BP, Rio Tinto cancel $2 billion Australian clean coal power plant

Rio Tinto and BP canceled a plan to build a coal-fired power plant in Australia that would capture and store carbon to cut emissions. The plant at Kwinana, which was being studied by the Hydrogen Energy joint venture between Rio and BP, won't be built after it was found that rock formations wouldn't seal in carbon dioxide. The project would have required $1.5 billion to $2 billion in investment.

In the U.S., the venture is working to use hydrogen derived from coal or natural gas to generate power and capture carbon for storage to minimize greenhouse-gas emissions. The project with Abu Dhabi National Oil Co., or Adnoc, which controls the United Arab Emirates' petroleum reserves, would pump carbon dioxide into oil fields, forcing out more crude. Currently, natural gas is used to create pressure inside the aging oil reservoirs to increase oil recovery.

- This is not the first cancellation of a supposedly "clean coal" power station project, nor is it likely to be the last. Earlier in Feb 2008, the FutureGen clean coal project in the US was cancelled. For the Australian project, the writing was already on the wall over a year ago, when leading Australian scientist Dr Tim Flannery said back in Feb 2007 that Australia did not possess the right geological conditions to support the clean coal process, which injected carbon dioxide emissions into the ground rather than releasing them into the atmosphere.

There is perhaps one very limited set of conditions where clean coal might possibly work : injecting the CO2 into an existing oil field for enhanced oil recovery (EOR), also known as tertiary oil recovery. Of course that pre-supposes that one would be building a "clean coal" plant practically next door to an operating oil field, and not just any old oil field but one with the right geological conditions where the CO2 injection technique might work. As you might expect, the list of candidate locations for this has got to be vanishingly small.

And now Singapore seems to want to try this. Can anyone show me where Singapore has an existing oil field that we may be able to inject the CO2 into? Yeah, right. We don't have one. Coal isn't a very bright idea - "clean" or otherwise. There is nothing clean about coal with its CO2 emissions, sulphur, soot, and radioactive residues.

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