Sir

Your News Feature “China's burning ambition” (Nature 435, 1152–1154; 2005) identifies gasification-based technologies as important for limiting future pollutant and CO2 emissions from China, but it fails to consider another major requirement for any future large-scale reduction strategy. There was no mention of CO2 capture and storage from the hundreds of new coal-combustion power plants that will inevitably be built in China during the coming decades. These modern power stations are likely to continue in use for about 50 years, and their combined emissions could exceed current UK emissions, for example, several times over.

As your News Feature notes, it would be very expensive to move immediately from combustion technologies to gasification-based options for all new coal plants. Fortunately, this is not necessary to prepare for eventual CO2 capture and geological carbon sequestration from these actual plants. Modern combustion plants using supercritical steam conditions, like those now being built in China, have coal-to-electricity efficiencies that at least match those of integrated gasifier combined cycle plants. With the latest technologies, efficiency penalties for capture are now also comparable.

Building a new supercritical steam plant to be ‘capture ready’, so that CO2 capture can be added later with minimal cost and performance impacts, will add a negligible amount to the initial cost, but could reduce subsequent economic penalties for adding capture by perhaps a third.

With no market or regulatory drivers currently in China to make coal-combustion plants ‘capture ready’, the technology has received little or no attention there, although it is being actively considered by electricity utilities in Canada and the United Kingdom.