Slashdot Mirror
The World Falls Back In Love With Coal
Hugh Pickens writes "Richard Anderson reports on BBC that despite stringent carbon emissions targets in Europe designed to slow global warming and massive investment in renewable energy in China, coal, the dirtiest and most polluting of all the major fossil fuels, is making a comeback with production up 6% over 2010, twice the rate of increase of gas and more than four times that of oil. 'What is going on is a shift from nuclear power to coal and from gas to coal; this is the worst thing you could do, from a climate change perspective,' says Dieter Helm. Why the shift back to coal? Because coal is cheap, and getting cheaper all the time. Due to the economic downturn, there has been a 'collapse in industrial demand for energy,' leading to an oversupply of coal, pushing the price down. Meanwhile China leads the world in coal production and consumption. It mines over 3 billion tons of coal a year, three times more than the next-biggest producer (America), and last year overtook Japan to become the world's biggest coal importer. Although China is spending massive amounts of money on a renewable energy but even this will not be able to keep up with demand, meaning fossil fuels will continue to make up the majority of the overall energy mix for the foreseeable future and when it comes to fossil fuels, coal is the easy winner — it is generally easier and cheaper to mine, and easier to transport using existing infrastructure such as roads and rail, than oil or gas. While China is currently running half a dozen carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects — which aim to capture CO2 emissions from coal plants and bury it underground — the technology is nowhere near commercial viability. 'Renewed urgency in developing CCS globally, alongside greater strides in increasing renewable energy capacity, is desperately needed,' writes Anderson, 'but Europe's increasing reliance on coal without capturing emissions is undermining its status as a leader in clean energy, and therefore global efforts to reduce CO2 emissions.'"
Um, no. Burning natual gas emits lots of CO2. Less than coal or oil, because so much more of it is hydrogen, but there's still a good amount of carbon there and it emits CO2 when burned.
I misspoke in saying it burnt without emitting CO2, but as you say it burns cleaner than coal which is what as the article says, they are turning to in Europe.
So switching to a much heavier use of natural gas can significantly reduce CO2 emissions.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No it's not. North America and South America are two continents. America is an accepted name for the United States of America.
Since China is the world's largest IMPORTER of coal, there is no cheap Chinese coal on the world market. I didn't even have to RTFA to get that from the summary. The coal industry in the US is hurting because cheap natural gas is displacing it (free market at work, but Murray Energy blames it on Obama). Natural gas outside of the North American market is not (yet) so cheap so it is not pressuring coal outside N. America.
This should be great for the zeta cartels - it seems they've expanded from drugs and mass-murder to the coal industry.
Now when we do such things as turn on a light, we can relish more than our collective carbon boot-print on the Earth's bemired face -- we can smile as we bask in the sanguineous luminosity of torture and intoxication too!
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
Coal spews more radiation than a nuclear meltdown, and kills many more people in it's extraction and mining. How's that for some things not to love?
..don't panic
The nuclear accident of Fukushima has yet to kill *a single person* due to radiation. I don't know where you get your data, but surely it's not factual.
Patrick Moore understood this but of course to the ignorants at Greenpeace this makes him a corporate shill. Environmental protection should be all about setting global priorities straight NOW.
Funny that the data doesnt shows a "dismantling [of] our manufacturing industry."
Our manufacturing industry simply evolved towards automation. We make more than we ever did before, its just that we use fewer man hours than we used to. Even small machine shops that used to employ a few dozen people now employ only a couple of people total who monitor CNC machines, but these small machine shops now output more product than they ever did using manual labor, and its made to tighter specifications than ever before too.
I worked in a shop where many employees were grinding some carbide cutting tools that needed to be within a spec of +/- 2 ten thousandths of an inch destined for Pratt and Whitney's jet engine manufacturing facility. There was lots of waste because it was exceedingly difficult to consistently make parts with such a tight specification. That same shop now uses a single CNC machine to make the same part, has almost no waste at all, and only needs a single person to oversee the machine periodically (the person can oversee dozens of machines.)
That, my friend, is what happened to American manufacturing. We didn't stop making stuff. We just stopped using people to do it.
"His name was James Damore."
The difference is that the residual radioactive materials in coal power station exhaust and fly ash tend to be long-lived ones from natural decay processes -- U238's half-life is 4.5 billion years so a tonne of uranium metal isn't actually very radioactive and in a lump nearly all of the decays that happen every second occur deep inside the lump and never make it to the outside where they can have an effect on the environment. In the case of power station fly ash radioactive contaminants like U238 and Th232 are diluted in lagoons under water and the perceived problem is the chemical toxicity of the sludge (toxic metals, dioxins, sulfur compounds etc.) rather than its radioactivity.
Conversely fission products from a reactor fuel rod that's been run for any length of time have a wide range of half-lifes from milliseconds to millenia. Some are long-lived enough to be an ongoing problem for disposal while also having short enough half-lives that they emit noticeable and possibly dangerous amounts of radioactivity. For example cesium-137 has a 30-year half-life so a kilogram or two spread as fine particles over a wide area due to an accidental release such as in the Chernobyl and Fukushima incidents will emit significant amounts of radioactivity for a time measured in human lifespans. Coal power station waste has virtually no radioactive contaminants with such a short half-life, but there is a very large amount of it produced every year. The exception is radon which is released in both coal mining and combustion -- all of the radon isotopes are quite short-lived and highly active.
Enough radioactive material escapes coal station chimneys even with 99%-plus filtration and precipitation in the stacks that it can be trivially detected downwind for long distances, especially if rain washes it down onto population centres nearby. I've seen a report of radioactive material attributed to the Fukushima releases being detected with simple radiation monitoring instruments in rainwater samples in the middle of St. Louis MO not long after the earthquake and tsunami in March 2011. One of the biggest coal-fired power station complexes in the US (Labadie, burning over 8 million tonnes of coal each year to produce 2.3GW of electricity) is about 20 miles to the west from where the measurements were taken.