For the second time this year, Mongolians are protesting against the government in significant numbers. In April, protests seemed to primarily grow out of younger Mongolians’ disappointed expectations with the government.
Today’s protests were sparked by apparent revelations about grand corruption, involving coal deliveries by state-owned Erdenes Tavan Tolgoi, one of the country’s largest mining companies, to China.
(Bloomberg) — Polish taxi driver Grzegorz says his phone won’t stop ringing, such is the demand for his services. Yet it’s not a ride people want. Grzegorz has given up driving for a far more lucrative line of work as Poland grapples with energy shortages: illegal mining.
Around his home in the Lower Silesian city of Walbrzych, coal sits as little as a meter below the surface in fields, recreation areas and even gardens. A four-man team can unearth a ton in an hour and make 1,000 zloty ($220) each for half a day’s work, roughly 60% of what an average person earns in a week.
LONDON, Nov 24 (Reuters) – It’s the best of times, it’s the worst of times. At least when it comes to mining coal. After years of decline, demand for the polluting fossil fuel has surged this year as Europe scrambles to replace Russian gas, and coal miners are making money hand over fist.
With coal prices hitting record highs, companies would normally expand their operations, but projects are being left on the table as most Western banks stand by climate pledges to restrict lending to the sector, according to a dozen mining company executives and investors.
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If you had to distill the theme of almost every UN climate summit into one word, it would be “coal.” Coal is the perennial bogeyman of the Conference of the Parties, as it is at the event’s latest edition, COP27, now under way in Egypt.
By now there is essentially zero debate among governments, climate scientists and even the coal industry itself that holding global average temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels is impossible as long as coal remains the single-biggest source of power generation.
Rich nations led by the US and Japan have pledged to give Indonesia a $20 billion package to help the coal-dependent country shift to renewable energy and reach carbon neutrality by 2050.
The deal put forward by the Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP), which includes the US, Japan, Canada, the UK, and several European countries in the EU and Norway, has been more than a year in the making.
An international team of researchers is proposing the idea of using aluminum formate – a metal-organic framework (MOF) – to remove carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants’ exhaust before the greenhouse gas reaches the atmosphere.
In a paper published in the journal Science Advances, the research group explains that MOFs have exhibited great potential for filtering and separating organic materials—often the various hydrocarbons in fossil fuels—from one another.
Miles Hatfield was walking into his dining room when he felt the wooden floor give way. His legs dropped hip-deep into water that had pooled under the brick house in the green hills of eastern Kentucky where he had lived for the past 40 years, trapping him in his own floor.
Hatfield, a retired coal miner, raised two boys in the house a few miles from the West Virginia border and added on five rooms as his family grew. But the red water running off from the nearby Love Branch coal mine had turned his backyard into a marsh, ruined his septic system, and finally sucked him through his floor three years ago.
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Every year, global climate summits feature a parade of hypocrisy, as the world’s elite arrive on private jets to lecture humanity on cutting carbon emissions.
But this November’s United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) in Egypt will offer even more breathtaking hypocrisy than usual, because the world’s rich will zealously lecture poor countries about the dangers of fossil fuels – after themselves devouring massive amounts of new gas, coal and oil.
Poland, one of the most coal-dependent nations in the world, has slowly and steadily been working its way toward decarbonization. In 2010, 86.6% of Poland’s energy mix came from coal-fired power. In 2021 that number had dipped to 70.8%.
On the one hand, this is a major improvement which deserves recognition. On the other hand, 70.8% is still very, very high, and poses a major hurdle for the European Union’s decarbonization goals – not to mention the entire world’s progress toward meeting the targets set by the Paris agreement in 2015.
A trade union representing miners today attempted to brick up the entrance to Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki’s parliamentary office. They criticise his administration for not allowing more mining of coal in Poland to ease the current energy crisis, and instead importing it from abroad.
Morawiecki, however, denies that his government has neglected the issue, saying that “the price of coal keeps me awake at night” and that the problem has been caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The ban was triggered by a public outcry after thousands of hectares of summits and foothills were permitted for exploration that was previously encouraged by the UCP government
EDMONTON — Supporters of open-pit coal mining say there’s a chance new mines could be built in Alberta’s Rockies after comments from the province’s new premier.
“We’re hoping with this little window with Danielle (Smith) that we can crack that open,” said Eric Lowther, a southern Alberta resident and president of Citizens Supportive of Crowsnest Coal.
AMASRA, Turkey — Funerals for miners killed in a coal mine explosion in northern Turkey began Saturday as officials raised the death toll to at least 41 people.
Desperate relatives had waited all night in the cold outside the state-owned Turkish Hard Coal Enterprise’s (TTK) mine in the town of Amasra, in the Black Sea coastal province of Bartin, hoping for news. There were 110 miners working several hundred meters below ground at the time of the explosion on Friday evening.
(Bloomberg) — Indonesia may only need $37 billion to shut down its coal-fired power plants, even if the bill doesn’t include building renewable energy to take their place.
That $37 billion worth of financing would be enough to buy out future revenues of 118 existing coal plants and up to 10 years of contracted coal power generation, meaning Southeast Asia’s largest economy could wean off the fuel by 2040, climate analytics company TransitionZero said in a report. That’s a decade earlier than the official target.
Volatility on metal and mining markets continued in the third quarter with copper losing sight of record prices hit in March, gold’s bounce back sputtering, lithium doubling in price year to date, coal surging to unprecedented levels, potash advancing to a 14-year peak and uranium experiencing the best market since Fukushima.
The MINING.COM TOP 50* ranking of the world’s most valuable miners lost $134 billion – based on primary exchange share price movements converted into US dollar – over the course of the third quarter and are now worth $1.22 trillion.
“But countries such as Germany, which shut down much of its nuclear and coal generating capacity to clamp its national lips around the gas pipe from Russia, is now, as former U.S. President Donald Trump and many others warned, paying for its energy vassalage to the Kremlin.”
There is now a clearly discernible international movement away from the fiscal indulgence of the faddish left and the collective self-blame of the majority across much of the democratic world.
Following the overwhelming and almost bloodless victory of democratic free enterprise over international Marxism in the Cold War, there was a commendable absence of gloating in the West, but rather a gradually more absurd and complacent experimentation with an idealized political fantasy land.
