Category Archives: Coal mining

Peabody CEO on coal demand

Gregory Boyce – chairman and CEO of Peabody Energy, the world’s largest coal company – has been saying some disturbing things to his investors. A recent Manhattan meeting was described in a press release:

Boyce observed that coal has been the world’s fastest-growing fuel this past decade, with demand growing at nearly twice the rate of natural gas and hydro power and more than four times faster than global oil consumption. “It’s stunning that any mature commodity could expand nearly 50 percent in a decade and speaks to the strong appetite for the products we fuel, as well as coal’s abundance and stable cost,” he said. Coal demand is also expected to grow faster than other fuels in coming decades.

Asia-Pacific nations are leading a historic global build-out in coal-fueled electricity generation. More than 94 gigawatts of new generation are expected to come on line in 2010, representing 375 million tonnes of coal consumption per year. If growth continues at the current pace, generators would add another 1 billion tonnes of new coal demand every three years.

For the sake of the natural world and future generations of humans, it is imperative that those projections prove to be badly off, and quickly. The world contains a very dangerous amount of coal, and burning it all is not compatible with maintaining a habitable planet for those who will come after.

It is for their sake that taking on powerful actors like Peabody Energy has become so necessary and important.

Join the Toxic Tour of Toronto!

Tomorrow (June 23rd), as part of the build-up to the days of action against the G8/G20 meetings, there will be a toxic tour of Toronto’s principal polluters and climate criminals.The tour begins at 11am in Alexandra Park, Toronto and will visit the home offices of many firms currently engaged in the unsustainable extraction of resources, as well as crimes against workers, local populations, and indigenous groups. Participants are encourage to dress up – some ideas suggested are executives with blood on their hands, corporate zombies, people covered in Tar Sands bitumen, etc. Fake blood and bitumen will even be provided!

Citing from the event promotional materials, the toxic tour will concentrate on four main themes:

  1. The extractive industry is violating human rights and the rights of mother earth. The federal government supports these companies even as human rights workers are killed, local peoples poisoned, and entire communities displaced. From the tar sands in northern Alberta to gold mines in Papua New Guinea to copper mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Canadian companies are exploiting indigenous and poor communities alike, violating their right to self-determination, poisoning their lands, manipulating any leadership that they can access, and often supporting brutal military and security operations.
  2. The extractive industry is exacerbating the climate crisis. The tar sands gigaproject is the most destructive industrial project on earth and will be the leading contributor to climate change in Canada, making it impossible for our country to meet its international climate commitments. The climate crisis has been caused by the industrialization of developed countries like Canada, while disproportionately affecting indigenous peoples and the global south who are faced with sea-level rise, drought, permafrost melt, desertification, melting glaciers, and increased extreme weather events. These and other problems brought on by the climate crisis have destroyed the livelihoods of millions who are dying and being displaced from their homes.
  3. The education system is taken over by corporate interests. The University of Toronto, Canada´s largest academic institution, is taken over by corporations, many of which are linked to the extractive industry. This corporate influence stifles open, honest, and critical debate in our institutions of higher learning and demonstrates how a wealthy few can dominate and shape the way people think. As an academic institution that strives to create the ‘leaders of tomorrow,’ we must challenge the notion that corporate greed and exploitation has any place in our education system.
  4. The Canadian economy is dependent on exploiting marginalized peoples and the environment. Harper would not be at the G8 if it wasn’t for exploiting the resources and people of countries that the G8 is purposely shutting out of discussions. Solutions, however, are there — but the Harper government refuses to give people the ability to determine the future of their own lives and livelihoods.

Training drillers and miners

1) Stopping climate change requires cutting global greenhouse gas emissions to zero.

2) To avoid ‘dangerous’ or ‘catastrophic’ climate change, most of the world’s remaining fossil fuels need to be left underground.

3) For reasons of both fairness and practicality, rich states with excessive per capita emissions must lead the way in cutting. That includes Canada.

