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The price of shutting down coal power, and what would be gained
- toomuchtodo 2y agohttps://archive.today/B7hkD https://archive.today/B7hkD
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- alexnewman 2y agoI feel like coal is really useful for new steel
- hinkley 2y agoSteel uses so much carbon that it’s been a target for using hydrogen as a reducing agent. There are a couple ironworks that have already started converting. That’ll still leave concrete as one of the next largest sources, even if the rebar gets a smaller footprint.
- namaria 2y agoFun fact: carbon footprint was an expressions put forward by Exxon decades ago to shift blame for global warming to the consumers of energy.
- robertlagrant 2y agoWords aren't magically bad by their now-forgotten etymology, unless you keep bringing up said etymology.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- namaria 2y agoDid I say a word is bad?
- christianqchung 2y agoYes
- HDThoreaun 2y agoconsumers are to blame for global warming. Companies are responding to what consumers demand.
- namaria 2y agoThat would be true if there had been zero effort and money spent in subsidizing fossil fuels, hiding data about its true long term impact for decades and sabotaging efforts to move away from carbon dependence.
- defrost 2y agoThere are two types of coal, metallurgical and thermal. Energy for steel production can come from coal, but doesn't need to, coal bound with iron to make steel is a different reaction to burning coal for energy. "Green steel" (as odd as that sounds) is an active area of research ATM, promising but there's a looong way to go to reduce the emissions from a billion+ tonnes of steel per annum (and concrete production and other resource processing).
- wffurr 2y agoElectrocatalytic production or using electrolytically produced hydrogen can also make new steel.
- gus_massa 2y agoOne of the biggest Steel mils here in Argentina had a dedicated forest with 30.000.000 eucaliptus to make the coal. So it's possible to use carbon-neutral coal. More details (Spanish) https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aceros_Zapla_S.A https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aceros_Zapla_S.A.
- jabl 2y agoYes. Already during the Roman empire the Ruhr valley was denuded as the trees were cut down to make charcoal for iron making. With modern technology we can do better, e.g. torrefaction produces bio-coal with about 90% of the original energy in the wood, but OTOH the scale is way beyond what was seen in the ancient world.
- Animats 2y agoIn the US, coal consumption is down 60% since the peak year of 2008.[1] The trend looks linear. Hits zero sometime in the 2030s. Coal is over in the US. Even the coal industry thinks coal is over.[2] Conversion of coal plants to natural gas is proceeding rapidly. China, though, is still adding coal capacity. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/243934/coal-consumption-in-the-united-states/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/243934/coal-consumption-... [2] https://ieefa.org/resources/nowhere-go-down-us-coal-capacity-generation https://ieefa.org/resources/nowhere-go-down-us-coal-capacity...
- defrost 2y agoCoal has peaked globally, there's no global expansion, 190+ countries are winding back coal save for both India and China which are still expanding at a declining rate and expected to peak and decline in the mid term. WRT China, they can't over produce renewable energy and be the largest global supplier of green energy without coal .. at least not yet.
- h0l0cube 2y agoChina’s growing coal capacity could be seen as a mix of welfare and bureaucratic waste. Each prefecture is incentivized to build its own redundancy, and in a flagging economy, government spending is up to keep the economy going. The resulting overcapacity could be used for ‘peaking’ to offset intermittency in renewable power, something that’s being experimented with currently. And in the shorter term, coal can have less warming effect than gas, but I’m not sure this would be true of China’s coal plants in particular
- defrost 2y agoChina’s growing coal consumption is part of Cina's growing energy demands, their middle class is growing and exceeds the entire popultion of the USA in size. While that middle class has a per capita energy and consumption figure that is lower than the USA per capita figures it is the case that the US has set an aspiration life style expectation that sees demand grow. China's coal use has become increasingly more efficient; much is made of additional new modern coal power houses, little mention is made of the larger numbers of older inefficient far dirtier coal plants have been closed down and are still being closed down. Nuclear and renewables are part of overall energy production in China to a far greater proportion and absolute number than in the US. The scale of China's energy production is substantial and not easily characterised.
