by Robert Bryce
Clean Energy Systems expects to begin commercial deployment of its first units in 2014 or 2015. The first applications are likely to be for use in oil-recovery systems that need steam and/or carbon dioxide. Among the likely locations: the Permian Basin in Texas, a region chronically short of high-quality carbon dioxide, a gas that is valuable for enhanced oil recovery.
19
SMALLER FASTER AND THE COAL QUESTION
About one train per hour: that’s the target loading rate for the massive coal silos, conveyors, and hoppers at the North Antelope Rochelle Mine in central Wyoming’s Powder River Basin.
And on a cool, nearly windless day in March 2012, Scott Durgin, a regional vice president for Peabody Energy, was happy. Standing in the mine’s dispatch office, one wall of which was covered with flat-panel displays showing details of nearly every facet of the mine’s operation, Durgin pointed to a list of trains that had recently passed through the mine. A clock on the wall displayed exactly 12 noon. The huge mine had loaded eleven trains—each one carrying about 16,000 tons of coal—in the previous twelve hours.
Some 40 percent of all US coal production comes from the strip mines located within a few dozen miles of the control room where we were standing. When I asked Durgin how long Peabody could continue mining in the region, he replied that the company could easily keep going for another five decades. “There’s no end to the coal here,” he said.
The scale and productivity of the mine is difficult to imagine. It produces about 3 tons of coal per second. The coal from the mine could, on an ongoing basis, provide enough coal to generate about two-thirds of Mexico’s electricity needs.1
Despite its staggering productivity, the North Antelope Rochelle Mine—along with all of the other 1,300 coal mines operating in the United States—should be an anachronism.2 Today’s TV commercials and talking heads lionize wind turbines and solar panels, not coal mines. Indeed, coal is routinely demonized. In 2009, climate scientist James Hansen wrote an opinion piece for the Observer, in which he declared that “coal is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet . . . Trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death.”3
March 29, 2012: A Peabody Energy employee looks over the working face of the North Antelope Rochelle Mine. The coal seam being mined at the Wyoming site is about 80 feet thick. Source: Photo by author.
Although the anti-coal forces are strong, coal will not go away, because coal is a fuel of necessity for producing electricity. Demand for electricity throughout the world is soaring. And as coal deposits are abundant, widely dispersed, easily mined, and are not influenced by any OPEC-like entities, it’s easy to see why coal is the world’s fastest-growing energy source. Between 2002 and 2012, when US coal consumption fell by about 21 percent, global coal consumption soared, growing by 26.5 million barrels of oil equivalent per day. That nearly matches the global growth in consumption of oil, natural gas, nuclear, and wind energy combined over that time.5
Global Coal Consumption 1980–2011, and Projected to 2035
The ongoing boom in coal consumption in India, China, Germany, and other countries assures that coal use will continue rising for years to come. Between 2012 and 2035, the EIA expects coal consumption to rise by about 38 percent to about 98.5 million barrels of oil equivalent per day. Source: EIA.4
And therein lies a remarkable dichotomy: at a time when nearly everything in modern society is getting Smaller Faster Lighter, coal—a bulky, heavy fuel that’s more identified with the nineteenth century than the twenty-first—remains a remarkably resilient source of energy. Coal may be bulky and heavy, but it’s an excellent fuel for creating electrons, and few things are Smaller Faster Lighter than electrons. (Electricity travels at about the speed of light, which is roughly 1 billion kilometers—670 million miles—per hour.)
To be perfectly candid, the coal boom is problematic for the thesis of this book. The black fuel’s persistence in our energy mix both beggars and confirms the thesis at hand. Oil and natural gas are vastly superior in terms of their hydrogen-to-carbon ratios. For instance, diesel fuel contains about 60 percent more energy per kilogram than the best black coal; natural gas has about 90 percent more.6
1906: Miners use hand tools while mining coal by candlelight. Source: Library of Congress, LC-USZ62–27886.
But coal—stubborn old coal, a fuel that’s been used by humans for millennia, and now accounts for about 40 percent of all global electricity production—enables innovation.7 Without cheap supplies of electricity produced from coal, the ongoing revolution in information technology, as well as the age of biotech and nanotech, simply wouldn’t be possible. Electricity accelerates the trend toward objects and systems that are Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper.
Electricity is the fuel of modernity. Countries that have cheap, abundant, reliable supplies of electricity are able to bring their people out of darkness and poverty and into the light of the modern world. And from India and China to Vietnam and Indonesia, the fuel that’s supplying the vast majority of that electricity is coal.