As a consequence of these three facts, it seems strange to me that we continue to subsidize and support university training of coal mining engineers, oil and gas geologists, etc. Having people entering that pipeline now implies that we expect these industries to endure for decades: a perspective incompatible with Canada’s stated aim of keeping global temperature rise to less than 2ËšC. Probably, Canada’s government should be phasing out support for such training programs, in recognition of how we need to move on to sources of energy compatible with climate stability.

By the same token, government should be phasing out research funding for oil, gas, and coal technologies. This includes drilling and mapping technologies, refining, etc.

Of course, such an approach would demonstrate how climate change mitigation and energy security can sometimes be conflicting goals. Stopping climate change can be a kind of prisoner’s dilemma, in which intelligent behaviour by a handful of states does them no good, if the majority continue to behave senselessly.

Still, we need to start having public consultations about whether the fossil fuel industry has any future and, if not, how we should be positioning ourselves for the great transition ahead.

Coal: A Human History

Barbara Freese’s Coal: A Human History provides a concise account of the interactions between humanity and coal, particularly in the United States, United Kingdom, and China. It includes a great many interesting anecdotes, as well as some good analysis of the social, health, and environmental consequences of coal use. In particular, it leaves the reader with a strong sense of the health costs associated with air pollution from coal, even before you start considering its impact on climate.

Freese identifies the forces that drove coal from a mineral of very peripheral importance to a substance that ended up at the heart of industrialization, powering the Industrial Revolution and being burned now in unprecedented quantities, mostly to generate electricity. She points out the importance of population density, wood scarcity, and the improved efficiency of steam engines in prompting the explosion of coal use. She also discusses the suffering associated with coal mining and use, the connections between the industry and industrial relations and organized crime, and the possible future of coal and energy generally.

Ironically, one of the key messages from the book is that coal – gritty, filthy coal – is actually largely invisible now. London’s deadly coal fogs are a thing of the past, and yet coal-fired power plants around the world continue to emit huge amounts of lethal pollution, accounting for tens of thousands of annual deaths in North America and perhaps a million in China. And yet, because the mechanism of this harm is invisible, there is no real public outcry to stop it. Thankfully, reduced suffering and death from air pollution is one of the major co-benefits that will accompany climate change mitigation, once nations finally start getting serious about it.

Climate change is essentially taken as a given in this short book, with some reference made to the possibility of abrupt and dangerous climate change, driven by reckless burning of fossil fuels. Freese is probably correct to treat carbon capture and storage (CCS) dismissively. Significant practical and economic hurdles stand in its way, and it is entirely plausible that it will prove quicker and cheaper to just deploy zero-carbon sources of energy, rather than refit fossil fuel fired power plants so as not to emit greenhouse gases.

One minor cause for complaint is the awkward binding of the hardcover edition. This small thin book just doesn’t want to stay open, and will clasp shut unless constantly held with the covers spread. The book’s treatment of hydrogen as a possible future energy storage medium is also thin and probably overly optimistic.

Those hoping to gain a broader historical perspective on the emergence of coal as an important energy source, the consequences of its use, and the present and future of the material will likely find this book informative, accessible, and useful.

West Virginia and the 2000 election

West Virginia is one of the poorest states in America. Only Arkansas and Mississippi are poorer. It is also a swing state, in terms of federal politics. In the past 37 presidential contests, the state has ended up supporting the Democratic candidate 20 times. The state has had 19 Democratic governors, 15 Republicans, and one independent. Since 1933, 12 out of 16 governors have been Democrats.

West Virginia is a major producer of coal, second only to Wyoming, and those companies felt profoundly threatened by the possibility that Al Gore might have been elected president in 2000. He had been raising awareness of climate change for decades, and helped to negotiate the Kyoto Protocol. In response, coal companies in West Virginia helped to organize and support the campaign of George W. Bush in that state.

Ultimately, West Virginia voted by a margin of 6.33% to give its five electoral college votes to Bush. Bush won the close-fought election with 271 electoral college votes, compared to 266 for Gore, after the 27 votes for Florida were assigned to Bush. That is to say, if Gore had won in West Virginia, it is quite plausible that the history of climate policy both in the United States and globally would have been very different.

