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Coal exports are a huge part of Australia's GDP. Resource exports make 67% of their total exports https://www.rba.gov.au/snapshots/economy-composition-snapshot/
by nojvek 4y ago
Coal exports are a huge part of Australia's GDP. Resource exports make 67% of their total exports https://www.rba.gov.au/snapshots/economy-composition-snapshot/pdf/economy-composition-snapshot.pdf?v=2023-03-10-04-51-31 https://www.rba.gov.au/snapshots/economy-composition-snapsho...
If Australia stopped exporting Coal (mostly to China), it would decimate not only their economy, but affect China (world's factory) making everything else expensive too.
Unpopular opinion: It seems with Coal or Gasoline, due to CO2 emissions, they've been seen as unclean and something we should switch away from. However their energy density is high, only below nuclear. Easy to transport, relatively safe. It's an amazing source of fuel.
I'm somewhat hopeful that someday we'll figure out how to capture 100s of millions of tons of C02 from atmosphere and turn it into synthetic gasoline-like fuel. All using solar energy.
The whole dance of global warming is because we know how to burn fuels and create heat + CO2 + H20, but we don't know how to do the reverse cheaply at scale.
Once we do that, then gasoline/ethanol is a renewable resource.
Lithium ion batteries are great, but gasoline is 100x denser than batteries.
- guelo 4y ago> capture 100s of millions of tons of C02 from atmosphere It's way more efficient to capture it at the source, ie. the coal plant. But nobody wants to talk about that because that would cost coal companies money and that's not allowed. They want to spew the pollution for free to keep coal energy "cheap" while the whole world has to pay for the cleanup.
- photochemsyn 4y agoIt would take all the energy the coal plant produced to capture all of its CO2 emissions, it's a pretty futile cycle... For comparison, try to imagine a diesel truck that captured all its emissions onboard as it drove down the highway. It's not very plausible and would represent a huge drain on power output. FutureGen was a massive failure, too.
- guelo 4y agoIf they were forced to pay the true externalized costs of burning coal they would either have to figure out the tech or go out of business.
- stephen_g 4y agoLiterally billions of dollars has been poured into trying to do this (in Australia alone but even more internationally), since the big coal and gas companies know it’s their only hope of continuing to operate long term, and very little has come from it…
- guelo 4y agoIf they were forced to pay the true externalized costs of burning coal they would either have to figure out the tech or go out of business.