UTILITY EXECUTIVE SEES PARALLELS BETWEEN COAL TODAY, NUCLEAR IN 1980S

Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
10/19/12

PITTSBURGH—The uncertain future the U.S. coal industry is currently facing is reminiscent of the nuclear industry’s experience after the Three Mile Island disaster in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Southern Company executive Chris Hobson said this week in a keynote here at the International Pittsburgh Coal Conference. “When Three Mile Island happened, the promise of nuclear power really seemed to be gone, but instead of backing away from technology development, industry, government and in some cases international entities came together and decided that it was in everybody’s best interest to develop new technology [such as advanced passive safety systems], and that technology has come to be,” said Hobson, senior vice president for Research and Environmental Affairs at Southern Company. “The same can be said for coal…but we need to remain committed to technology development around coal.”

Hobson said that the experience with nuclear energy could be some sort of “guiding light” for coal advocates hoping to bring their industry back to prosperity. He added that a coal “renaissance” is possible if government and industry push for the development of new technologies such as carbon capture and storage that could help bring the industry into the 21st century. “Clearly CCS is the key here. It’s analogous to the nuclear situation because I believe even though we might be a little bit reluctant to go forward with coal in this country, there are other countries that are not so reluctant,” Hobson said in a subsequent interview. “They’re going to want to make progress around carbon capture technologies so that they’ll ultimately be able to implement them.” He said that the U.S. should aim to take a leadership role in CCS development even if coal use continues to decline. “If there isn’t American leadership I don’t know that it will happen at all,” he said. “Maybe in the absence of American leadership somebody would step up, but I think right now clearly America is leading [CCS technology development].”

Hobson called for political leaders to maintain support for CCS R&D programs such as the Department of Energy’s National Carbon Capture Center, which is operated by Southern Company in Wilsonville, Ala., and allows developers to test their CO2 capture technologies on real flue gas at pilot scale. He said that the second and third generation technologies being tested there could be the key to making CCS economic in the future. “We need to keep the [coal industry] vibrant and working so that when we do need to do coal better, we’ll have the infrastructure to do it,” he said.