Home » Posts tagged 'coal' (Page 3)

Tag Archives: coal

Middle East to dominate 2021-2026 supply growth, US rise to be modest

Effective spare capacity could shrink to lowest since 2016

Supply growth to slow on spending cuts, project delays, demand uncertainty

London — The world’s oil production capacity is expected to slow in the medium-term as the market digests the full impact of COVID-19 and the pivot toward cleaner energy, the International Energy Agency said on March 17.

The Paris-based agency warned in its Oil 2021 report that the industry’s spare capacity supply cushion will slowly erode in the absence of fresh upstream investments.

“By 2026, global effective spare production capacity (excluding Iran) could fall to 2.4 million b/d, its lowest level since 2016,” the report said.

Global oil supply growth is set to slow down from 2021 to 2026 due to spending cuts, project delays, and demand uncertainty, caused by the oil price crash and the pandemic.

Only a marginal rise in global upstream investment is expected this year after they fell by a record 30% in 2020 compared to the previous year, the IEA noted.

Many in the industry have recently warned that oil and gas investment will need to see a huge boost to prevent a supply crunch that could send prices skyrocketing and tip the global economy back into crisis.

Impact on upstream

2020 was a cataclysmic year for the oil industry, as capital expenditure and upstream spending fell dramatically.

The deferral of upstream projects has wiped out over 2 million b/d of potential supplies by 2026, according to the IEA. But spending is likely to stay around 15% below 2019 levels in the medium term.

“While spending looks set to remain constrained this year, a modest return to growth has been flagged further ahead,” the report said.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

When Is Mountaintop Removal Not Mountaintop Removal? In Alberta, of Course!

March 6, 2021

When Is Mountaintop Removal Not Mountaintop Removal? In Alberta, of Course!

The Kenney government plays word games as it plans to strip-mine the Rockies.

Does this look like mountaintop removal to you? Coal mining underway in Elk Valley, BC, on the west side of the Rockies across from where Alberta plans similar mining. Photo by Callum Gunn.

In Alberta, the government of Jason Kenney has one definition for mountaintop removal, while most people have another.

You might think that excavating the top of a mountain until it’s reduced to a series of carved away “benches” that rise like giant steps to a last shred of a mountain’s peak is “mountaintop removal.”

If so, you disagree with the Alberta government.

Here’s someone else who disagrees with the Kenney definition. Australian coal miners.

While the Kenney government claims mountaintop removal can’t happen in Alberta’s water-sensitive eastern slopes, Benga Mining, an Australian firm owned by Aussie billionaire Gina Rinehart, says that’s the technique it intends to employ — and in a joint federal-provincial hearing no less.

Last week, the Kenney government told the Narwhal in a series of emails that open-pit mining can’t be called mountaintop removal if it only removes, say, 90 per cent of a mountaintop.

By Alberta’s definition, the top of the mountain has to be “completely” removed to qualify as mountaintop removal.

The Alberta Energy Regulator and Kenney spokesperson Kavi Bal both informed the Narwhal that open-pit mining can scrape off the sides of a mountain, devein coal seams and leave a ridge a pockmarked shadow of itself after removing tonnes of toxic debris, and that’s OK: because it’s open-pit mining, and not mountaintop removal.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Achtung Baby! (It’s Cold Outside) – Germany’s ‘Green’ Energy Fail Rescued by Coal and Gas

February 10, 2021

Achtung Baby! (It’s Cold Outside) – Germany’s ‘Green’ Energy Fail Rescued by Coal and Gas

Barely a week after Davos luminaries met with world leaders and Silicon Valley oligarchs to plot their latest phase of the Great Reset, the underlying provenance of their entire ‘climate emergency’ thesis is still struggling to correspond with reality.

Their much-celebrated “Zero Carbon” agenda which virtue-signaling leaders like Justin Trudeau, Boris Johnson and Joe Biden are currently advocating for – is proving to be a lot more difficult to achieve in reality than it is on their elaborate UN Agenda 2030 Powerpoint slides, computer modeled projections and Zoom calls.

