Why relying on technology to keep ASEAN’s coal plants running is risky

A recent ASEAN Center for Energy (ACE) report emphasized that to contribute to tackling climate change, ASEAN countries don’t need to immediately phase out all of their coal fleet.

The report asserted that coal will continue to be an essential part of the energy transition. It also stated that by allowing ASEAN countries more time to improve electricity grids to accommodate more renewables could help smooth the transition to cleaner energy. Put the two together, and it strongly hinted that coal might be squeezed in to buy said time.

In order to reduce damage from coal, ACE urged ASEAN member states to use clean coal technologies in coal-fired power plants. It also recommended using carbon capture and storage (CCS) or carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) to replace “old, inefficient, and unabatable coal plants.”

Interestingly, this is also a view promoted by the World Coal Association—now Future Coal—the international coal lobbying group.

At first glance, this plan seems promising. However, relying heavily on technology oversimplifies potential risks and assumes full delivery of promises without thorough risk assessments. In this article, we provide evidence that ACE’s chosen pathway is not as good as it seems and could face significant problems in the future.

False solution

The first “clean coal technology” proposed by ACE—termed “high efficiency, low emissions (HELE)”—is mostly supercritical coal power plant. This means it uses less coal while producing more energy. This is why they’re claimed to be more environmentally friendly than sub-critical or “regular” coal power plants.

But using supercritical technology doesn’t guarantee the emission problem is solved; it has varying degrees of success in reducing coal emissions.

For example, a 2019 Australian paper found supercritical coal power plants underperformed against regular power plants with higher breakdown rates, leading to frequent electricity price spikes during 2018-2019. This was a decade after the technology was first launched in 2007.

Failing to deliver steady electricity supplies would contradict ACE’s stated goal to prevent energy shortage and provide smoother transitions towards renewable energy.

Risks of carbon capture

Another technology that ACE advocates is carbon capture and storage (CCS), which captures carbon emissions from power plants and stores them underground.

However, CCS appears to replicate past project failures. Opponents of CCS often suggest its success rate is relatively small.

The industry claims the technology can capture 95% carbon from each project. Yet, the 2023 reports from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) found that no current project has consistently managed to capture more than 80% of carbon emissions. Some of them only succeeded in capturing 15% of carbon emissions.

Leakage from captured carbon underground is the other risk we might bear. This will have tremendous consequences not only by netting off the so-called mitigated emissions but also by contaminating groundwater and risking communities nearby.

According to carbon capture proponents, when done properly, the risk of leakage is minuscule. Even when it occurs, they claim it will not be catastrophic.

However, a big enough leak is still possible. The margin of safety is very narrow: even a mere 1% leakage every ten years could pose serious consequences in the long-run, mainly rises in temperature. Keeping the “safe level of leakage rate” requires rigorous monitoring and supervision. Therefore, the risks could be higher in developing countries like Indonesia, which has chronic problems with regulatory governance.

Some other evidence suggests that CCS is not economically viable. One of the strongest arguments against CCS is probably the diminishing returns. As one of the leading experts in carbon capture claims:

“The closer a CCS system gets to 100% efficiency, the harder and more expensive it becomes to capture additional carbon dioxide.”

This implies potential future costs for bigger equipment, additional time, and additional energy for CCS to achieve that efficiency level.

More importantly, chasing increasingly expensive CCS technology merely prolongs the life of coal-fired power plants, which pose significant environmental risks. The same money and effort could be used to build more renewable energy infrastructure such as wind turbines or solar panels.

In addition to its potential high costs, captured carbon must be sold in the market—for various uses ranging from oil extraction to food preservation—to increase its economic viability.

However, other than CO₂ conversion to fuels, there is a strictly limited usage of CO₂. Commercial use of CO₂ is less than 1% of the global CO₂ emmissions from energy usage. On the other hand, converting CO₂ back to fuels requires carbon-free energy sources.

The conversion will also result in approximately 25%–35% of energy losses. Although there have been more research on how to improve the efficiency of the process, CO₂ utilization has yet to be scalable.

Why the half measure?

ACE must be wary of its reliance on technological solutions. Instead, the center should consider a double-down on less-risky and less-capital-intensive solutions with many positive impacts, such as setting up community-based renewable energy, aggressive reforestation, or even better, significant halt of deforestation.

Community-based renewable energy offers to help people in energy-poor areas to build their own energy sources. Moreover, people living in close geographical proximity can share costs and resources to install and maintain off-grid renewables, encouraging more widespread adoption of cleaner energy sources with minimal problems of land use.

On the other hand, in contrast to CCUS, aggressive reforestation does not require heavy machinery or specialized knowledge and skills to operate complex technology to achieve the same goals of storing emissions. Again, it is an established scientific fact that forests and soil currently store 30% of emissions. Unlike CCS that only stores emissions from sites where it is installed, forests and soil absorb atmospheric carbon emissions. Even well-planned city forests could have more capacity to effectively absorb CO₂ than we thought.

ACE can also reconsider replacing the “old, inefficient, and unabatable coal plants” with renewables, such as solar and wind, especially those for non-industrial electricity facilities. Those electricity generation costs have been falling rapidly for years.

As most of the ASEAN member states are developing countries, they must carefully select the most suitable technologies to adopt. With limited fiscal capacity, rashly importing an advanced technology that will require substantial startup costs potentially becomes a costly effort, yielding limited benefits.

It is puzzling why we should replace our old coal plants with new ones. It is like when we are replacing our old mobile phone with a slightly better mobile phone—instead of jumping straight to a smartphone. Why the half-measure?

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.