If serious American leadership on the issue had begun back in 2000, it seems very plausible that the modest targets in the Kyoto Protocol would have been built upon in subsequent agreements by now. It also seems highly likely that the Iraq War would never have been launched, Saddam Hussein would still be in power, and that huge expenditure of American wealth and energy would never have taken place. Even in the face of strong opposition in Congress, it seems likely that a Gore administration would have taken significant steps in dealing with climate change: tightening rules on coal mining and toxic emissions from coal plants, reducing coal’s economic advantage, and maybe even managing to put a price on carbon emissions.

Of course, the same can be said of all the states where the results were close and where more than five electoral college votes were at stake. That being said, the situation does seem illustrative of how relatively small prompts can telescope out to have wide-ranging effects.

Don’t Ignite the Lignite

Quite unintentionally, deficiencies in the quality of my video camera and the lighting of the establishment where this was filmed have made this video more anonymous than I planned. It has a bit of a ‘witness protection program’ vibe. My apologies about the annoying feedback in the audio.

At the same time, it lays out my current views on climate change and how to deal with it in just five minutes:

Obviously, it requires many simplifications to put that amount of information into a five minute movie. Even so, I think it is a fair reflection of my current thoughts, at least insofar as I would format them for an event of this type.

It would be very interesting to know what I am wrong about.

It would also be interesting to know which (if any) messages seem to be well conveyed.

The slides and speaking notes are also available:

The End of China’s Steam Railroads, or Coal and International Prestige in the 21st Century

While the phasing out of steam engines from North American railroads was virtually complete by 1960, other regions saw a much slower decline. Due in part to the high costs of the war on Europe, U.K. mainlines were not completely dieselized until 1968, and in Finland and France the process took until the mid 70s. While there are other examples of steam power remaining in service in the 80s and 90s, such as South Africa, India and Russia, the only major power to continue to use steam into the 21st century is China. The continuation of coal-fire steam in China into the 21st century, and it’s eventual phase out in favour of more conventional diesel motive power, serves as an example for understanding importance of economic conditions as well as branding and prestige in state-level transportation planning. More specifically, it might serve as an example of how the international recognition of global warming helped pressure a nation to cease its use of the dirtiest carbon fuel (coal), and therefore possibly prefigure the role of international prestige in future phase outs of coal-electric plants and non-traditional sources of fuel oil.

To understand why Chinese mainline freight and passenger railway service was largely steam powered in the year 2000, it’s important to recognize that diesel trains were introduced far later in China than in most of the rest of the world. Whereas the United States, Russia, and the U.K had their first diesel locomotive engines in the 1920s, the first diesel was not  in service in China until 1959 – at which point dieselization in the USA was almost complete. And China’s transition, although starting in the 50s, did not “pick up steam” until the 80s and 90s – the last mainline steam loco was built in 1999 , and very powerful QJ engines continued to pull coal trains on the Jitong railway until 2005.

Some of the reasons for China’s late use of motive steam power are simple – cheap, easily available labour meant much smaller savings would be acquired by switching to the small crews which diesel operation allows. Also, with huge reserves of coal mined by disposable, non-unionized wage labour, steam trains remained isolated from international oil prices. Russia acted on this principle as well – keeping a full thousand steam locomotives on standby in case of national emergency up until 1989. Other reasons are more complex – military industrial complex funding in the U.S. meant there was money to translate advances in tank engine design into locomotive design. Moreover, diesel operation has many benefits that go beyond simple economics which are highly valued in first world countries, such as cleanliness, simplicity of operation, but most important they are perceived as (or were in the 50s and 60s) “modern”. Capitalist, desire-based economies emphasize the new – there is always some new feature, or function, or things are getting faster, or smoother. Command economies (like the military-industrial complex, incidentally) are needs-based: if steam locomotives are fulfilling the needs of industry and transportation, there is no need to replace them with expensive modern equipment until the upgrade makes simple economic sense – and in a land of very inexpensive labour, this was perhaps never going to happen.