No one is being hit with this sobering reality more than the Europe’s premier green trailblazer, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose country is currently in the grips of Europe’s record-breaking freeze this winter.

Stop These Things reports…

Germany’s held up as the world’s wind and solar capital. But, at the moment, the ‘green’ stuff can’t be purchased, at any price.

Its millions of solar panels are blanketed in snow and ice and breathless, freezing weather is encouraging its 30,000 wind turbines to do absolutely nothing, at all. [Note: don’t forget about the constant supply of electricity from the grid that these things chew up heating their internal workings so they don’t freeze up solid!]

So much for the ‘transition’ to an all wind and sun powered future – aka the ‘Energiewende’.

Despite being the object of consternation and much vilification over the last 20 years, Germany’s coal-fired plants are now being appreciated for what they are: truly meaningful power generation sources, available on demand, whatever the weather. With a Nationwide blackout a heartbeat away, the German obsession with unreliable wind and solar is like a time bomb set to explode.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Critics Skeptical as Alberta Reverses Course on Open-pit Coal Mines

February 9, 2021

Critics Skeptical as Alberta Reverses Course on Open-pit Coal Mines

Five days after Kenney defended the province’s mining push, the government says it was all a big mistake.

Rancher Renie Blades says she’s glad that the Alberta government admitted its mistake in cancelling the Coal Policy, but calls her response ‘very guarded.’ Photo by Callum Gunn.

After months of ignoring a grassroots protest movement opposing plans to allow open-pit coal mining in Alberta’s Rockies, Energy Minister Sonya Savage said today the provincial government made a mistake and is now prepared to fix it.

In a brief news conference, Savage said the province would reinstate the 1976 Coal Policy, which prohibited open-pit mining on 1.5 million hectares of “Category 2” lands in the eastern slopes of the Rockies.

In addition, Savage said she had instructed the Alberta Energy Regulator that “no mountain top removal will be permitted” in the province and that all future coal exploration on the Category 2 lands will be paused indefinitely until public consultation is held.

Coal exploration by Australian miners on six existing leases in the foothills will not be paused.

Savage’s reinstatement of the Coal Policy directly contradicts statements from Premier Jason Kenney on Wednesday that the Coal Policy was a “dead letter” and obsolete.

The highly unpopular premier also characterized opponents of coal mining as urban snobs even though the majority of the opposition has come from his party’s angry base: ranchers, farmers, landowners and rural towns and municipalities.

The government’s abrupt change of course follows weeks of protests from hundreds of thousands of Albertans from all walks of life and all political parties.

They raised concerns about water security, selenium pollution (a legacy of open-pit coal mines), and the future of the province’s iconic eastern slopes.

Landowner and conservation groups greeted today’s announcement with skepticism.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

China Restricts Electricity Use Amid Coal Shortage

December 22, 2020

China Restricts Electricity Use Amid Coal Shortage

Despite the swift industrial recovery from the pandemic, factories in areas in China are working only part-time, and residents in several provinces are asked to save electricity, while authorities are turning off street lights and billboards, warning of coal shortages this winter.

In at least three provinces in China, authorities have ordered limits on electricity use, saying there could be shortages of coal, The New York Times reports.

At the same time, Chinese authorities vehemently deny that the potential shortages have had anything to do with the diplomatic spat with Australia, which has turned into a true energy trade war, with China banning imports of coal from one of its major suppliers.

Still, China has admitted there is a problem with electricity supply in parts of the country, just ahead of the winter season when Chinese industrial activity has been recovering very well from the COVID-related economic slump earlier this year.

“At the moment, some provinces temporarily do not have enough electricity. This is an objective fact,” the NYT quoted the Chinese authority overseeing state-held firms as saying during the weekend.

As a result of the power shortages with a reduced supply of thermal coal, some factories are cutting working hours and are operational only two or three days a week, while office workers in some cities have had to climb 20 flights of stairs to reach their workplaces because elevators have been shut down to save electricity.

