Post-Fukushima Japan Chooses Coal and Nuclear Over Renewables


In 2010, Japan touted plans to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels for electricity. Following an ambitious blue print, the government wanted to reduce liquid natural gas and coal's 60-percent share of the energy mix to just 10 percent upon reaching ecotopia in 2030. Nuclear would increase significantly and renewables would jump to 20 percent.

But the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster at Fukushima trashed that plan, forcing Japan to turn off its nuclear power plants, which has relentlessly pushed up fossil fuel imports ever since. Before the accident, Japan got 62 percent of its electricity from fossil fuels, and nuclear made up a third. Since then, as utilities crawled back to coal and LNG, thermal power rose to 90 percent of Japan's electricity mix.

Struggling to compete globally

Buying more fossil fuels has been painful for the resource-poor "energy island," which has run 20 consecutive months of trade deficits, and last year did an about face on promises to cut greenhouse gas emissions, a pragmatic but embarrassing admission of failure. For LNG, the surge in demand caused the price per MMBtu to shoot up and peak at $17 in 2011 from $11 before the accident, dropping a few dollars since.

With high energy costs, heavy industries like the automotive sector struggled to compete globally. So after Prime Minister Abe was elected, he quickly confronted the trade deficit, driven largely by fuel purchases. That's one

reason his government's Basic Energy Plan now calls for both additional coal plants and restarting the nuclear power fleet. While this decision obviously dismayed environmentalists, putting more coal and nukes to work is kryptonite to high natural gas prices.

The new policy said the government will "lower as much as possible" Japan's dependency on nuclear power and push for the development of more renewables, including wind, geothermal, and solar. Though the new policy said Japan will cut its nuclear dependency as much as possible, it failed to set specific targets for each source.

"Each energy source has its own characteristics and no energy source is perfect in terms of stable supply, cost, environmental impacts and safety," Toshimitsu Motegi, the minister of economy, trade and industry, said to Bloomberg. "We aim for an energy demand-supply structure that is realistic and well-balanced."

What made the official vagueness odd was that in the first 8 months of fiscal year 2013, 4.58 GW of solar PV were added in Japan, driven primarily by Government incentives. There's more good news. Japan's first floating wind turbine can be seen 15 miles off the coast from Fukushima, the first step by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and a large consortium toward building the world's largest offshore wind farm.

Japan's coal-powered future

Nevertheless, utilities were a step ahead of the government. With nuclear reactors dead in the water, awaiting safety checks, Japan's 10 power companies consumed 5.66 million metric tons of coal in January, a record for the month and 12 percent more than a year ago, according to Bloomberg.

Japan's coal-powered future is now showcased at Nakoso Power Station's No 10 coal power generator, a joint venture between Tokyo Electric Power and Tohoku Electric Power, located about 37 miles from the devastated Fukushima nuclear plant. Station No 10 was built in 2007 to test new integrated gasification combined-cycle (IGCC) technology built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. It produces about a quarter of the power of a 1 gigawatt nuclear reactor.

Mitsubishi began developing their coal gasification technology more than a quarter-century ago, after the oil crises in the 1970s. At the time, gasification was already under development in the United States and Europe, but for the most part it was targeted at the chemical industry.

Targeting the power industry, according to Mutsubishi, it became the only company to put both air-blown and oxygen-blown processes into one gasifier, which was refined during a 25 year scale-up, enabling it to take advantage of previously ignored lignite.

A global supplier of its IGCC technology

The Mitsubishi IGCC's big selling points are a high degree of automation, an integrated plant built entirely in house, and increased efficiency. Inside the dual cycle turbine, the first combustible gas fuels a gas turbine. In the second, waste heat from the first

process drives a steam turbine, creating 20 percent more power than conventional coal-fired systems.

Ironically, without the disaster three years ago, the generator wouldn't even exist. But today it's up and running and delivering record amounts of power to the grid. "This was originally a research generator," Yoshitaka Ishibashi, the plant"s manager, told a reporter from Bloomberg News. "They're usually dismantled once the study is over. But nuclear reactors were suspended, power supply was tight, and 250 megawatts is not a negligible capacity. So it was turned into a commercial one."

Mitsubishi, which aims to be a global supplier of its IGCC technology, will have a majority stake in the new plants. Cashflow-challenged Tepco will run the plants, which they will put online around 2020. The Mitsubishi's literature shows three international projects in development.

For Tepco this is part of a big push into coal to serve its 29 million customers. The utility will add two more IGCC generators, one at the Nakoso station and the other nearby at its Hirono plant. A more traditional 600-megawatt coal-fired generator at Hirono fired up last December.

Is Prime Minster Abe's strategy short-sighted, or a smart move?

Images: Fukushima, Digital Globe; Nakoso Power Station No 10, factory construction, MHI, Floating wind turbine, MHI

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