Technology making fossil fuels less polluting and more efficient

The story of energy is mainly that of the fossil fuels -- coal, oil and natural gas -- that are the source of 85 percent of the energy consumed in the United States and the world.
How fossil fuels came to underpin modern life is largely a story of technology. That will not change soon. The experts project that fossil fuels in 2030 will still account for 85 percent of domestic and worldwide energy. Why? Because they are abundant, well understood, affordable and supported by an amazingly complex infrastructure and continual technological advances.
The Energy Policy Act of 2005 recognizes these realities and advocates or mandates research and development projects that should produce important new technologies for fossil energy, as well as for other vital energy efficiency, renewable energy and nuclear energy technologies designed to re-draw today's energy picture.
Coal, for example, is fast evolving into an energy resource that will produce virtually no polluting or greenhouse gas emissions, the primary goal of President Bush's $2 billion, 10-year commitment to clean coal research.
The centerpiece of current clean coal R&D is ``FutureGen,'' a full-scale, 275-megawatt technology proving ground/test facility that should be up and running by the year 2012. (A commercial 275 megawatt power plant would serve more than 215,000 homes.)
At a cost of approximately $700 million to the taxpayer spread over several years, with an additional $300 million contributed by industry and foreign government participants, FutureGen will generate affordable electricity, manufacture hydrogen and useful byproducts, virtually eliminate polluting emissions and use ``carbon sequestration'' technology to capture and permanently store carbon dioxide emissions underground. The result will be secure, clean, coal-based energy that can continue supplying more than half our national electricity needs while producing fuel to help supply the fleet of hydrogen-powered vehicles projected to begin appearing on American roads in 2020.
Department of Energy investment: $700 million.
Return on investment: priceless.
Clean coal projects already completed are generating substantial short-term benefits in the form of reduced emissions and increased efficiency. Dozens more are now under way. While past results are no guarantee of future performance, as Wall Street likes to say of investments, the record of achievement is impressive:
• Federal coal R&D investment totaling $4 billion will yield $100 billion in benefits through 2020, according to an industry study.
• R&D projects aimed at just one advanced process, fluidized bed combustion, , produced technology now used in 570 new units operating in the United States and other countries. Each dollar invested in fluidized bed combustion yielded an estimated $9 return.
• Coal plant technology developed under Department of Energy auspices has produced environmental benefits estimated at $60 billion through the year 2000 from reductions in emissions that cause acid rain, according to the National Research Council.
• New pollution reduction technologies have been cost-effective, lowering the cost of controls for sulfur dioxide by 66 percent and for nitrogen oxide by 93 percent. Emissions dropped dramatically but electric bills did not rise.
• Coal R&D could benefit American consumers to the tune of nearly $1.5 trillion over the next 40 years, according to an Electric Power Research Institute estimate.
This partial list of cost benefits will grow at an accelerating rate as current R&D technology projects aimed at gasification, fuel cells, mercury emissions and carbon sequestration begin to bear fruit.
Coal also has potential as a source of clean diesel fuel. Research continues on ways to make coal-to-liquids technology cost-competitive with oil-derived and other vehicle fuels.
Meanwhile, R&D aimed at methane hydrates and oil shale could, in perhaps a decade, unlock oil and natural gas resources that dwarf current domestic reserves. The Department of Energy's R&D investment in fossil fuels is relatively small -- less than $600 million in the current federal budget -- but it is vital to providing the secure energy on which our economic future and our way of life depend.
JEFFREY JARRETT is the assistant secretary of energy in the Department of Energy. He wrote this article for the Mercury News.