“We are not living a normal life when our factory can only work two days a week and the streets are dark at night,” Mike Li, who owns a plastic flower factory in the city of Yiwu, eastern China, told the Financial Times.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Coal Curse – A Review

August 25, 2020

The Coal Curse – A Review

Governments are abrogating their first responsibility, which is to safeguard the people and their future well-being.

The first part of historian Judith Brett’s Quarterly Essay, The Coal Curse – Resources, Climate and Australia’s Future, is a masterly dissection of Australian economic history since WW2.

Credit – Unsplash

It brings into sharp focus the divide between the protectionist – primary producer and manufacturing – forces of the immediate post-war period and the gradual shift to a neoliberal globalist model which favoured the mining sector. The transition was marked by the Hawke/Keating 1983 decision to float the dollar, and Paul Keating’s “Banana Republic” outburst three years later as commodity prices and the exchange rate fell, illustrating the dangers of an overly rigid economic system being left too late to reinvent itself in a rapidly globalising world.

Luckily, economic expansion in Asia in the 1970s, 80s and 90s provided relief as demand for primary products soared – agriculture as before, but increasingly minerals and fossil fuels, notably coal and most recently gas.

The essay documents how the mining industry – minerals and fossil fuels – came together in the 1970s to convince a sceptical polity and community of its value to the nation. Initially through: “—the Australian New Right, a loose network of conservative men – and a few women – in high places, who combined a zeal for free-market economics with opposition to the progressive causes of the 1970s, including land rights and environmentalism.” – working through think tanks such as the Institute of Public Affairs and the Centre for Independent Studies.

The network honed their teeth in opposing indigenous land rights and native title, and gradually accrued political influence as the economic importance of mining exports increased. Then, when the need to address climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels became obvious in the 1990s, the network swung into action to oppose anything which would constrain growth in fossil fuel use – namely reducing carbon emissions.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What Kenney Had to Kill to Embrace Coal

August 3, 2020

What Kenney Had to Kill to Embrace Coal

Alberta’s 1976 Coal Policy protected vital drinking water supplies for much of the province. That’s gone now.

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney. His government, after being heavily lobbied by coal interests, opted to open a huge swath of sensitive Rocky Mountains land to open pit mining, rendering longstanding protections ‘obsolete.’ Photo by Jason Franson, the Canadian Press.

Under the cover of a pandemic, Alberta Premier Jason Kenney quietly wiped away a near half-century of safeguards against open pit coal mining in most of the province’s Rocky Mountains and foothills.

The result could be the stripping away of mountain tops across more than a million and half hectares of terrain — about half the size of Vancouver Island.

Gone, as of last May, is the province’s 1976 Coal Policy, which protected the headwaters of rivers that secure drinking water for Canadians across the prairies.

The Coal Policy was established by the Progressive Conservative government then led by Peter Lougheed, based on nearly six years of active public consultations. It was quietly axed this spring without input by First Nations or the wider public.

In fact, Kenney’s government only talked to one group, the Coal Association of Canada. (See this related story published today on The Tyee.)The Tyee is supported by readers like you Join us and grow independent media in Canada

That lobbying group is directed by Robin Campbell, a former Tory provincial environmental minister.

Now a handful of largely Australian-owned corporations intent on serving metallurgical coal markets in India and China are poised to begin transforming Alberta’s eastern slopes into an industrial mining zone.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

USGS says Powder River Basin has 35 years of coal left, not 250

May 13, 2020

USGS says Powder River Basin has 35 years of coal left, not 250

Preface. The USGS did a survey of coal in the U.S. in 1974 and announced that America had 250 years of coal left. In 2007, the National Research Council wrote a report suggesting 100 years was more likely due to “a combination of increased rates of production…transportation issues, recoverability, and location”, and that the USGS ought to re-survey the U.S. to find out.