Coal has been an essential fuel for electricity production ever since Thomas Edison used it in the first central power plant in Lower Manhattan in 1882. Of course, Edison wasn’t the first to exploit coal. The first instance of coal use likely occurred in China about 3,000 years ago. By the late 1600s, the town of Birmingham, England, had become a center of the metal-working business. The town had more than two hundred forges that used coal to produce iron.8
For much of human history, the black fuel has engendered an intense love-hate relationship. Coal heated people’s homes and fueled the Industrial Revolution in England, but it also made parts of the country, particularly the smog-ruined cities, nearly uninhabitable. In 1812, in London, a combination of coal smoke and fog became so dense that according to one report, “for the greater part of the day it was impossible to read or write at a window without artificial light. Persons in the streets could scarcely be seen in the forenoon at two yards distance.”9 Today, two hundred years later, some of the very same problems are plaguing China. In Datong, known as the “City of Coal,” the air pollution on some winter days is so bad that “even during the daytime, people drive with their lights on.”10
The air pollution that comes with today’s coal business is only part of the industry’s environmental and human toll. The coal industry causes serious damage on the surface of the Earth through strip mines, mountaintop removal, and ash ponds at power plants. In addition, thousands of miners die each year in the world’s coal mines, with Chinese mines being the most deadly. Here in the United States, forty-eight coal miners were killed in 2010, with twenty-nine of those deaths due to an explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia.11 That explosion was the worst mining accident in the United States in four decades.12
While air pollution from burning coal and the problems associated with coal production are deadly serious, the coal-related issue that’s getting the most attention from the media and policy makers is carbon dioxide emissions and climate change. While the US EPA and the Obama administration may want to prohibit the construction of new coal-fired power plants, their efforts will have almost no effect on global carbon dioxide emissions. Why? The United States may quit burning coal, but the rest of the world can’t, and won’t.
India Is Not Going “Beyond Coal”
In July 2012, blackouts hit northern India, leaving more than 600 million people—about twice the population of the United States—without electricity. Trains were stranded, traffic snarled, and the country’s economy ground to a halt. The blackouts were caused by excess demand when some regions of the country began taking more power than they had been allotted.13 In the months since the blackout, one thing has become certain: India won’t be going “beyond coal” anytime soon.
At the same time that the Sierra Club pushes its “beyond coal” campaign in the United States, developing countries are rapidly increasing their
coal consumption. Much of that surge in coal use occurred in India, the world’s third-largest coal consumer (behind only China and the United States). Burgeoning coal use helps explain why India’s carbon dioxide emissions jumped by 81 percent between 2002 and 2012. That same coal use explains why global carbon dioxide emissions continue to soar.14
Although India’s coal use—which doubled between 2002 and 2012 to some 6 million barrels of oil equivalent per day—keeps rising, the country remains chronically short of electricity. India’s per-capita electricity consumption is about 700 kilowatt-hours per year.15 For comparison, the average resident of China uses almost five times as much electricity as the average Indian, while the average American uses about 19 times as much.16 In mid-2013, Victor Mallet of the Financial Times reported on India’s electricity shortages: “Of all the problems blamed for the slowdown [of economic activity] over the past two years . . . the electricity shortage is now regarded by government and business alike as among the most serious.” Mallet went on to quote a government official who said that the country’s leaders used to think roads were the key to growth. But now, said the official, “it’s power, power, power.” To alleviate the shortages, India is planning to add about 90,000 megawatts of new generation capacity by 2018.17
While India wants to increase the amount of its natural gas–generation and nuclear-generation capacity, it still relies on coal for about two-thirds of its electricity production.18 With 60 billion tons of domestic coal reserves—enough to last a century at current rates of extraction—India has plenty of the carbon-heavy fuel. But the country’s mines are notoriously inefficient, and coal deliveries have been hamstrung by poor-quality transportation and ham-handed government policies. The result: India, which now imports about 25 percent of its coal, may soon surpass China as the world’s biggest coal importer.19
For years, Indian leaders have been saying that they will not let concerns about carbon dioxide impede their push to generate more electricity. In 2009, shortly before the big climate-change meeting in Copenhagen, that very message was delivered by none other than Rajendra Pachauri, the Indian academic who chairs the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “Can you imagine 400 million people who do not have a lightbulb in their homes?” he asked. “You cannot, in a democracy, ignore some of these realities and as it happens with the resources of coal that India has, we really don’t have any choice but to use coal.”20
Use it they will. In the wake of the blackouts, Indian officials are talking about expediting the permits needed to produce and transport more coal. Over the next decade or two, India’s coal use is expected to double, and so will easily surpass US coal consumption.21 But even if that occurs, India will likely continue lagging the developed world in production of electricity.
Slogans like “beyond coal” may appeal to members of the Sierra Club and to former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who gave the environmental group $50 million to help it “end the coal era.”22 But with 1.3 billion people on the planet still lacking access to electricity, the priority for leaders in New Delhi and other developing countries isn’t carbon dioxide emissions or “clean energy.” Instead, their primary aim is to simply bring their people out of the dark.