- hinkley 2y agoCoal is already dying by degrees: https://climatenexus.org/climate-issues/energy/whats-driving-the-decline-of-coal-in-the-united-states/ https://climatenexus.org/climate-issues/energy/whats-driving...
- r00fus 2y agoArticle mainly talks about stopping coal, when the goal should be increased generation of power. China does it well - they are building out nuclear, coal, and carpeting entire rooftops with solar and mountain ridges with wind turbines.
- rwyinuse 2y agoThe goal should be increased generation of power while mitigating worst climate change scenarios. Coal deserves to die.
- r00fus 2y agoCoal is key to current steel manufacturing process. There are experimental green steel processes but very nascent. If you're building stuff, you need coal.
- marssaxman 2y agoBetter eliminate all other coal-burning as fast as possible, then, to minimize the damage done while the hydrogen-based steelmaking industry grows up.
- cbmuser 2y agoBuild more nuclear power plants since wind and solar do not provide dispatchable baseload and batteries don’t scale enough. No other technology comes even close to the energy density of nuclear power.
- BLKNSLVR 2y agoI don't think I'm anti-nuclear power. The only thing that works against nuclear, in my opinion, is the time it takes to build. A lot of solar and wind and battery can be built in the decade (if not more) that it seems to take a nuclear power station to be built. Having said that, given the increasing power demands of civilization, why not both in parallel?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- goda90 2y agoWhy does it take time to build though? Is it a technical reason, or economic and regulatory reasons? If the latter, we could probably go faster if as a society we prioritized it.
- namaria 2y agoI think nuclear power should be expanded. I don't think nuclear power centrals should be rushed.
- plufz 2y agoI have heard the argument that the standard nuclear plant have the inefficiencies of any large building project, like building a big bridge. You never get the optimizations of mass production that you get in a factory that produces tens of thousands of solar panels or lots of wind turbines. I guess that is what SMR is trying to solve. I don’t know how that is going.
- vimy 2y ago50 years ago France build more than 50 reactors in a decade.
- andrewstuart 2y agoOff topic but I saw in a YouTube video how they suspect one of the earths greatest extinction events was partly driven by volcanic material igniting massive coal beds, the combination of the vulcanism and the coal burning killed like 90% of life on earth.
- pfdietz 2y agoThe Permian-Triassic extinction. A massive intrusion of basaltic magma into the The Tunguska Basin that also created the Siberian Traps. The intrusion heated organic-rich sediments and evaporites (salt, anhydrite) and caused eruption of gases. Siberia is littered with enormous pipes as much as 1 km in diameter that erupted massive amounts of gas during the event. In addition to CO2 and methane, the gas was loaded with chlorinated hydrocarbons from the salt, which could have devastated the ozone layer. I've seen an estimate that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere may have reached as high as 30,000 ppm (3%). It was bad luck for the Paleozoic world that this massive mantle plume came up in perhaps the worst possible place. Some of these pipes became filled with magnetite and as a result are mined for this rich iron ore.
- jackcosgrove 2y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinction_event https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_ext... > Though the current rate of greenhouse gas emissions is more than an order of magnitude greater than the rate measured over the course of the PTME, the discharge of greenhouse gases during the PTME is poorly constrained geo-chronologically and was most likely pulsed and constrained to a few key, short intervals, rather than continuously occurring at a constant rate for the whole extinction interval; the rate of carbon release within these intervals was likely to have been similar in timing to modern anthropogenic emissions. Modern CO2 increase has been going on for 200 years, and is theorized to be comparable to one of the bursts that occurred during the Permian-Triassic extinction. However the PTME witnessed a few such bursts over the course of tens of thousands of years. CO2 levels sextupled from a base that was not much lower than where CO2 levels are today. It's a warning about the dangers of CO2, but given the corrective actions already taking place I don't think CO2 levels will reach anywhere near those seen during the PTME. Most importantly CO2 level increases are driven by human activity which is a lot easier to modulate than volcanoes.