Not until 2015 was a new survey done on the Powder River Basin (PRB) in Wyoming and Montana, which supplies 45% of U.S. coal. The USGS found that at best, 40 years of coal were left (35 years in 2020). Here’s how the USGS calculated this in Billions of Short Tons:

1,156 BST original resources (mostly coal that isn’t economic or technologically obtainable).
1,148 BST after subtracting out previously mined coal
179 BST geological constraints; subtract Environmental, societal, technological restrictions
162 BST Subtract too deep, too thin, high stripping ratios, mining technology limitations
25 BST 2% of original resource estimate after subtracting coal that is more expensive than the market value of coal

Then in 2017, the Little snake river and red desert coal fields were assesed again. Originally there were 19.37 BST in resources, but at this point in time there is only 1% of this original resource, 167 million short tons of reserves that are economically and technologically obtainable (Shaffer 2017).

There are 5 more basins that the USGS has yet to asses: the Raton and Piceance Basins in the Rocky Mountain Province, the Williston Basin in the Northern Great Plains Province (lignite), the Illinois Basin, the northern Appalachian Basin, and the Gulf Coast Province (lignite) (USGS 2017b). I question whether lignite is worth getting, it has roughly the same energy as wood.

The only major news media it appeared in was U.S. News and World Report and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Merkel Inks Deal For Stalled German Coal Exit

January 17, 2020

Merkel Inks Deal For Stalled German Coal Exit

In a move that’s sure to restore a smidgen of Greta Thunberg’s childhood, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has finally hammered out a deal for Germany’s stalled exit from coal-fired power generation, after state leaders agreed to shut down the industry by 2038.

We would note that this falls outside the 12-year window of doom predicted by US climate expert Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but better late than never when environmental apocalypse is on the line.

Germany’s plan includes 40 billion euros ($44.6 billion) in compensation for impacted regions, according to Bloomberg. The country’s largest coal-fired power producer, RWE AG, will receive 2.6 billion euros according to an insider – sending the stock up 1.7% in mid-morning trade on Thursday. In eastern Germany, utility Lignite operators will receive 1.75 billion euros according to German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz.

Germany reaches agreement to phase out coal by 2038

Merkel has been in a tight spot on the issue, facing pressure from environmentalists and miners alike. Climate tops voter concerns, and Germany will already miss its 2020 targets under the Paris Agreement. On the other hand, the poorer states in the former Communist East, where the bulk of the mines are, fear a growing gap to the West. Her predicament feeds into a broader political challenge, with the Greens party and the far-right Alternative for Germany gaining support on both sides of the political spectrum to squeeze Germany’s traditional mainstream parties, including her Christian Democrats. The AfD has been particularly strong in the eastern mining states.
“It was a long night — it lasted until 2 a.m. — but we were able to achieve a sensible agreement,” Armin Laschet, premier of the state of North-Rhine Westphalia, said in an interview with Deutschlandfunk radio. “The time frame that we’ve agreed on is ambitious, but realistic.” –Bloomberg (via Yahoo!)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Getting Real About Green Energy: An honest analysis of what it CAN’T promise

October 12, 2019

Getting Real About Green Energy: An honest analysis of what it CAN’T promise

I want to be optimistic about the future. I really do.

But there’s virtually no chance of the world transitioning gently to an alternative energy-powered future.

These Are The ‘Good Old Days’

I’m often asked where I stand on wind, solar and other alternative energy sources.

My answer is: I love them. But they’re incapable of enabling our society to smoothly slip over to powering itself by other means.

They’re not going to “save us”.

Some people are convinced otherwise. If we can just fight off the evil oil companies, get our act together, and install a national alternative energy system infrastructure, we’ll be just fine. Meaning that we”ll be able to continue to live as we do today, but powered fully by clean renewable energy.

That’s just not going to happen. At least, not without a lot of painful disruption and sacrifice.

The top three reasons why are:

Math
Human behavior
Time, scale, & cost

I walk through the detail below. I’m doing so to debunk the magical thinking behind the current “Green Revolution” because I fear it offers a false promise.

Look, I’m a huge fan of renewable energy. And I’m 1,000% in favor of weaning the world off of its toxic addiction to fossil fuels.

But we have to be eyes wide open about our future prospects. Deluding ourselves with “feel good” but unrealistic expectations about green energy will result in the same sort of poor decisions, malinvestment, and crushed dreams as fossil-based system has.

