“Beyond Coal” Campaign : SPlog : Smile Politely

“Beyond Coal” Campaign

Posted in SPLOG to Word by Smile Politely Editors on Wednesday, March 10, 2010 at 11:03 am

CONTACT:
Parker Laubach
Lead Organizer, Students for Environmental Concerns
847-721-5189
laubach1@illinois.edu

Students for Environmental Concerns and Sierra Club Announce "Beyond Coal" Campaign in Front of Abbott Power Plant

Representatives from the organizations Students for Environmental Concerns, Sierra Club and Prairie Rivers Network held a press conference this morning to kick off the "Beyond Coal Campaign" in front of Abbott Power Plant on the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign campus. Students for Environmental Concerns, the oldest environmental organization on campus, organized the coalition and hosted the press conference. Members of SECS delivered a Freedom of Information Act Request to University administrators regarding operations at Abbott. The event was to announce the beginning of a statewide partnership to lobby the University to make the transition from burning mostly coal at Abbott to burning natural gas.

The coal systems at Abbott power plant date back to the 1930s, and require extremely high levels of investment to keep operating reliably―The University of Illinois Energy Task Force commissioned a report that anticipated a need of approximately $205 million over the next 15 years, mostly needed for the coal system. Abandoning coal use would allow this money to be used to retire the campus energy debt, fund aggressive energy conservation, and install renewable energy.

Students for Environmental Concerns' lead coal organizer Parker Laubach said, "It makes no sense for the University to shovel money into the coal boilers when it has made a commitment to climate neutrality. Schools across the country, like UW-Madison, Cornell and Stanford have committed to stop burning coal―it is past time for us to show leadership here."

"The economic case for ending coal burning at Abbott is abundantly clear as the deferred maintenance costs are so high." says Students for Environmental Concerns' President, Anthony Larson, "This case can be made without even discussing the climate impact."

These maintenance costs are an opportunity for the University to demonstrate its commitment to sustainability by breaking its reliance on coal. Recent events show that sustainability is important to Illinois students. Last week, a referendum to raise the campus green fees passed last week with 77% of the student vote.

Transitioning to natural gas at Abbott is an important step in cutting the University's carbon footprint, will avert hundreds of millions in maintenance costs at the power plant, and is necessary in order to meet the University's goal of being carbon neutral by 2050.

6 comments

breanne

03/10/10 at 03:37

how much would it cost to update systems to effectively transition from coal to natural gas?

Luke

03/10/10 at 03:08

I took a tour of the Abbott Power Plant last year.

It wouldn’t cost anything to change the facilities to run off of natural gas. The Abbott Power Plant runs off of natural gas, coal, or oil—depending on how the energy market looks at a given time. When we were there, they were running both the coal and natural gas systems. They said that they haven’t used the oil boiler in decades.

Their natural gas turbine looks like a railroad boxcar sitting in their facility, and the exhaust gas passes through a heat-exchanger which makes steam to heat and cool the campus buildings. The coal power system does something similar—the hot steam goes to the turbines, then it goes to campus buildings to be turned back into water. This is called a Combined Heat and Power (CHP), and it’s one of the most efficient ways to do this kind of thing.

The plant manager told us that the plant’s primary job is to make steam to run the campus’ HVAC systems (the chillers run off of steam, too), and that the electricity is secondary.

I thing we should move beyond coal and natural gas (natural gas is only a halfway solution—half the CO2, and fracking probably is half as bad as mountaintop removal(I used to live on the VA/WV border)). But the bottom line is that coal/NG works and we’ve got to figure out a way to heat the campus and run all of the steam-powered equipment before it’s even a possibility.

A protest just isn’t going to have any impact when there are no other options. The protesters should probably hire a professional engineering group to asses how feasible it would be to heat/cool all of the buildings using geothermal heat-pumps with the electricity provided by a renewable power-source. By guess is that it would cost more than the university can afford, but the (much smaller) unversity where my brother teaches has been making progress on something similar.

Anyway, I’m quite sympathetic to the large-scale goal—but I’ve gotten down into the weeds on this issue enough to realize that public awareness and happy-thoughts aren’t going to do anything other than get the plant-manager to hand out more global-warming denialist “handbooks” to people who tour the plant. The solutions cost money, and a lot of it—my personal guess, givent he size of this university, is that a couple of billion dollars is probably in the ballpark. That’s a lot of money—but not as much as it sounds, since UIUC spends between $65 million and $85 million on energy every year.

Luke

03/10/10 at 03:13

P.S. The Abbott Power Plant can’t even come close to generating enough electric power to run the university, much less the town.

Stuart Tarr

03/10/10 at 03:06

Interesting. But I’d like to know exactly what the carbon difference between coal and gas is. Anyone know the combustion chemistry? It strikes me that the CO2/Btu shouldn’t be that different, but I don’t know. Any leads appreciated.
Coal of course has other problems besides carbon; mercury being a major one, but also ash, sulfur, etc.
Fracking on the other hand, is not nearly as benign as proponents make it out to be. There are some nasty chemicals involved and groundwater supplies could be, some would say have been, polluted. NYC is especially worried about fracking shale in upstate NY areas where their water comes from.
The claims being made that fracking means we have centuries worth of gas in the US are also highly dubious. More needs to be known.

Luke

03/10/10 at 03:54

Stuart,
Here’s a breakdown of pounds of CO2 emitted per megawatt-hour generated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_power_station#Carbon_dioxide
It’s Wikipedia, so it’s only a starting point for delving deeper into the issue—but their numbers agree with what I’ve read at other sources and their writeup is very concise.
Also, the plant manager was quite proud of the scrubber that they have for coal emissions. He said that it was one of the first ones installed in the USA, and it was installed so that they could burn Illinois coal (which is apparently dirtier than normal coal).

Suhail Barot

03/10/10 at 03:30

The University could meet ~80% of the peak steam load with natural gas right now, most of the time, the coal systems are unnecessary. They would have to do enough energy conservation to get the peak load low enough to use only the gas systems to meet demand, but they could make that happen in a couple years, if they wanted to. Natural gas (because there is a lot more hydrogen in there compared to coal) has about 55% of the carbon footprint of coal - switching Abbott over completely would cut Abbott’s emissions by about a quarter. Abbott represents around 2/3rds of the University’s emissions, because of purchased electricity, transport, and so on.
The big advantage of abandoning the coal systems are that they are really old and will need a lot of investment to keep them running. Some of the gas equipment is less than 10 years old, where as the coal equipment has stuff in there that dates back to the 1930s. If they pulled this off, they could save at least $100 million or so over the next decade or so. We don’t generally look at the full costs of things - including all of this in the decision making would make the coal vs. natural gas decision a lot easier to make. Saving that $100 million or more could easily subsidize gas use, and still fund a lot of energy conservation. Not enough of course, but a first pass by some consultants the University hired, estimated that 30% of campus energy use could be eliminated by a $150 million investment - and after reading their study, I think their numbers are very conservative.

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