(John Kemp is a Reuters market analyst. The views expressed are his own)
Nov 18 (Reuters) – Climate campaigners reserve a special scorn for coal-fired power generation. Coal has replaced nuclear as the form of energy that environmentalists most love to hate.
“The world needs to turn its back on the fossil fuels of the past, like coal, which have helped to create today’s climate and instead look to the clean, renewable energy sources of the future,” the UK charity Christian Aid said on Monday.
“If we are to avoid dangerous climate change we must leave most of the remaining coal reserves in the ground,” the charity warned. Christian Aid branded the decision to host a meeting of coal producers in Poland at the same time as the UN climate summit in Warsaw “perverse”. Governments have been less dogmatic. But at least in the advanced economies, policymakers see little positive role for coal-fired power generation in future if the world is to meet a target of limiting global warming to no more than 2 degrees by 2050.
THE WAR ON COAL
In September, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued draft regulations requiring new coal-fired plants to emit no more than 1,100 pounds (499 kilograms) of carbon dioxide (CO2) per megawatt-hour (MWh).
Since even the cleanest and most advanced coal plants emit 1,700 pounds per MWh, the regulations effectively ban new coal-fired plants unless they are fitted with expensive carbon capture and storage (CCS) systems.
On October 29, the U.S. Treasury updated its guidance for the World Bank and other multilateral development banks insisting they should no longer help finance new coal plants overseas except in very limited circumstances.
And on November 14, the federally chartered Tennessee Valley Authority, one of the largest coal-fired generators in the United States, announced it will retire eight coal-burning units capable of generating more than 3 gigawatts (GW) because it was too costly to upgrade them to meet environmental requirements.
Coal supporters, such as West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, have accused the Obama administration of waging a “war on coal”. The president’s commitment to an “all of the above” energy strategy has little or no role for coal, they claim.
By contrast, coal consumption is expected to continue to grow rapidly in emerging markets. China alone will commission about 600 GW of new coal-fired generating units by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
“Coal provided nearly half of the increase in global primary energy over the decade to 2012,” the IEA wrote in its 2013 World Energy Outlook.
“But its use has serious drawbacks, especially if inefficient: coal is a major source of local air pollution and as the most carbon-intensive fuel, it is the main contributor to rising energy-related carbon dioxide emissions.”
The IEA conducts little research on coal, other than CCS. It appears to advocate phasing out coal as much as possible in favour of cleaner-burning natural gas.
AN INFERIOR FUEL
Coal’s problem is its chemistry. Natural gas is mostly methane (CH4), which contains four hydrogen atoms for every carbon one. When hydrogen is oxidised during combustion, it produces harmless water vapour. Only the carbon atoms turn into greenhouse-inducing carbon dioxide.
“By several criteria, natural gas is the premium fuel,” Harold Schobert, emeritus professor of fuel science at Pennsylvania State University, wrote in a recently published book on the “Chemistry of Fossil Fuels and Biofuels” (2013).
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