As we constantly repeat here at Peak Prosperity: Energy is everything.

Without as much available, the future is going to be exceptionally difficult compared to the present. Which is why I call the time we’re living in now The Good Old Days.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

‘Clean’ natural gas is actually the new coal, report says: Don Pittis

July 2, 2019

‘Clean’ natural gas is actually the new coal, report says: Don Pittis

Global investment of more than $1 trillion in planned LNG plants at risk

Employees work next to tanks for liquefied natural gas at a factory in Xian, China in June. China is a prime customer in a worldwide LNG expansion. (Reuters)

There’s no question that when you burn it, methane, the main component of natural gas, is much cleaner than coal.

With that in mind, you might think a newly released report titled The New Gas Boom should be cause for celebration.

Instead, the fresh analysis from Global Energy Monitor, a group well known in energy circles for keeping track of coal plant construction in Asia, sounds a warning, not just for the climate but for investors in what it calculates as a risky $1.3 trillion US worth of global gas infrastructure.

Effectively, the report warns that rather than being an environment-friendly product that can help solve our climate problems, gas is the new coal.

The explosion in spending on planned new liquefied natural gas (LNG) facilities — the vast majority in the U.S. and Canada — combined with new calculations for leakage from the LNG supply chain called fugitive gas — means the world may soon turn against gas in the same way it turned against its solid fuel relative.

“New studies have shown there is significantly more fugitive gas than studies showed five years ago, and the gas is also a bigger contributor to climate change than was understood,” said James Browning, one of the report’s authors.

A 34,000-ton heavy lift vessel carries barges for LNG Canada completing pre-construction work at Kitimat, B.C., last fall to prepare the port for larger vessels once the new $40-billion natural gas export facility is constructed.(YouTube/LNG Canada)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Renewables Are Dead

May 7, 2019

Renewables Are Dead

Gustave Courbet **The man made mad by fear** 1844

If I’ve said once that those among us who tout renewable energy should pay more attention to the 2nd law of Thermodynamics, I must have said it a hundred times. But I hardly ever get the impression that people understand why. And it seems so obvious. A quote I often use from Herman Daly and Ken Townsend, when I talk about energy, really says it all:

“Erwin Schrodinger (1945) has described life as a system in steady-state thermodynamic disequilibrium that maintains its constant distance from equilibrium (death) by feeding on low entropy from its environment – that is, by exchanging high-entropy outputs for low-entropy inputs. The same statement would hold verbatium as a physical description of our economic process. A corollary of this statement is that an organism cannot live in a medium of its own waste products.”

Using energy produces waste. Using more energy produces more waste. It doesn’t matter -much- what kind of energy is used, or what kind of waste is produced. The energy WE use produces waste, in a medium of which WE cannot survive. The only way to escape this is to use less energy. And because we have used such an enormous amount of energy the past 100 years, we must use a whole lot less in the next 100.

We use about 100 times more energy per person, and a whole lot more in the west, than our own labor can produce. We use the equivalent of what 500 billion people can produce without the aid of fossil fuel-powered machines. We won’t solve this problem with wind turbines or solar panels. There really is one way only: cut down on energy use.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

It’s cheaper to replace most coal plants with renewables than keep them open, per report

March 26, 2019

It’s cheaper to replace most coal plants with renewables than keep them open, per report

New research finds that replacing 74 percent of coal plants with renewables would immediately reduce costs.

It would be more expensive to keep the majority of U.S. coal plants open than to replace them with new wind and solar power alternatives, according to new findings published Monday.

Authored by the environmental firm Energy Innovation in partnership with the grid analysis company Vibrant Clean Energy, the research finds that replacing 74 percent of coal plants nationally with wind and solar power would immediately reduce power costs, with wind power in particular at times cutting the cost almost in half. By 2025, the analysis indicates, around 86 percent of coal plants could similarly be at risk of cheaper replacement by renewables.

“We’ve been closely following the cost of wind and solar in the U.S. and globally, and the costs have come down so far that we’re now seeing unprecedented low [costs] for wind and solar,” said Mike O’Boyle, Energy Innovation’s electricity policy director, on a call with reporters.