- scythe 2y agoJapan has converted all of their largest hydroelectric plants to pumped storage, as far as I can tell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Japa... Presumably countries with a higher proportion of electricity from hydropower, like Canada and Brazil, could get even more out of this than Japan does in terms of stabilizing renewables.
- ZeroGravitas 2y agoYou can also float solar PV on the reservoirs, re-using the grid connections with extreme complementarity (since you want to hold the hydro power back when the solar is producing).
- mmooss 2y agoA proper evaluation includes the financial cost of the coal's climate impact. Climate change is very expensive. That cost affects, * The investor's return, without subsidies. * The cost to the public of replacing coal with something else. The article says, > the cost per tonne of CO2 emissions avoided is just $34. Does anyone grasp what they mean exactly, and where that number comes from?
- DennisP 2y agoIf I'm reading this right, they just added up the remaining amortized capital cost of the plants, doubled that to give the investors a return, and divided by the amount of CO2 emissions that would be avoided. They don't mention cost of replacements, or the costs of climate damage.
- jillesvangurp 2y agoThe fallacy of the cost argument here is that it fails to take into account the cost and economics of operating a coal plant. Coal energy is simply too expensive. Any time wind/solar pushes energy prices down, coal plants are operating at a loss. Shutting down and starting up coal plants is expensive too. A lot of the reduction in coal plant capacity is not driven by environmental concerns but by economics. This is investors cutting their losses. The cost of continuing to operate these plants is higher than the cost of just getting rid of them. Keeping these plants going requires ongoing investments with very dubious returns. Financing that is getting hard; it's a bad investment. Which is why a lot of countries are pretty far done decommissioning their coal capacity.
- DennisP 2y agoYeah if we did something like this for real, we should make a more realistic estimate of how much of a return the plant owners are really likely to get, instead of just arbitrarily multiplying their investment by two. But while coal is declining, it's still spewing large amounts of CO2 and probably will for some time yet. It's doing better in areas outside the US, where it doesn't have to compete with such cheap natural gas. We could also apply this plan to natural gas, which is doing better economically, accounts for a lot of CO2, and has a warming impact as bad as coal if you take methane leaks into account. I wonder what the cost per ton CO2e would be for that.
- gandalfian 2y agoI thought the article on the meaning of "energy transition" was more interesting. The idea that oil is reliant on steel and steel on coal is a thought. https://www.economist.com/culture/2024/11/10/energy-transition-has-been-profoundly-misunderstood https://www.economist.com/culture/2024/11/10/energy-transiti...
- theendisney 2y agoSomeone in China drew an interesting picture of a slow rotating skyscraper shaped like a vertical axle wind turbine. Tall but the proportions of a bucket. Say such a thing has half a million ton in mass and 500 m diameter. The fun part is that losses are less than zero if there is some wind.
- metalman 2y agoOne of the ways China is killing coal is of course with coal, aaaand the worlds largest ultra high voltage transmission power lines~30000 km's, which is so extensive that moving power from supply to demand works over several time zones. Enabling maximisation of solar and wind production by sending noon solar in one place to power the end of day surge somewhere else and coal is playing a role by bieng run at full efficiency, with no need for load dumping. Currently more than half of the load on the ultra high voltage transmissiin network is bieng provided for by renewables, and a mad mix of anything and everything to fill in the gaps. kind of like finding anything to put in empty shipping cans going back to china driving American production of Hay, watered from aquifiers,ending up in China or possibly mountains of wierd suspect corn,bieng shipped and then burned as fuel in a coal plant.Thermal plant here in Nova Scotia, burns wood to make electricity. And then back to hay, which is pelletised and used as fuel.World wide the use of bio fuels is going to be in the millions of tons, so it is too soon to close the book on carbon.
