No bids for over 70% of Indian coal mines up for auction
reuters.com
reuters.com
Just in the past two weeks:
Germany closing even new coal plants - https://reneweconomy.com.au/german-coal-plant-closes-after-j...
Philipines will not build new coal plants due to economics. They will instead invest in grid scale storage and renewables - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-10/biggest-p...
It's mostly economics. When other generation and storage systems drop by orders of magnitude in price in just 2 decades it throws the old equations out. There's no economic reason to build a coal plant today.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/energyinnovation/2018/12/03/plu...
Please don't greenwash Germany's horrible energy strategy after they prematurely closed nuclear plants because of Fukushima-based populism. One example: They brought a new 1.1 GW coal power plant online last year that they expect to run until at least 2038. (Datteln 4: https://www.reuters.com/article/deutschland-klima-uniper-idD...)
Yes decade old information for all the decade old nuclear power plants that are still running. We don't drive cars from the 60s anymore but still operate nuclear power plants from that era. You'll have to shut them down to avoid that criticism because it's perfectly valid as long as those power plants are online.
Incidentally, have a look at what's doing the most damage to Ukrainian land currently. It's a lot of damage, and it's not reactor no. 4.
Until proof is provided that something changed fundamentally, I don't want it (or its waste [1]) in my neighborhood. You can have it in yours.
[1] https://www.tri-cityherald.com/news/local/hanford/article251....
If you are not willing to host nuclear power in your community, are you at least willing to commit your community to using less energy?
Using coal as a baseline is unjustified where coal is being actively phased out for cleaner alternatives. Much of this has been natural gas (a nonrenewable greenhouse gas contributor, though one with a good safety record), but wind and solar are cheaper than coal, competitive with gas, and growing rapidly (increasing over 2020, in a year energy consumption overall declined).
The biggest risk with nuclear power time and again has proved to be organisational, not technical. (This is a major focus of the late Charles Perrow's work, which I strongly recommend.) Unfortunatley, organisational failures tend not to have technical fixes. In the case of nuclear energy, they have very long-term consequences, on the order of centuries.
Well-running nuclear power plants are some of the safest forms of energy production we have. They are not the safest, with solar trending far better, as well as most hydro (there is one notable exception, as with nuclear, it's a case of organisational failure, unlike the notable nuclear accidents, the incident site is now home to 17 millions of people living without any residual risk). Wind power carries some risks, but those are all but entirely limited to workers, not the general public.
IPCC have studies of risks on a per-GWh generation basis, which largely corroborate this.[2] If we were to compare nuclear with coal only, based on 2020 generation mix, the multiplier for accidents would be closer to 6-fold rather than 70-fold, though that is still 18 major nuclear accidents rather than the three commercial operation incidents observed. Note too that there are several further nuclear incidents where non-generating plants and military operations are concerned, as well as numerous near-catasterophes such as the Tokaimura criticality incident (again: an organisational failure).
________________________________
Notes:
1. This and other energy statistics are from the BP Annual Statistical Review for 2020, released two days ago. https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/stat...
2. http://srren.ipcc-wg3.de/report esp. p. 845.
Assuming absolutely zero progress has been made in nuclear R&D, regulation, and application.
Automobile safety is a domain in which we've extensive experience, and what is shown is a decreasing trend in absolute numbers, as well as in percentage safety. In the first decade of widespread adoption in the US (1910--1920), the accident rate per passenger mile roughly halved. It's halved every two decades since, as contributions from a number of factors are combined. Some risks, notably toward pedestrians, have remained largely unchanged or increased over the same period.
In the power sector, the record from hyroelectric facilities across countries shows a similar trend, with early immature sectors exhibiting major disasters, which fall greatly by time. But the pattern itself repeats across countries, and there's some uptick in risk as aging and poorly-managed infrastructure either fails or experiences near-failure. See for example the Edenville and Sanford dam failures in Michigan in 2020, and the near-failure of the Oroville dam in California in 2017.
With more nuclear power plants, there'd also be more plants in more places, including in less well-governed or more unstable countries. Note that in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, much of the Middle East, Southeast Asia, South and Central America, and Africa, there've been numerous transitions of government, as well as coups and outright wars, often with major terrorist / partisan freedom-fighter components. We'd have to presume that these would have occurred with a much more substantial nuclear power component.
Under such conditions skilled engineering and management talent often prefers seeking better conditions (higher paying, more stable, safer) elsewher (brain drain), coption of programmes for non-generation purposes (explosive weapons, dirty bombs, other forms of coercion) is far more likely (see Iran and North Korea as two examples), nuclear proliferation, already widespread, would likely be much greater, a even simple errors such as siting on poorly-suited or improperly mitigated locations (as was the case at Fukushima-Diaichi) would be more likely.
