Coal is dirtying Scotland's carbon-neutral plans

Scotland has the potential to be a world leader in developing low-carbon fuels, but Alex Salmond's reliance on coal is an albatross around its neck

Fred Pearce
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 7 January 2010 11.29 GMT
There were a lot of big names at the UN's climate change conference in Copenhagen last month: Barack Obama, Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel and the rest. So not a lot of attention was paid to Alex Salmond, the first minister of Scotland. But he played a blinder, at least for domestic audiences, by linking up with the president of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, to create a "climate partnership".
Much of the Maldives, an archipelago of some 1,200 low-lying islands in the Indian Ocean, is likely to disappear beneath the rising seas within the next century. But its government is doing its best to hold back the tides with a national plan to go carbon-neutral by 2020. Salmond too has a 2020 plan, to cut Scottish emissions by 42% on 1990 levels.
Salmond said: "We are delighted to help the Maldives in their endeavour to become the world's first carbon-neutral country". But maybe he needs a reminder of the definition of carbon-neutral, because many would say that his own plans are flawed. The problem can be summed up in one word: coal.
Now don't get me wrong. The Scottish government's enthusiasm for renewable energy is genuine and first class. But a lot of people in the Highlands hate it. And anger was heightened this week with news that Holyrood has approved a line of 600 pylons through the Cairngorms from Beauly to Denny that will connect wind and wave power to the grid.
Although Salmond wants to generate half his country's electricity from renewables, he wants to generate the other half with fossil fuels, mostly coal. By some estimates, Scotland has one-tenth of Europe's total coal reserves. And he wants to use them.
I've mentioned this before. But as his plans firm up – for instance in the latest Climate change in Scotland annual report (pdf) – his fixation with coal looks an increasing liability.
Around 90% of Scotland's power comes from just five power stations (pdf): two old coal stations at Longannet and Cockenzie, a gas-fuelled station at Peterhead and two ageing nuclear power plants at Hunterston and Torness.
Coal is high-carbon; nuclear is low-carbon. Whenever the two nuclear stations go offline, the country's carbon dioxide emissions will surge as coal plants replace their power. But Salmond has ruled out replacing the old nuclear plants. "Our aim is a non-nuclear Scotland," he says.
Instead he wants to extend the lives of the two existing coal plants, while adding a third to replace the Hunterston nuclear plant.
But Salmond says coal can be green. He is among the keenest in a big field of world leaders anxious to talk up the potential of developing carbon capture and storage (CCS) for coal power generation. This proposed technology would capture carbon dioxide as it goes up the power station stack and transport it for burial in disused oil wells beneath the North Sea.
This time last year, one of the world's leading climate scientists, Nasa's Jim Hansen, wrote to Salmond, pleading with him to abandon plans for more coal-fired power stations in Scotland, at least until CCS technology was up and running.
Salmond's view is this: : "Coal is king ... If you can use clean-coal technology, coal has a dynamic future. It means coal, far from being environmentally unacceptable, is becoming environmentally attractive."
One day, maybe. CCS is likely to prove such an energy-intensive technology that, rather like biofuels, its benefits may prove illusory. But not even its biggest enthusiasts expect CCS to be functioning on anything more than a pilot scale this side of 2020. Most reckon the 2030-40s are more likely.
Salmond's political career will be over by then. And his new coal-fired power plants are likely to be ending their lives having captured little - if any - of the millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide they will have emitted.
Scotland genuinely does have the potential to be a world leader in developing low-carbon fuels. And Salmond has the political charisma and nous to make it happen. But he has an albatross round his neck: coal. It may sink his green reputation, just as surely as it threatens to sink the Maldives.