2100, and by 9-degrees or more in the US.
3:38

Heidi Cullen: For Georgia, this could mean the state tree, the Live Oak, would no longer thrive.
- Climate change could push the Georgia State Tree out of Georgia.
3:43

Heidi Cullen: And recent research predicts a two to five foot sea-level rise by the end of the century, due to the thermal expansion of water and the melting of glaciers and ice sheets. That could be problematic to coastal cities like Savannah.
- Global sea level could rise over three feet this century.
- Savannah’s Rising Seas
3:57

Heidi Cullen: Laura Devendorf lives on the coast, some forty miles south of Savannah. She's starting to see change, too.
4:04

Laura Devendorf: Are we worried about sea level rise? Indeed. I think everyone on the coast is. You can just sit there and see the tides getting bigger.
- Georgia's sea level sea level has long been rising about an inch per decade.
4:11

Heidi Cullen: Along with her daughter Meredith, Devendorf lives on a six thousand acre plantation near Sunbury. She says the threats to the marshlands are even more alarming than the rapidly changing tide.
4:21

Laura Devendorf: I think it's between 60 and 80 percent of all seafood that you eat spends part of its lifecycle on the marsh, and the thought that this might disappear really is a devastating thing for the food source, for everything here.
- Estuaries support most US seafood.
4:35

Heidi Cullen: Stephen Smith is quick to connect the types of changes both Rogers and Devendorf are noticing to Georgia's continued reliance on coal.
4:43

Stephen Smith: Georgia is being impacted on a number of different fronts, and we’re frustrated that the political environment doesn’t match up to what we think is in jeopardy. So, we’re stuck with the status quo, and the status quo in the South is largely coal.

Clean Coal?

4:55

Heidi Cullen: Today's debate about coal extends well beyond Juliette and coal ash. People across Georgia are concerned about how the state's dependence on coal could affect their lives.
5:01

Chris Hobson: Coal is a critically important fuel source to the country, but particularly here to the southeast. There is a great deal of existing generation infrastructure already on the ground that's using coal. We cannot abandon that infrastructure.
5:15

Heidi Cullen: Hobson adds that his company is working to minimize coal's environmental risks.
5:20

Chris Hobson: We are spending roughly three billion dollars here at Plant Scherer. Upgrading pollution control equipment to control what we call the traditional pollutants from EPA—sulfur dioxide emissions, nitrogen oxide and mercury.
5:35

Heidi Cullen: But soon coal-using companies around the country may face new regulations. The EPA recently ruled that carbon dioxide is a pollutant and Congress is debating legislation that would require reducing CO2.
- The US federal government has ruled that CO2 is a pollutant.
5:48

Heidi Cullen: That's one reason why the owners of coal-fired plants are exploring new ways to reduce emissions—including something they call clean coal, a phrase that has sparked an on-going multi-million dollar advertising war. Attack ads…
6:02

Political Ad: Clean coal harnesses the awesome power of the word clean….
6:05

Heidi Cullen: …and ads supporting clean coal.
6:07

Political Ad: I believe… We can be energy independent. We can continue to use our most abundant fuel cleanly and responsibly….
6:15

Heidi Cullen: Opponents of clean coal say that coal is a dirty rock that can’t be wiped clean with an advertising campaign—that mining, ash disposal and combustion are intrinsically problematic.
- Low-carbon coal plants need more coal for the same power output.
6:26

Heidi Cullen: The other side points to the low cost of coal, and domestic reserves that could last two hundred years or more. That, they say, will help the US remain competitive with fast growing economies like China and India, both major coal users.
6:41

Heidi Cullen: So what is clean coal, and even if we can make the coal cleaner, the two bigger questions are: how long will it take to build the technology, and how much will it cost?

Carbon Capture and Storage

6:51

Chris Jones: Clean coal today increasingly means carbon capture and sequestration.
6:55

Heidi Cullen: A professor of engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, Chris Jones says that capturing and storing the carbon in coal can help make coal cleaner and thereby be part of the solution to the carbon dioxide problem.
7:08

Chris Jones: …and it's the idea of capturing carbon dioxide that's produced from combusting fossil fuels, so that you can then store it somewhere and prevent releasing it to the atmosphere.
7:17

Heidi Cullen: A conventional coal-fired plant emits carbon dioxide by burning coal. Carbon capture and sequestration technology, or CCS, starts with the separation of carbon dioxide while generating power.
- Technologies exist to reduce CO2 emissions from coal power plants.
- CO2 Capture
7:29

Heidi Cullen: The CO2 is transported by pipeline to a suitable site where it is injected in liquid form deep underground into a porous layer of rock and sand that can absorb the CO2 and prevent its escape to the atmosphere.
- Working pipelines already demonstrate long-distance CO2 transport.
- CO2 Injection
7:43

Chris Jones: Like any technology, we need time to ramp up. And given the scale of this particular technology, it is going to take probably on the order of a decade to get this to a reasonable scale where we feel like it has a significant impact. CCS is going to likely result in an increase in the cost of electricity, but technically all of the individual components of CCS are viable and have already been demonstrated.
8:04

Heidi Cullen: Much of the country has underground geologies well suited for carbon dioxide storage. But some locations, like most of Georgia, do not.
- Deep rock layers thought suitable to store CO2 abound in the US.
- CO2 Storage Areas
8:14

Chris Jones: So, if we were to do CCS in Georgia, we would have to pipeline and perhaps send it to other parts of the country that are more amenable to the storage.
- Many underground formations have the potential to store CO2.
8:21

Heidi Cullen: Some opponents of CCS worry about whether any location can truly contain the CO2 stored underground.
8:28

Heidi Cullen: While engineers flesh out those details, the federal government has already committed billions in stimulus money to support large-scale projects for clean coal technology.
- The federal government is spending billions to help develop low-carbon coal technology.
8:41

Heidi Cullen: Steve Smith says there are things Georgians can and should pursue today to help reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
8:48

Stephen Smith: Energy efficiency is the first fuel that we should be going to. It is the fastest cheapest way that we can offset the impacts of global warming.
- Energy efficiency can reduce national CO2 emissions at a net profit.
8:57

Heidi Cullen: Experts agree that it will take more than efficiency to solve the climate problem. Which brings us back to clean coal. If scientists are able to tackle the technical hurdles, and if Congress decides to regulate carbon dioxide, clean coal may emerge as another important way to help reduce carbon dioxide emissions. That could lead to major changes for big coal plants, like Scherer… and for Georgians who care about the future of their state and their country.
- Trimming energy waste could provide a third of the CO2 cuts many experts say are needed by mid-century