Then there are the fuel preparation, delivery, and waste management issues, as well as site decomissioning needs.
Quite. One good thing (the only one?) that came out of Thatcherism was the end of the British coal industry, though at the cost of enormous suffering for many people. Although BoJo and his crew of sub-100 IQ morons seem to be intent on opening a new one.
These stickers in the 70s, mostly on polluting Citroen 2CVs used to really piss me off:
https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/htt...
And actually now, which I had completely forgotten, I remember meeting a gorgeous blond girl in Bennets Bar in Edinburgh, about 1978, and her taking me back to my flat in her car with the "Nien Danke" sticker on it. And I said it would have to go. Well, you can probably imagine what the result was.
What? A 2CV is a tiny, lightweight car, with a miniature engine. How much pollution can it possibly throw out already? Surely far less than many brand new cars today. I know you can actually almost see the petrol fumes coming out of some big old cars, but to go after 2CV owners is absurd IMO. Although i'm not any kind of expert, so i might be wrong. "Green 2CV".
Emissions tech has come a long way; just looking at the legal max emissions, the 2CV failed to 2.72g/km CO emissions while the legal max since 2006 has been 1g/km CO.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citro%C3%ABn_2CV#1980%E2%80%93...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_emission_standards#Em...
Ugh
I guess they try to sell the "our party cares about the environment" to win (i.e. lie to) voters, but at the same time they care about their industries, and old emission standards are easier to comply to. I can imagine they know research for better emissions is hard, but building cars to antiquated standards is easy and can keep more people employed...
A bit like Angela Merkel, after many years of not wanting to, suddenly agreeing to a timeline to shut down German nuclear power plants a few days after Fukushima and a few days before a state election (her stunt didn't help, the Greens still won a majority of the votes).
It's a four stroke flat twin (boxer engine).
It's far less efficient and I expect it to be more polluting than a modern engine, but I don't know how to search for objective measures of such pollution.
Actually, more memories are now flooding back. One of my flat-mates (not the greatest-looking man) met up with a really hideous woman in Sandy Bells and tried to inflict her on us - we fairly resolutely said "NO" - it all worked out for the best in the end - he ended up with a nice nurse.
In any case, 1.1GW pales in comparison to the amount of renewables coming online every year. Also, Germany is actually shutting down more coal than that this year (1.5GW). That 2038 deadline is part of a plan to shut down most of their remaining coal plants: https://www.mining.com/germany-to-shut-1-5-gw-of-coal-genera....
Call this a last 'success' for the coal lobby. They are going to lose most of the coal capacity by 2038 but they got to have a new plant. I'm sure that made sense in somebody's head when they agreed to take the plant into operation but only until 2038. That plant had already been built so they were negotiating about taking it into operation at all. They won that battle but then lost the battle about shutting down all of the coal plants. In any case, this might end up being the last coal plant Germany ever built. This being a relatively modern plant, it might also be the last one they will shut down.
That might happen a lot sooner than 2038 too. There will be elections in Germany at the end of this summer. Conservative CDU, and its coal friendly sister party CSU who were responsible for pushing this through, might find themselves having to negotiate with the green party over exactly this topic. And depending on how things go, they might have to swallow their pride and compromise. Like they compromised with SPD before.
Shutting down coal in Germany is a hot topic. Shutting down brown coal, which is the nastiest form of coal, doubly so. That's the real hot potato politically. My impression is that there will be lots of haggling over that final shut down year during every election between now and 2038. So, that deadline might start shifting a bit. Since that's only 17 years from now, I'd say 2030 is a nice round number to shoot for. Given some political will, that might actually happen. In the grand scheme of things whether its 2030 or 2038 won't actually matter a whole lot. It's going to be definitely a thing of the past somewhere in that time-frame.
I imagine at some point it also becomes a "lets just rip off the band-aid and get it over with" kind of thing for politicians. The less coal remains, the less power the coal lobby will have to preserve what remains. They are losing power every year. 1.5GW this year.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54462311
Germany replaced nuclear power with Russian gas.
Beautiful.
The Department of Energy in late 2020 declared a moratorium on endorsing new coal-fired power plants as the Southeast Asian nation seeks to shift to a more flexible power supply and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 75% by 2030.
You don’t need a moratorium on something that makes no economic sense. This is a decision that takes into account externalities (and that’s great!)
Yes, you do. Some will make decisions that are uneconomic because captive rate payers have no choice (this is prevalent with coal in the US MISO and PJM ISO grids) but to pay, and those making them are doing so to support coal even while in its death throes. About 160 cities are locked into the prairie state coal plant in southern Illinois (one of the largest coal plants east of the Mississippi) because of bonds they issued and debt they’ve taken on they can’t afford to accelerate payback on to close the plant early.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/politics/2021/6/4/22517456/prai...
