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Comment by andrewwharton | Hacker News Reader

Ha! Try telling this to the current Australian government...

The current narrative is that India desperately needs coal and our coal is the cleanest, so we need to dig it up [1] and sell it to them to help fight climate change, because otherwise they're going to get 'dirtier' coal from somewhere else. If you disagree, then you believe that Indians don't deserve electricity.

And this isn't a strawman, this is almost verbatim what's being said in Parliament. The cognitive dissonance with our current PM is strong.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmichael_coal_mine

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Australian coal is currently largely used for steel making in India as "coking coal" as far as I know. Power generation is largely local coal. A few power plants that depend on imported coal have been proposed but hardly any have come through as the political process of acquiring coal has been undependable.

Source: Metallurgical engineering background

That's not true. As anyone in the power industry will tell you, Indian coal, tho voluminous in availability, has a relatively very low calorific content and relatively much higher Ash content. As a result, disposal of ash is far more expensive than project economics can sustain. As a result, imported coal IS the standard, domestic coal may be used as a supplement, and long term supply contracts from local traders who import from sites in Indonesia, et al. is commonplace.

Also, you're absolutely wrong about imported coal plants being rare. I don't know of any critical or super critical plants that could use 100% domestic coal without having to blatantly lie on their EIA study about ash disposal. It's just not viable.

Don't know what your sources are but see this article based on coal ministry data which suggest coal imports are a small fraction of India consumption and rapidly coming down. Specifically to your point - "Goyal added that no power producer has approached CIL for supply of imported coal this year."

https://www.platts.com/latest-news/coal/newdelhi/indias-coal...

You're missing the other side of the story. Which is that the current Australian government has also been undermining the renewable energy sector for years forcing projects to be cancelled and talent to leave overseas.

I've never understood given how decent Australia through the CSIRO has been at commercialising innovation why we never invested more in the renewable energy sector.

I would expect it's partly because coal royalties paid to the state government for every tonne they dig up keep underpin the state government budgets.

India imports a huge amount of coal from Australia because of local restrictions on mining, by the way. Otherwise we have one of the largest coal reserves on the planet.

Digging up coal to fight climate change is just silly, and I doubt that flies anywherre.

This is incorrect. Local, domestic coal has significantly worse project economics, which is why local plants prefer the imported variety.

The normal industry name for lower quality coal is "brown coal" (the most common type is lignite, which actually has a brown colour), and higher quality coal is "black coal". For coal used for steel making / coking has to be purer so low sulphur black coal is the only option.

This may be true to some extent, but a significant amount of noise was generated because of the previous government refusing to issue mining clearances for coal. I think a number of private companies had laid out infrastructure to use brown coal after the energy reforms by the Vajpayee government.

> Digging up coal to fight climate change is just silly, and I doubt that flies anywhere.

Well, it's trying really hard [0] to fly here in Australia.

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCsUYltcJZU

That's so weird. Why does he have to come up with weird justifications to digging up and selling something that people are willing to buy?

Digging up and selling our coal has a range of horrible environmental effects both short and long term. Short term includes: massive use of water that we need for agriculture and environmental flows, destruction of marine environment from dredging so coal ships can get in, giant holes in landscape. Long term: more of the same ocean warming that's killed about 50% of the Great Barrier Reef already. Google Adani coal mine for more on what Australians are pissed about. If you'd like a more strictly economic argument, the sale price sure doesn't cover the damage.

So, fix the taxes to correctly represent environment costs. The problem is not in the decision to dig or not to dig, it's in the costs of these decisions - and I think it's obvious that these two things have to be responsibilities of different government or private bodies.

The thing is the railway line which is baseline to enable the development of the Galilee Basin was never really about Adani. There are other miners to gain from it who have poured a lot of money into the election of certain members of Parliament.

Quid pro quo.

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