That trend has opened up an opportunity for a dramatic shift, the groups argue, one that could see coal largely replaced in many areas by energy sources that are better for both human health and the environment.

President Donald Trump has worked hard to save U.S. coal, going so far as to advocate for a financial bailout to rescue the dying industry. But data largely suggests that coal’s economic value will continue to plummet, a downturn that comes as wind and solar power are becoming increasingly cheaper and more viable options.

“America has officially entered the ‘coal cost crossover’ – where existing coal is increasingly more expensive than cleaner alternatives,” the report argues.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

World Coal 2018-2050: World Energy Annual Report (Part 4)

September 20, 2018

World Coal 2018-2050: World Energy Annual Report (Part 4)

This is Part 4 of the World Energy Annual Report in 2018. This part of the Annual Report provides updated analysis of world coal production and consumption, evaluates the future prospect of world coal supply and considers the implications of peak coal production for global economic growth.

This report uses Hubbert linearization to evaluate a region’s ultimately recoverable coal resources where a Hubbert linear trend can be meaningfully established, that is, where a clear downward trend of the annual production to cumulative production ratios can be identified and has been established for at least several years. Otherwise, this report uses alternative sources to establish a region’s ultimately recoverable coal resources, such as official reserves, official projections, or estimates made by energy research institutions.

chart/

Figure 14 World Historical and Projected Coal Production, 1950-2050

Figures are placed at the end of each section.

Coal Consumption by Major Economies, 1990-2017

According to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, world coal consumption was 3,732 million tons of oil equivalent in 2017. Between 2007 and 2017, world coal consumption grew at an average annual rate of 0.8 percent.

Figure 1 compares the historical world economic growth rates and the coal consumption growth rates from 1991 to 2017. The coal consumption growth rate has an intercept of -0.031 at zero economic growth rate and a slope of 1.496. That is, coal consumption has an “autonomous” tendency to fall by 3.1 percent a year when economic growth rate is zero. However, an increase (or decrease) in economic growth rate by one percentage point is associated with an increase (or decrease) in coal consumption by about 1.5 percent. R-square for the linear trend is 0.45. In 2017, world coal consumption grew by 0.7 percent, a rate that is 1.9 percentage points below what is implied by the historical trend.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why Can’t Japan Kick Coal And Nuclear?

September 15, 2018

Why Can’t Japan Kick Coal And Nuclear?

Earlier this year we reported on a startling anomaly in the global energy market that even the experts couldn’t have predicted. Just one nation, alone against the greening tides, was turning back to coal–Japan. Now, half a year later, a newly released report shows that Japanese financial institutions have funneled US$92 billion into coal and nuclear development—a sum bigger than the gross domestic product of Sri Lanka – in the months between January 2013 and July 2018 alone.

Energy Finance in Japan 2018: Funding Climate Change and Nuclear Risk was commissioned by a climate change-focused non-government organization (NGO) called 350.org based in the United States. The study found that the Japanese finance industry gave US$80 billion in loans and underwriting services, the majority (50 percent) of which went straight to coal development, with the other half split between nuclear and other fossil fuel resource companies. The other US$12 billion went to bonds and shares in the same industries.

Among the 151 Japanese financial institutions analyzed in the Energy Finance in Japan 2018study, only 38 of them were not involved with coal or nuclear energy projects. A similar 350.org study from last year shows that Japanese insurance companies represent a large proportion of investors in domestic and international coal industries. Japan’s single biggest investor in coal for the five-year period studied was Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG), followed by Nippon Life Insurance (NLI) and Nomura Holdings.

These numbers mark a stunning turnaround for Japan, which at one point was almost entirely dependent on nuclear, a far cleaner, more efficient energy source than coal. So why the about turn? There is actually a very clear source of Japan’s changing energy attitudes: the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tag Archives: coal

Content

Post categories

Economic Links

Energy/Resource Links

Environmental Links

Geopolitical Links

Liberty Links

News Links

Other Links

Survival Skills

Post Archives by Category

Post navigation

Latest Posts