CEE Jan-Mar 2012

f registration of COM projects easy, and it has also bowed to the might of the fossil fuel industry and has agreed to the modalities and procedures for inclusion of carbon capture and storage (CCS) as a COM project. CCS is a technology to capture C0 2 emitted by fossil fuel burning industry and store it in geological formations. According to a report published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a CCS– equipped thermal power plant will burn 40 per cent more coal to capture C02 than a conventional power plant. Since C02 will be stored in geological sites, which might run across many countries, CCS will create waste sites that will need to be carefully monitored and managed for hundreds of years to ensure that C0 2 does not escape into the atmosphere. At Durban, industry lobbyists sold CCS as an important mitigation technology to help developing countries provide electricity to the poor and solve climate change. One other such industry– friendly decision was the inclusion of materiality standard within the COM. Materiality is an accounting principle that deals Energy COAL PRICES SET TO CHANGE New grading system will be a setback for the power sector THE system of grading coal in India will change from January 1 so that it complies with the global standards. The switch, announced by the Union Ministry of Coal, will hit the power sector hard. with omission, misstatement or erroneous reporting of information. The Bonn-based COM Executive Board now rejects or sends for review many projects because these claim higher carbon credits than the actual emissions reduction. The projects do this because of accounting errors or omission or misstatement of information. The projects are rejected or sent for review irrespective of the level of excess carbon credit they claim. The COP meet at Durban has now fixed a tolerance limit for excess carbon credit. If the excess carbon credit claimed by projects due to accounting errors or omission or misstatement of information is within the tolerance limit, the project will be accepted, else rejected. This means many projects will not have to go through repeated review if the designated operational entity which is conducting the verification gives an assurance certificate that the error in accounting of carbon credit is within the tolerance limit. The tolerance limit for excess carbon credit has been fixed on the basis of the size of the projects. Projects reducing emissions by 500,000 tonnes of C0 2 have tolerance limits of 0.5 NEWS BRIEF Till now, the value of coal was calculated on the basis of its ash and moisture content. The best coal has the lowest ash and moisture content. This is called Useful Heating Value (UHV). The new calculation , called Gross Calorific Value (GCV), will also include the chemical composition of coal, says Kalyan Sen, former director of the Central Fuel Research Institute, who was a member of per cent; for small-scale renewable energy and energy efficiency projects, it is 10 per cent. No leapfrog The credibility of COM as a tool to leapfrog to low-carbon economy is already in doubt as it has allowed generation of carbon credits from coal-based thermal power plants using a little more efficient technology than the ones being used currently. There are already 45 coal power plants in the COM pipeline. Recently, the COM Executive Board suspended the carbon crediting rules for coal power projects after it found that these projects were using flawed methodologies to overestimate their carbon credits. In the age of domestic and voluntary commitments for emission reduction, the big question is should the developing countries sell away their cheap options for a few dollars more. If the Indian industry's myopic view is to be accepted, the answer would be yes. Courtesy: Down to Earth, January 16-31, 2012, P18 the team that had adopted UHV in the 1960s. The switch to GCV will set much higher standards for calculating the energy content of coal as it will take into account the content of highly combustible elements like carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and sulphur. "This will change coal pricing. Higher grades will fetch better prices and vice-versa, " says N C Shah, chairperson of Coal India Limited (CIL), a state-owned 33