- reisse 2y ago> which is so extensive that moving power from supply to demand works over several time zones. It's not really possible to do that in China...
- foxyv 2y agoI was about to mention that, China only has China Standard Time. Although its borders do span 4 time zones observed by other countries.
- dr_dshiv 2y agoThe installed capacity of solar has been doubling every 3 years for the past 15 years. And if it keeps going on this pace for another 15 years, solar will exceed the energy production of all other energy sources (coal, oil and gas’s). It is my opinion that this should be a global roadmap. Double solar installed capacity every three years. It’s doable. We should do it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics
- black_13 2y ago[dead]
- burnt-resistor 2y agoWrongly framed. The price of not shutting down coal is an planet that would uninhabitable. That would cost more than all of the value humans ever created, create, or ever would create had we chosen more wisely to stop killing ourselves for the temporary "crack high" of profits today. Now, the challenge is in decarbonizing energy and all other industries one-by-one to limit the damage and destruction that has already been set in motion by energy already imparted and will be retained using the sky as an open sewer.
- photochemsyn 2y agoWe have a long way to go to shut down coal power. Here's a graph of current global fossil fuel consumption in exajoules. China uses about 84 exajoules of coal power, and is approaching 4 exajoules of nuclear, so that's a big job to replace with nuclear. China plans to triple their nuclear from their current ~50 plants, but that's still a smallish fraction of total demand. https://www.voronoiapp.com/energy/China-and-the-US-Are-Responsible-for-Almost-Half-of-Global-Fossil-Fuel-Consumption-1798 https://www.voronoiapp.com/energy/China-and-the-US-Are-Respo... For current coal consumption: https://oilprice.com/Energy/Coal/Global-Coal-Production-Hits-Record-Highs.html https://oilprice.com/Energy/Coal/Global-Coal-Production-Hits... > "Global coal consumption also hit a new high, exceeding 164 EJ for the first time. This represented a 1.6% increase from 2022, a growth rate seven times higher than the average over the previous decade. China remained the largest consumer, responsible for 56% of global coal use. China’s coal consumption increased by 4.7% in 2023, more than four times the country’s 1.1% average coal consumption growth rate of the past decade. For the first time, India’s coal consumption in 2023 surpassed the combined consumption of Europe and North America. Meanwhile, coal consumption in both Europe and North America dropped below 10 EJ each, marking their lowest levels since 1965." The planet thus continues to head full tilt towards Pliocene conditions last seen 2-5 mya. A rational civilization would at this point be investing in a massive infrastructure project on a global scale to adapt to these new conditions, while simultaneously stepping up wind/solar/storage deployment at scale.
- defrost 2y agoGlobal high, sure, and yet at the same time a very probable peak with a future of steady fall: For the forecast period, we expect a net reduction in global coal production starting in 2024, which would mean global coal production peaking in 2023 in line with global coal demand. Ongoing declines in the United States and the European Union are likely to be complemented by reduced production volumes in Indonesia, as Chinese demand for seaborne thermal coal is likely to decrease. The last bastion of remarkable growth in production is India, serving the growing demand from its power sector. Our model suggests that declines in other countries will more than offset this growth ~ https://www.iea.org/reports/coal-2023 https://www.iea.org/reports/coal-2023
- ZeroGravitas 2y agoStrange little thinkpiece. The classic "No Country for Coal Gen" report in 2017 suggested that most coal generation in the states at that time was being propped up despite being uneconomic due to warped incentives and that the US would save billions just in energy costs by closing them (health and carbon benefits were on top of that energy cost saving and were further billions). Ironically I have more faith in Communist China actually following the economic incentives in phasing out coal, despite sporadic reports of regional governments alledgedly following their local preogatives to build coal.
- perseysinowatz 2y ago[dead]
- navigate8310 2y agoIndia is an outlier, they are addicted to coal so much so that an entire family tycoon (probably in cohoots with the government) owns coal supply lines.