IOP Groups

Clean Coal Electricity Generation

Professor Allan Jones (E.ON UK)

Abstract

Coal has been a reliable primary fuel for the generation of electricity in the UK for over a century. In recent decades, however, it has had to rise to the challenge of increasingly stringent environmental legislation and has been somewhat eclipsed by gas, nuclear and renewable technologies in a challenging electricity marketplace. However, in addition to environmental impact, security of supply and affordability are two additional important criteria in the Government’s energy strategy which coal is arguably well placed to address. Regardless of the UK position on coal as a fuel for power generation, the major developing nations (particularly China and India) have coal at the centre of their substantial increased demand for electricity and clean technologies must be developed and transferred if the threat of global climate change is to be averted.

The presentation summarises how the development of first generation ‘clean coal’ technologies has enabled coal fired power generation to meet the challenges posed by tighter limits on particulates and acid gases. It moves on to discuss the new challenge of CO2 abatement and the options that are available for the required next generation of clean coal technologies. Higher efficiency stream cycles, moving to ultrasupercritical designs of coal fired plant, oxyfuel firing, gasification and carbon capture and storage will all be subjected to a snapshot review.

RD&D activity, both current and planned, is also summarised and the current list of full scale demonstration/early deployment projects discussed. Finally, some indication of the relative costings of the ‘carbon friendly’ power generating options are given, as this will naturally have a major impact on the energy mix that will evolve from the need to plug a looming gap in electricity generating capacity in the UK over the next ten years.

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