The Huanen Beijing co-generation power plant is not the shining advertisement for clean coal that advocates claim, according to Thomas R Blakeslee in Renewable Energy World last week. Australian carbon capture and storage technology has been installed at the plant and 3,300 tonnes of carbon dioxide are captured annually and sold to soft drink manufacturers. Blakeslee said this is less than one thousandth of the CO2 produced by the plant and that the equipment required to compress and process the millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide the plant produces each year would be larger than the plant itself and would consume a significant portion of the power it produces. Blakeslee said, “the political stranglehold of the coal lobby is the biggest threat to our climate today.”
