Which power plant is greener? Tuas Power or Senoko Power?

Tuas Power is building a clean coal and biomass plant:

Mr Lim Kong Puay, chief executive of Tuas Power, said: “The efficient use of the cogeneration technology coupled with biomass and clean coal allows us to achieve savings, and this saving will be passed on to our industrial consumers.”

‘Overall, we are able to produce one unit of energy at a more competitive cost,’ said Tuas Power president and CEO Lim Kong Puay.

Senoko Power is converting its plants from oil-fired to gas-fired:

Senoko had considered using coal, which is a cheaper fuel, Mr Adair said, but was very conscious of its carbon footprint which is two-and-a-half times that of natural gas. On the other hand, the carbon footprint of gas is also only 60 per cent that of oil. The genco will be seeking carbon credits for the project, he added.

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Tuas Power is going ahead with its plan to build Singapore’s first clean coal and biomass plant. We expressed concerns about Tuas Power’s proposed plans in our previous post, Red dot goes black?, and our worries have come true.

We wrote the following letter to The Straits Times to express our concerns about the use of coal by Tuas Power:

I refer to the article, “Tuas Power to build $2b ‘clean’ plant” by Clarissa Oon (ST Sep 26).

Clean coal is an oxymoron as coal is associated with multiple environmental problems such as habitat destruction, acid rain and global warming. Burning coal produces higher levels of carbon dioxide, sulphur oxides, nitrogen oxides, particulates and mercury.

With these environmental impacts in mind, Tuas Power and the National Environment Agency need to reassure the public and concerned environmentalists on the use of coal in the new plant.

Would the new plant meet the relevant air emissions and environmental regulations? Are carbon emissions per kilowatt hour higher for the new plant as compared to a natural gas-fired plant? Would the use of coal in the new plant lead to greater use of coal by other power generation companies?

This switch to using coal by Tuas Power seems to contradict the government’s efforts and plans on sustainable development. The new plant should not increase Singapore’s environmental impacts, especially our carbon emissions. If not, it would seem that we are moving one step forward and two steps backward on our green efforts.

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China Huaneng Group, a Chinese state-owned enterprise has recently bought over Singapore’s Tuas Power, a power plant that produces about 26% of Singapore’s electricity. According to the Business Times, Tuas Power is planning to convert its standby capacity of 1,200 MW that is currently generated by steam plants to be generated by either natural gas-fired plants or coal-fired plants.

Tuas Power’s CEO Lim Kong Puay explained that the capital costs of coal-fired plants (about $2 billion) would be higher than natural gas-fired plants (about $700 to $800 million), but coal-fired plants have lower operating costs. Tuas Power could also tap on its new owner, Huaneng’s vast experience in coal-fired plants in China.

We think it is highly possible that Tuas Power would take the coal route as it wants to tap on the expertise of Huaneng on coal and cut its costs before its competitors (such as Power Seraya and Senoko Power) also acquire new owners and become more competitive. Once there is a coal-fired plant in Singapore, the worry is that other power plants will follow suit and build more coal-fired plants as coal is still more cost competitive than oil and natural gas.

We are against the use of coal for generating electricity because coal is still a dirtier fuel source that emits more carbon dioxide, thus contributing to global warming. A cleaner coal-fired plant such as a modern Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) plant still emit about twice the carbon dioxide amount as compared to a natural gas-fired plant. The future zero emissions coal plant using carbon capture and sequestration technologies are still in research and not commercially available yet.

In Tuas Power’s Health, Safety and Environmental Policy, they commit to:

Conducting operations in an environmentally responsible manner through maximizing our plant efficiency, resource conservation, reducing waste and controlling emissions

We hope that Tuas Power would remember its own environmental commitment to control emissions and reject the idea of building coal-fired plants in Singapore. If there is a go-ahead by the government to allow Tuas Power to start using coal to generate our energy, does it mean that we are contradicting our stand on sustainable development and climate change?

Source: Business Times via Wildsingapore; Tuas Power. Image attribution: Wolfiewolf.

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