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Kennedy School of Government professors William Rosenberg (right) and John Holdren testified before Congress on March 10 about clean coal technology. (Staff photo Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard News Office)

The new technology could answer two major criticisms of coal: that it's a source of pollutants such as sulfur dioxide and mercury, and that it's a source of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas implicated in human-caused global warming.

John P. Holdren, Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy, and William Rosenberg, a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the Center for Business and Government, presented their views at an Energy and Natural Resources Committee panel on clean coal. The panel was held as the committee gathers information for legislation to update national energy policy.

Holdren, who directs the Belfer Center's Science, Technology and Public Policy Program, spoke as co-chair of the National Commission on Energy Policy, a group founded in 2002 to present nonpartisan national energy policy recommendations.

Rosenberg, who submitted a written statement to the committee, proposed federal loan guarantees that would boost production of the advanced clean coal plants, helping ease a natural gas shortage that has caused prices to skyrocket, more than tripling since 1990.

Holdren outlined a plan that would raise $36 billion between 2010 and 2020 through a new permitting system for emissions of greenhouse gases. The plan would grant permits to existing emitters and auction off a small number of additional permits that would then trade on the market. The system would provide an incentive for companies to develop technology to restrict greenhouse gas emissions so they can sell permits to companies without such technology.

The National Commission on Energy Policy's plan proposes using $4 billion of the money raised as incentives to speed up construction of new high-tech coal plants that not only would generate electricity much more cleanly than today's coal-fired power plants, but also would convert coal to clean burning liquid and gaseous fuels that could replace oil and natural gas in other applications. The plants could be designed so that they could be retrofitted with equipment to sequester carbon dioxide produced in the process (once carbon sequestration technology has matured), which would drastically reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Holdren said later that the clean coal proposal is just part of the commission's overall energy strategy. Other aspects would spend $3 billion for research into carbon sequestration, boost spending on renewable energy and nuclear power research, and would tackle energy problems from the demand side as well as the supply side, proposing increases in efficiency of everything from automobiles to appliances.

Both Holdren and Rosenberg agreed that coal's abundance makes it destined to be a big part of the world's energy mix in the decades to come. The United States has more coal reserves than any other nation, and large coal reserves in rapidly developing India and China assure that coal will become an even larger part of those nations' energy mix. That means that clean coal technology developed here could be sold to those countries as interest grows in finding environmentally sustainable ways to fuel economic growth.

Rosenberg's written testimony to the committee urged support for the advanced clean coal plants mentioned by Holdren by offering federal loan guarantees for their construction. The loan guarantees would reduce the cost of borrowing money to build the plants and cut the cost of the power produced at natural gas plants from about 6 cents to about 4 cents per kilowatt-hour.

The clean coal plants could do more than simply lower overall electricity costs, they could also provide lower-cost gas to chemical, plastic, fertilizer, and other industries that have shut down production and cut thousands of jobs due to the natural gas price spike.

The proposal recommends that Congress set aside $1 billion to cover the loan guarantee, but could result in the construction of 20 new plants nationally over the next 10 years.

Rosenberg said that the clean coal plants would produce a cleaner gas that would substitute for high-priced natural gas being used by power plants built in recent years and that could be burned in those plants. It is the building boom of natural gas-fired power plants, particularly in New England, Rosenberg said, that led to the current natural gas shortage, that drove up prices, and that requires liquified natural gas (LNG) to be imported.

"There's a huge natural gas crisis in the United States, and there's something we can do about it other than import LNG from the Middle East and other countries," Rosenberg said. "We shouldn't look at this as an experimental program, we should look at this as a major energy supply option."

alvin_powell@harvard.edu

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