Planners add carbon capture and storage and underground coal gasification to the mix

Coal will dominate the energy provision landscape of South Africa for the next quarter of a century, despite the restrictions by the Integrated Resource Plan, or the IRP 2010, and despite the South African commitment to a 34% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2020.

Paul White, Fossil Fuel Foundation of Africa (FFF) co-director and coal and energy consultant, has said that more coal operations are expected to come on line if carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology is successful.

He says that the emissions issue has made people look at alternatives and technologies, and improve processes to limit emissions and reduce waste to produce a cleaner energy source, with both Eskom and Sasol investing in underground coal gasification (UCG) technology. (Source: Mining Weekly, March 2011)

Dave Collins, FFF portfolio manager of climate change and emissions, said if UCG and CCS technologies were successfully implemented, it would probably be at the expense of nuclear. The next 20 years would probably be a race between the two energy sources, he told Mining Weekly.

Professor Rosemary Falcon, who holds a Chair of Energy Research for Clean Coal Technologies at the University of Witwatersrand, told Energy Forecast that UCG and CCS are cleaner alternatives to coal, in that they are more efficient in the production of energy from gas obtained from in-situ coal.

“It would be likely to be less costly and more efficient in producing energy and it would be cleaner in terms of ash disposal, environmental protection relative to surface mining, and efficient in the production of gas relative to surface gasification methods,” she noted.

“It would also allow use of coal seams, which are too low-grade to mine economically, or too deep.”

Cleaner alternatives

The website www.esi-africa.com recently produced information about Eskom’s effort to use UCG technology to good effect.

South Africa has 160 billion tonnes of coal resources that are judged to be uneconomical.

Until recently, there was little prospect of exploiting this resource, but now Eskom is seriously studying a technology that has the potential to unlock the country’s vast uneconomic coal potential, without increasingly damaging carbon emissions.

The technology is UCG, which was first developed commercially in the former Soviet Union and is now being tested in South Africa.

The concept for advancing UCG in South Africa emerged in Eskom’s technology scanning in 2001, which highlighted all the possible technologies for extracting coal and converting it into electricity.

The utility was drawn to UCG for two main reasons:

Firstly, with its lower carbon emissions, it is considered a clean coal, with far lower emissions than conventional coal-fired plants. It offers the potential to use previously uneconomical coal, and it offered a new approach to mining uneconomical coal.

The second point had particular resonance for the Majuba colliery in Mpumalanga, which had been decommissioned in the early 1990s, as it had been deemed uneconomical to mine.

Dr Mark van der Riet, Eskom corporate consultant for fuels and combustion technology, said: “We purchased the Majuba colliery infrastructure and mining rights from Rand Coal, but the challenge always remained to find a way to extract the coal.

“Currently, the coal for Majuba power station comes from different sources as far away as Witbank.”

In 2001 and 2002, a pre-feasibility study was launched into the potential for exploiting the Majuba reserves using UCG. This put Eskom in contact with UCG experts around the world.

“We did a due diligence on the UCG technology and we selected Ergo Exergy Technologies, Inc. of Canada, who have applied their knowledge gained from the former Soviet Union and Australian UCG operations.”

Ergo Exergy Technologies was contracted to complete a review of the Majuba site and available resource data. It conducted preliminary tests of coal samples, which confirmed the potential of the site for UCG technology.

Eskom, in turn, visited the UCG pilot plant in Australia to verify the appropriateness of the technology for South African application. (Source: www.esi-africa.com, March 2011)

The ‘race’ between nuclear and coal

Asked if there could be a race between nuclear technology and coal for the next 20 years, Falcon told Energy Forecast: “Not competitive, but rather a parallel development in which nuclear could supplement coal in the medium term and then take over when coal reserves have been depleted.”

Cornelis van der Waal, energy analyst and business unit leader of the energy and power team at Frost and Sullivan Africa, told Energy Forecast that coal would dominate as energy provider for the next quarter of a century in South Africa.

In terms of the IRP 2010, the South African generation mix gigawatt installed should be made up of 48% coal and 14% nuclear.

Currently, 4.5% of the installed capacity in terms of energy provision in South Africa is nuclear, Van der Waal told Energy Forecast.

South Africa should, in terms of research and development programmes on cleaner coal technologies, invest a greater percentage of its budgets in those research programmes. Currently, the 1% is vastly inferior to that of programmes in Europe, which would be about 3%, said Van der Waal.

Coal under fire

Coal use, primarily for the generation of electricity, now accounts for about 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions. According to the publication International Mining, coal-fired power stations currently generate about 42% of the world’s electricity.

The United States has the largest share of global coal reserves, according to Mining Weekly, with 238 billion tonnes; followed by Russia with 157 billion tonnes, China with 115 billion tonnes, and Australia with 76 billion tonnes. South Africa uses 30 billion tonnes.

However, the likely emissions South Africa would be allowed to generate over the next 20 years are constrained by the draft IRP2010 revised balance scenario.

The revised balance scenario allows for an emissions peak of 305 million tonnes of CO2 a year, before declining to a plateau of emissions between 260 million tonnes and 275 million tonnes of CO2 a year thereafter. (Source: Mining Weekly, March 2011)

When South Africa signed the Copenhagen Accord in 2009, the country agreed to reduce its emissions by 34% by 2020 and by 42% by 2025 below the business-as-usual limits.

The government has allocated 50% of future emissions to electricity, leaving the non-electricity generating industries concerned about whether they will be able to comply with limitations placed on their emissions.

Balance between development and climate change

Prof. Falcon told Energy Forecast: “I seriously wonder whether South Africa will be able to meet the reduction as stated by 2020.

“But if this does happen, it is likely that the price of electricity will skyrocket relative to what South Africans pay today, due to the higher costs of alternative energies.

“South Africa has one of the cheapest electricity costs in the world. I believe in the development of many high-energy industries such as aluminium and other metalliferous ore melting in this country,” she added.

“If the costs go up significantly, South Africa will not be competitive any longer and may well lose those industries to other countries.”

A host under possible pressure

South Africa hosts the 17th Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Durban later in 2011, well aware of its status as the premier emitter of CO2 on the continent. Prof. Falcon was asked whether that would pressurise the country.

She said that morally it would pressurise South Africa. “But we should defend our right to consider poverty alleviation, housing and education first,” she added.

“I am a great believer in the fact that industrialised counties of the north have had centuries to develop into mature economies and by now have the funds to do something about their emissions. But we as a country and continent have yet to get to the same level of social and economic maturity.

“If we do not, African countries, including South Africa, will simply be a burden on the world in terms of poverty, wars and disease. The 1.5% of the world’s emissions (by South Africa), while notable, is merely a drop in the ocean relative to the rest of the world,” said Prof. Falcon.

Fanie Heyns