The rest of the world will keep burning coal because the essentiality of electricity to modernity is incontrovertible. The countries that have cheap, abundant, reliable electricity are wealthier than the countries that don’t. And the people who live in wealthier countries are living better, longer, healthier lives than they ever have before. The International Energy Agency calls electricity “crucial to human development,” and it says that the availability of electricity is “one of the most clear and un-distorted indications of a country’s energy poverty status.”23
Perhaps the best example of soaring electricity demand can be found in Vietnam. Between 2001 and 2010, electricity use in that country soared by 227 percent, a rate Faster than that of any other country on the planet.25 The country’s soaring electricity demand is also stoking demand for coal. Between 2001 and 2010, the country’s coal demand increased by 175 percent, again, Faster than in any other country. That coal use also led Vietnam to have the distinction of having the fastest-growing carbon dioxide emissions over that same time period. Emissions increased by 137 percent, exceeding the carbon-dioxide emissions growth in China, where emissions increased by 123 percent.26
Electricity Use Is Closely Correlated with Wealth Creation
Source: World Bank.24
Number of Days Needed to Consume 100 Kilowatt-hours
In 2013, Todd Moss of the Center for Global Development came up with a clever way to illustrate the energy poverty that prevails in the developing world by calculating how long it takes residents of different countries to consume 100 kilowatt-hours of electricity. His findings: an average American uses that amount of power in about 66 hours. By contrast, it takes the average Tanzanian more than a year to use that quantity of electricity. Source: Center for Global Development.27
So what can the United States and other wealthy countries say to a country like Vietnam when it comes to carbon dioxide emissions? The answer: very little. After all, Vietnam has about ninety million residents who live on an average annual income of about $1,400.
Or consider China. In 2011 alone, that country added 55,000 megawatts of new coal-fired capacity.28 That capacity was equal to about three-quarters of all of the nuclear reactors under construction around the world in 2013. (That amount totaled 72,000 megawatts.)29 Between 2012 and 2014, China was expected to add another 70,000 megawatts of new coal-fired electric-generation capacity, and another 280,000 megawatts of coal plants are being planned.30 For comparison, in 2011, the United States had about 300,000 megawatts of coal-fired electric capacity.31
Proponents of renewable energy are quick to claim that countries like China and India should be moving more quickly toward renewables in general and wind energy in particular. But in his 2012 book, The Carbon Crunch: How We’re Getting Climate Change Wrong—and How to Fix It, Dieter Helm, a professor of energy policy at Oxford University, points out that just to match the growth in coal-fired electricity in China and India, let alone replace any current power plants, those two countries would have to deploy about 1,000 megawatts of new wind turbines every week or about 52,000 per year. “Whether these numbers are out by a few thousand a year either way . . . does not much matter; it is the sheer scale of what is going on that matters.”32
But we needn’t look only at developing countries to see the essentiality of coal. Germany, which has the biggest economy in Europe, is rushing to close its nuclear reactors in the wake of the accident at the Fukushima facility in Japan. The result: German utilities are placing their bets on coal. By 2013, Germany was building 11,000 megawatts of new coal-fired power plants.33
The essentiality of electricity cannot be disputed. And that essentiality explains coal’s centuries-long persistence in our fuel mix. We want electricity. We want it at home. We want it in our tents when we go camping. Electricity is so flexible and useful we want to be able to use it always, everywhere.
In short, we want batteries.
GOOG < Coal
The headline in the New York Times nearly gushed over the prospect: “A Subsidiary Charts Google’s Next Frontier: Renewable Energy.” The story, published November 28, 2007, explained that Google, a company with “a seemingly limitless source of revenue, plans to get into the business of finding limitless sources of energy.”34 Google, it said, was planning to create “renewable energy technologies that are cheaper than coal-generated power.”
Google, which at the time was only nine years old and had almost no experience in the energy sector, did nothing to tamp down the media’s expectations.35 The Internet search and advertising company declared that it was planning “to spend tens of millions on research and development and related investments in renewable energy. As part of its capital planning process, the company also anticipates investing hundreds of millions of
dollars in breakthrough renewable-energy projects.” Larry Page, Google’s cofounder, predicted that the company would be able to produce 1,000 megawatts of renewable energy capacity that is Cheaper than coal, and he added, “We are optimistic this can be done in years, not decades.”36 The company even created an equation that touted their goal: RE < C, or renewable energy Cheaper than coal.
That equation—and the optimism—didn’t last very long. On November 22, 2011, less than four years after Google announced the RE < C effort, one of the company’s bloggers quietly announced that the Cheaper-than-coal effort was being abandoned and that “other institutions are better positioned than Google to take this research to the next level.”37 When I asked a former Google employee who had been involved in the project why the company had abandoned RE < C, he admitted that the company didn’t appreciate how long it takes to commercialize energy technologies. A new software program could be put together in a few months and launched almost immediately, he told me. Getting new energy systems into place takes years, and yes, even decades. Once the honchos at Google realized that, the company bailed out on RE < C.