Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumThe Death Of Coal? Guess Again - Globally, It's Only Accelerated Since The 1990s
f you only focused on the United States, you might think coal's days were numbered. The dirtiest of all fossil fuels once provided more than half of America's electricity. That has since dropped to 39 percent, thanks to competition from cheap natural gas, a tireless campaign by the Sierra Club to shutter old coal plants, and strict new air pollution regulations. Add in the Obama administration's upcoming crackdown on carbon-dioxide emissions from power plants, and US coal will keep waning in the future.
But that's not true globally. Far from it. According to data from BP's Statistical Review of Energy, coal consumption has actually been accelerating worldwide since the end of the 1990s:
https://cdn3.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/1KVCqJSOcTvfalhwOkAw_ColUOM=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/3852530/global%20energy%20use%20by%20source%202015.png
EDIT
According to an important study in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we're in the midst of a global "renaissance of coal" that's not confined to just a few countries like China or India. Rather, coal is becoming the energy source of choice for a vast array of poorer and fast-growing countries around the world, particularly in Southeast Asia. "This renaissance of coal," the authors write, "has even accelerated in the last decade."
Why is coal so widely popular? The authors of the PNAS study Jan Christoph Steckel, Ottmar Edenhofer, and Michael Jakob argue that coal is often the cheapest energy option in many parts of the world, relative to other sources like oil, gas, nuclear, or renewables. What's interesting is that countries no longer need their own domestic mines to take advantage of coal power. International coal markets have become so robust, with exports surging in mining countries like Australia and Indonesia, that it's become much easier for a wide variety of countries to build coal-fired power plants. (Notably, the authors say, the price of coal itself, rather than the capital costs of building power plants, seems to be the important economic driver here.)
EDIT
http://www.vox.com/2015/7/7/8908179/coal-global-climate-change
Erich Bloodaxe BSN
(14,733 posts)And expanded with a goal of building wind farms and solar farms in developing nations that would otherwise burn coal.
hatrack
(59,599 posts)Kusile, South Africa - thanks, World Bank!
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)happyslug
(14,779 posts)For example US Coal production continued to INCREASE after 1998, if you go by Coal Ton mined, but if you go by BTU produced by that coal, US production peaked in 1998 and has been declining ever since.
http://energywatchgroup.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/EWG_Report_Coal_10-07-2007ms.pdf
Anthracite: 30 MJ/kg
Bituminous coal: 18.829.3 MJ/kg
Subbituminous coal: 8.325 MJ/kg
Lignite: 5.514.3 MJ/kg
Most recent increase mining of coal in the US has been in Lignite coal, Anthracite the richest coal in terms of energy peaked production decades ago, Bituminous Coal is in the decline in the US but expanding in China:
Some previous threads on Coal:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/112777738
pscot
(21,024 posts)Just burn more of it. There's 540 billion tons in the Powder River basin alone, just lying there waiting to be shipped overseas.