So, what happened – why did China ever switch to diesel and electric operation if steam fared so well for them – if they continued to construct large and powerful locomotives into the 1990s to pull coal trains on the Jitong line through Inner Mongolia until 2005, what was the final reason for switching over to diesel? I’m sure some would like you to believe that Chinese labour conditions are improving, and as a result there are greater savings from reducing the amount of labour required to run the Jitong line. But I think it’s far more likely that the dieselization of the Jitong line has nothing to do with economics and everything to do with international prestige. In 2005, just prior to the end Jitong steam, the International Herald Tribute reported:

There is no sense of regret in the Chinese government, which is anxious to crush all memory of something as old-fashioned as steam just a few years before the 2008 Olympics reach Beijing.

If we want to know why steam was phased out in Mongolia, or why coal fired steam is phased out anywhere it still makes economic sense, the only answer is political prestige. In his book “The Weather Makers”, Tim Flannery makes the point that North America too still runs on coal:

“Some power plants burn through 500 tonnes of coal per hour, and so inefficient are they that around two-thirds of the energy created is wasted. And to what purpose do they operate? Simply to boil water, which generates steam that moves the colossal turbines to create electricity that power our homes and factories. Like the great aerial ocean itself, these Dickensian machines are invisible to most of us, who have no idea that this nineteenth-century technology makes twenty-first-century gadgets whirr.” (The Weather Makers, p. 30)

The continuance of coal fires steam power plants in North America to this day demonstrates quite clearly that the “Age of Steam” never ended – it ended only in public perception. In reality, many ipods, laptops, electric trains, even coffee makers are powered by coal-fired steam. And, there is no reason to think that our age of steam will end for any reason other than the one that motivated the demise of the Jitong railway – public perception, and political prestige. If sites like this one contribute to making coal perceived as a fuel of the past, and for the right reasons (the science), then we can rightly be said to be contributing to the conditions under which Stephen Harper finds it politically useful to institute the phase-out of coal-fired electricity.

Hydraulic fracturing and unconventional gas

Hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling are changing the natural gas industry, by enabling the exploitation of reserves that were previously inaccessible, such as the large reserves of shale gas in North America:

Shale and other reservoirs once considered unexploitable (coal-bed methane and “tight gas”) now meet half the country’s demand. New shale prospects are sprinkled across North America, from Texas to British Columbia. One authority says supplies will last 100 years; many think that is conservative. In 2008 Russia was the world’s biggest gas producer; last year, with output of more than 600 billion cubic metres, America probably overhauled it. North American gas prices have slumped from more than $13 per million British thermal units in mid-2008 to less than $5. The “unconventional”—tricky and expensive, in the language of the oil industry—has become conventional.

All of this is doubly problematic from a climatic perspective. Firstly, as hydraulic fracturing spreads worldwide, the total quantity of gas extracted and burned will rise, increasing the total amount of climate change experienced by future generations. Secondly, increased access to gas will perpetuate fossil fuel dependency, delaying the process of transitioning to the use of renewable and zero-carbon forms of energy.

Some people argue that all this gas is actually going to help with climate change mitigation efforts, because people will burn it for electricity in place of coal. In response to this argument, it seems sensible to point out that what really matters are the total cumulative emissions of humanity – not the amount of greenhouse gases released in any particular year. If we burn this gas and then go on to burn that same coal later, we will be in a worse position than if we had never gained access to the gas. The one way in which these gas reserves could conceivably help with efforts to deal with climate change is if they displace coal in the short term, and then legislation finally comes through to push the national economies in question away from the use of coal forever.

Of course, accomplishing that will be an incredibly difficult feat, given the entrenched interests involved. As such, it seems far more sensible to protest any new extraction or use of coal and unconventional oil and gas, while simultaneously pushing for legislation that will finally put a price on greenhouse gas emissions, and that will treat the risks associated with climate change appropriately by, among other things, putting a moratorium on coal use.