EU and China launch project to cut greenhouse gas emissions

China’s coal stations: due for a greening

China is in the midst of a mammoth programme of building coal-fired power stations. Between 2000 and 2004, new stations were built with a capacity greater than all existing plants in Germany or India. In 2005 alone, the country increased its generating capacity by 52 gigawatts. If new building continues at the same rate, without CO2 capture, levels of CO2 in the atmosphere will literally hit the skies.

At the same time, it is clear that low costs in China make it much cheaper to build fossil-fuelled power stations with CO2 capture in China than in Europe.

This is the backdrop for a proposal from the independent Norwegian research institute SINTEF for a Sino-European programme to unite the interests of quota-hungry Europeans and electricity-hungry Chinese.

The three-year cooperative project, called Coach has a budget of €3 million. The project is dedicated to coal-based generation of electricity and fuel, with associated CO2 capture, and is a twin of the EU’s Dynamis project, also led by SINTEF.

Dynamis aims to develop a full-scale coal or natural gas-fired demonstration plant for electricity generation and hydrogen production with CO2 capture. The plant is to be in operation by 2012 – 2015.

In the Dynamis project, representatives from industry and academe will where to locate the plant, and what technology it should employ. In Coach, eleven European and nine Chinese industrial companies, universities and research organisations will carry out a similar evaluation process to build a Chinese counterpart.

Coach will identify which of China’s ageing coal-fired power stations should be replaced by new plants, evaluate which of the new projects are most suitable for CO2 capture, and recommend what sort of technology and methods should be used to deal with the CO2 produced by individual power plants.

Coach will provide openings for European countries to buy up emissions quota and give European suppliers an opportunity to position themselves in the future Chinese market for CO2 capture technology. The project will also give the Europeans and Chinese the chance to develop joint CO2 technology for sale elsewhere.

In a bid to make itself independent of major imports of oil and gas, China is keen to develop its national energy supply by gasifying the country’s huge coal deposits. This will involve transforming coal into hydrogen-rich gas that can be used as fuel in both power plants and in transport. The aim in plants of this sort is to extract the CO2 at the front end of the process and deposit it, preferably in underground porous rocks.

The Coach project is being coordinated by the French Petroleum Institute in Paris.