Bangladesh appears trapped in false energy solutions for decades to come with plans to hold onto its overwhelming fossil fuel dependence for a while before switching to what it refers to as clean energy.
Emran Hossain
Fossil fuels dominance in Bangladesh’s newly formulated energy plan
Bangladesh would be ‘decarbonise ready’ in 2050, the newly-formulated Integrated Energy and Power Master Plan said, indicating the persistence of fossil fuels dominance for decades while the country introduces technologies such as hydrogen and ammonia co-firings as clean energy.
The so-called clean energy technologies are far from being proven, energy experts already warned, identifying them as false solutions invented to buy more time for fossil fuels.
The new technologies are costlier, energy experts and individual researchers warned, with their application failing to promise a complete reduction in greenhouse gas emissions anytime soon. The financial risks involved in making investments in unproven technologies, which the IEPMP, passed last year, said would start in a decade, are too many, particularly for a country like Bangladesh.
Bangladesh is in the middle of its worst economic crisis in decades following the draining of its foreign currency reserve by fossil fuel imports and capacity charge payments.
Bangladesh’s current installed power generation capacity is 30GW, half of which remains unused anyway – energy shortage triggered by the economic crisis, technical difficulties believed to be owed to sub-standard equipment and transmission and distribution incapacities.
The draining of the foreign currency weakened the taka, leading to staggering inflation for more than two years now, prompting authorities to introduce rolling blackouts and the poor to shed protein from their food menu.
Over the 14 years until August 2023, Bangladesh paid Tk 1 lakh crore in capacity charge, money paid to power plants regardless of offtake, while Tk 40,000 crore was spent just in 2021-22 alone to import LNG and Tk 25,000 crore to import coal.
Trying to cope with the predatory energy expenses, Bangladesh has increased energy prices by about 300 per cent since 2009 with forecasts that many more price hikes are on the cards.
The current crisis came with many forewarnings, often issued after the passing of power and energy master plans, particularly since 2010. The warnings were always ignored.
Just as in the past, the new IEPMP downplayed renewable energy potentials with the introduction of clean energy and the plan to keep expanding its fleet of fossil-fuel-based power plants.
Depending mostly on imports, Bangladesh plans to add 11.1GW of new gas-fired capacity by 2027 and 6.5GW of new coal capacity by 2026.
Clean energy, on the other hand, will account for 40 per cent of the power generation mix in 2041, the year the installed power generation capacity will reach 60GW. With an outstanding debt of 4$b in unpaid energy and other bills, energy experts said, the IEPMP risks further increasing Bangladesh’s economic burden with clean energy.
The so-called clean energy
Theoretically, co-firing coal with cleaner alternative fuels means replacing a portion of the coal used for power production with ammonia or biomass.
Blending hydrogen with natural gas, on the other hand, involves injecting hydrogen into the natural gas fed to the gas turbine.
The replacement of fossil fuels with the so-called cleaner fuels involves modifications or retrofitting of the existing infrastructure and adding new equipment and introducing new technologies.
Hydrogen combustion requires new equipment and operations and maintenance to deal with higher combustion temperatures and increased use of water for cooling.
Limited modifications to fossil fuel thermal power plants may enable low levels of co-firing or blending but it barely reduces greenhouse gas emissions.
If not locally produced, Bangladesh will have to import clean fuels, which are even more expensive than liquefied natural gas import and involve complex steps to be maintained along the value chain, revealed a report released by the Bloomberg NEF in October last year. The Bloomberg estimated that imported hydrogen procurement could be four to five times more expensive than gas procurement and ammonia could be seven to nine times costlier than coal.
The biggest cost driver behind imported hydrogen is the conversion process. The Bloomberg report assumed that hydrogen is exported to Bangladesh from Australia or the Middle East in the form of ammonia as it is the most economical shipping option. This requires ammonia synthesis using hydrogen. Once in Bangladesh, ammonia must be converted back to hydrogen and nitrogen via thermolysis. These conversion processes are costly and increase the costs of imported hydrogen production.
The biggest problem with hydrogen is it is a very small molecule that gets easily leaked to combine with other molecules, potentially leading to methane concentration in the atmosphere. Hydrogen is an indirect greenhouse gas with a significantly higher global warming potential than carbon dioxide. If hydrogen is domestically produced, it requires electrolysis of water using clean electricity.
Bangladesh would need to build 9.3GW of solar projects to domestically supply hydrogen to power a 1GW retrofitted combined cycle gas turbine plant, the Bloomberg NEF estimated, adding that only 2.8GW of solar would generate the same amount of electricity. Ammonia is a hydrogen derivative.
The Bloomberg NEF estimated that 9.9GW of solar project would be needed to locally supply ammonia for a 1GW retrofitted coal power plant. ‘This is more than four times larger than solar capacity needed (2.1GW) to generate the same amount of electricity as the coal plant,’ said the Bloomberg report.
Combustion of fuels such as hydrogen or ammonia at high temperatures leads to NOx emissions, more than what is emitted by fossil fuel power plants. These combustion technologies also emit nitrous oxide (N2O) – a greenhouse gas that poses a 273 times greater global warming threat than that of carbon dioxide over a 100-year timescale.
Hydrogen and ammonia are also highly flammable. Hydrogen is particularly risky for it is hard to detect for being odorless and colorless. The greenhouse gas is also emitted during hydrogen derivation. Green hydrogen, which releases little or no greenhouse gas, is derived via electrolysis of water using renewable electricity.
Blue hydrogen, derived from steam reforming of methane or gasification of coal coupled with carbon capture and storage, releases more emissions than green hydrogen.
Gray hydrogen is produced almost the same way as blue hydrogen is but without the use of CCS, releasing large volumes of carbon dioxide.
Bloomberg noted that almost all hydrogen and ammonia produced today are gray.
According to a study by the Japan Center for a Sustainable Environment and Society, the cost of generating a kWh of electricity from a gas-fired power plant with carbon capture technology is estimated to be 8.4USC, which is 4.7USC with coal and 5.2 USC with nuclear energy.
The cost of production with ammonia is 17 USC and hydrogen 14 USC.
The center noted that a 100 per cent ammonia co-firing could reduce a maximum of 20 per cent reduction in carbon emission.
A glimpse into Bangladesh’s power and energy master plans
The IEPMP was funded by the Japan International Cooperation Agency, which also supported the formulation of the previous plans in 2016 and 2010. Previous plans were called the power sector master plan or PSMP. The 2016 PSMP introduced the plan to import gas and coal for massive power sector expansion. The 2010 PSMP planned to source 50 per cent of its energy from coal in 2030.
The first PSMP came in 1985 with a focus on oil and gas as an energy source. The second master plan in 1995 was based on local gas for cluster-based expansion of power plants. The next PSMP in 2005 introduced domestic coal as another potential energy source. The first three master plans were funded by UNDP and ADB and developed by foreign consultation firms from the USA, Canada and Japan.
‘Bangladesh’s power and energy plans have always been formulated by foreign consultants who developed the plans keeping in mind their interest,’ said Hasan Mehedi, member secretary, Bangladesh Working Group on Ecology and Development, a platform of green activists.
About 95 per cent of gas turbines used in Bangladesh are supplied by the USA-based General Electric. The other important gas turbine suppliers included Japan-based Marubeni and Toshiba. China and India penetrated Bangladesh’s energy market after 2010.
A report released by the United States-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis in March this year revealed that Japan has a surplus LNG problem that it plans to dump on South and Southeast Asian countries, including Bangladesh.
