Coal’s future

If you want to whip an energy and climate geek into a frenzy, there are a few go-to topics, the two most prominent being nuclear power and coal. A couple of interesting items appeared in Google Reader today regarding coal that I thought were definitely worth your time.

First is The Future Of Coal Power Will Require Hard Choices:

Next Monday, governments of some of the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases are scheduled to announce how much they’ll limit the emissions that warm the planet. That’s the deal they made at the Copenhagen climate conference in December.

No matter what cuts they promise, they’ll all have to take a long, hard look at how much coal they use.

It used to be that coal was king in the U.S. But now, coal is guo wang — that’s “king” in Chinese.

“Coal is 80 percent of all power generation in China,” says Richard Morse, an energy analyst at Stanford University. “And the Chinese use of coal is really one of the largest drivers of global coal consumption and, hence, global emissions.”

The Top Source Of Greenhouse Gases

Coal is the biggest single source of greenhouse gases. China and India are now huge consumers of coal, and their appetite is growing. “As long as economic development is a priority,” says Morse, “I think climate takes a back seat, and in that situation, coal is going to win every time.”

That’s the conventional wisdom. But the deal made in Copenhagen may change all that. By Monday, as many as two dozen countries will have listed their emissions targets. China and the U.S. — the two biggest coal users — are leading the group. India is expected to join them, and so will South Africa — a major coal exporter.

So it’s governments whose economies depend on coal who are now driving climate diplomacy by saying that they’ll cut their greenhouse gas emissions.

And that means these countries will have to wrestle with the coal conundrum — we can’t live without it, but we can’t live with it.

Our current coal situation reminds me of Thomas Jefferson’s famous observation about slavery, “we have the wolf by the ear and feel the danger of either holding or letting him loose.”

Courtesy of the IEA, here are the electricity fuel graphs for China, India, and the US (click on each image for the full-size version in PDF format):

Notice the slope of the total electricity generation for each country, and in particular the alarmingly steep rise of the purple coal segments for China and India. Also notice that the vertical axes are different. The total electricity generation of the US and China re reasonably close, but India’s is far lower. This is little comfort, given that India is expected to become the world’s largest country by population in not to many more years.

Second is a 51-minute audio from The Envronment Report, Coal: Dirty Past, Hazy Future. You can stream the report from that site or download it as a 36MB MP3 file.

I highly recommend this one, despite its length, because it provides a really (dare I say it) fair and balanced view of the coal situation in the US.

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