Uit het volgende Guardian artikel blijkt dat 'clean coal' (schone steenkool) niet bestaat en niet gemaakt kan worden, kortom je reinste bedrog!
Het artikel werd geschreven door Sharon Kelly en werd gepubliceerd door The Guardian:
How
America's clean coal dream unravelled
Exclusive: Kemper
power plant promised to be a world leader in ‘clean coal’
technology but Guardian reporting found evidence top executives knew
of construction problems and design flaws years before the scheme
collapsed
by
Sharon Kelly
Fri
2 Mar 2018 07.00 GMTLast modified on Fri 2 Mar
2018 17.03 GMT
High
above the red dirt and evergreen trees of Kemper County, Mississippi,
gleams a 15-story monolith of pipes surrounded by a town-sized array
of steel towers and white buildings. The hi-tech industrial site juts
out of the surrounding forest, its sharp silhouette out of place amid
the gray crumbling roads, catfish stands and trailer homes of nearby
De Kalb, population: 1,164.
The
$7.5bn Kemper power plant once drew officials from as far as Saudi
Arabia, Japan and Norway to marvel at a 21st-century power project so
technologically complex its builder compared it to the moonshot of
the 1960s. It’s promise? Energy from
“clean coal”.
“I’m
impressed,” said Jukka
Uosukainen, the United Nations director for the Climate Technology
Centre and Network (CTCN), after a 2014 tour, citing Kemper as an example of
how “maybe using coal in the future is possible”.
Kemper,
its managers claimed, would harness dirt-cheap lignite coal – the
world’s least efficient and most abundant form of coal – to power
homes and businesses in America’s lowest-income state while causing
the least climate-changing pollution of any fossil fuel. It was a
promise they wouldn’t keep.
Last
summer the plant’s owner, Southern Company, America’s
second-largest utility company, announced it was abandoning
construction after years of blown-out budgets and missed construction
deadlines.
“It
hit us hard,” said Craig Hitt, executive director of the Kemper
County Economic Development Authority. Some 75 miners, roughly half
living inside Kemper County, have already been affected in a region
where unemployment is 7.1% compared to a national average of just
4.1%.
“It
was going to be the biggest project in the history of the county,
possibly in the state of Mississippi,” Hitt said. Instead, this
year, Kemper County was home to one of the first large coalmining
layoffs of the Trump era.
It’s
failure is also likely to have a profound impact on the future of
“clean coal”. “This was the flagship project that was going to
lead the way for a whole new generation of coal power plants,” said
Richard Heinberg, senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute. “If
the initial project doesn’t work then who’s going to invest in
any more like it?”
Company
officials have blamed the failure on factors ranging from competition
from tumbling natural
gas
prices to bad weather, bad timing and plain old bad luck.
But
a review by the Guardian of more than 5,000 pages of confidential
company documents, internal emails, white papers, and other materials
provided anonymously by several former Southern Co insiders, plus on-
and off-record interviews with other former Kemper engineers and
managers, found evidence that top executives covered up construction
problems and fundamental design flaws at the plant and knew, years
before they admitted it publicly, that their plans had gone awry.
Their
public statements helped to prolong the notion that their “clean
coal” power could be affordable, costing Southern’s customers and
shareholders billions, giving false hope to miners and firing dreams
that American innovation had provided a path forward for “clean
coal” technology at a reasonable price.
‘A pony show’
“It
was exciting times, but it turned out to be like a mirage,” said
Brett Wingo, a former Southern Co engineer who first went public with
his concerns about Kemper’s construction delays in a front-page New
York Times investigative report in
2016 and is now suing the company over alleged retaliation. “It was
a cool trick – on all of us.”
Kemper’s
failure will have a profound impact on international plans to slow
climate change which relyheavily
on the rapid development of technology to capture carbon and store
it, technology that has so far shown little
progress.
The
United States has spent hundreds of millions in federal taxpayer
funds chasing the chimera of clean coal. Donald Trump has been
particularly vocal about his support for clean coal. “We have ended
the war on American energy and we have ended the war on beautiful,
clean coal,” he said in this year’s State of the Union address.
Kemper
promised a way forward. But the documents show that while Southern Co
management presented a rosy picture of Kemper’s prospects to the
public, numerous structural problems with the project had emerged
during construction and internal documents questioned the very
foundation of the plant’s viability.
In
a 24 April 2013 earnings call, for example, Southern’s CEO Tom
Fanning regretted Kemper’s newly announced first budget blowout, a
$540m hike, but described “tremendous progress” on construction
and said “the scheduled in-service date” was achievable.
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Zie ook:
Energyagency rejects Trump plan to prop up coal and nuclear power plants
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