TLDR You have to kill coal with extreme prejudice, not just hope economic sanity is enough, because the evidence has demonstrated it isn’t.
If that’s the case then you have bigger problems. Rather than applying bandages on top of a broken system you should figure out how to align incentives.
The system is broken because you can’t align the incentives.
and
B) I thought the claim was that coal is uneconomic regardless of environmental considerations
In the long run it might sort itself out. But, quoting Keynes out of context: “In the long run we are all dead”
Yes, but we are trying to avoid boiling the ocean.
It often makes sense to solve the smaller problem you can change rather than the larger problem which is too hard.
I'm cynical and jaded so i feel that the only reason we're finally getting some traction on the environmental side is that the poor economics of coal made the environmental battle not worth fighting anymore. Effectively the coal lobby is disintegrating at this point.
Coal is expensive because other fossil solutions are cheaper. Renewables without storage are in no way a threat to coal alone - they don't fulfill the same function.
Coal isn't load following. It overproduces and doesn't get paid during that time because renewables get feed in priority.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Un...
The US pioneered fracking, and Europe built pipelines from Russia. Renewables are part of the story, but you give way too much credit to environmentalists. The next frontier is energy storage, and the engineers and capitalists don’t pay much attention to the environmentalists, much like the frackers before them.
Because many environmentalists are so unwilling to accept a massively imperfect solution that getting their buy-in would be as futile as trying to build affordable housing in San Francisco.
Something can be generally economically unfavorable but cheaper in select applications. For example while petroleum is generally way too expensive to be used for grid scale electricity production, it is used for over 60% of Hawaii's electricity production because it is relatively easy to transport by ship over long distances, and thus in that specific case is the most economical option.
Agreed we have a long way to go :)
https://e360.yale.edu/features/despite-pledges-to-cut-emissi...
Some of the competition is renewables. A lot of it is natural gas. Countries are usually building a mix of fossil fuel and renewable generation.
If you're a great power, have little natural gas or oil accessible by land (either in your own territory or through friendly neighbors), and have peer rivals with enormous navies, coal becomes very attractive as the fossil part of your energy mix for security reasons.
It is cheaper to replace an existing coal plant with new construction alternative energy even including the new procurement costs. That's without subsidies by the way.
Oil will begin to be subject to this. When BEVs eat into oil demand sufficiently, financing and banking will evaporate for new projects, and the industry will undergo a reverse economies of scale in extraction, refining and shipping.
Oil is already more vulnerable than coal to this, since the cost of extraction for oil is high compared to the old days of "stick pipe a couple feet in the ground and light sweet crude gushes out". The oil is coming out of deep water, fracking, tar sands, etc which all has a price floor which, if oil goes under that long enough (since banks won't float loans on this sector much longer), the entire extraction operation shutters, often permanently.
Although we should absolutely be accelerating the rate of fossil fuel -> alternatives conversion with government subsidies.
Do we have a replacement for coal in the steel industry?
translation> It had 15,000 ha of forest with 30 million eucalyptus trees to extract the coal necessary in the process, for which the town of "Centro Forestal" was build.
Also, coal we dig up is much more suitable for one or the other purpose. If you mine thermal coal, the steel plant doesn't want it, they want metallurgical coal. If your country has a steel plant, and a thermal coal mine, you will export thermal coal from the mine and import metallurgical coal to run the steel plant. Well, if nobody buys your thermal coal, the coal mine shuts, even if you still have a steel plant.
3.5 kwh/kg is probably 20 cents worth of electricity.
[1] Separators are used to isolate the anode and cathode in electrolytic cells in order to suppress side reactions. Modern separators allow specific ions to pass while blocking others.
Your phrasing implies this is a small number - but 20 cents per kg is 20000c/tonne or $200 per tonne. The current spot price for iron ore is $200, which itself is twice as much as it was a year ago. So the additional cost of electricity could take the spot price as high as $400, four times as much as it was in July 2020.
It's still an important for the environment to do this & remove carbon from the industry, but need to acknowledge the costs.
My thinking is electrowinning iron and mini-mills could easily absorb excess capacity. Aqueous electrolytic cells should be able to just sit idle for hours to days. And electric furnaces draw easily 10-100MW. That makes them a good match for a renewable grid.
Low-carbon alternatives to Portland cement are being researched and piloted, too. Just a matter of money and the learning curve, the same as with electric power production.
Further, nuclear is simply not a good option for this application. Cement kilns need to reach 1,450 C, while reactor temperatures are limited to about 950 C.
Isn't this irrelevant?
It's not like we just produce cement to stockpile it indefinitely. When it's mixed with water and used to construct useful things, that CO2 comes back out of the atmosphere as it "cures".
What am I missing here?
The cement doesn't turn 100% back into calcium carbonate. Only the surface of the grains get exposed to the water and CO2 necessary to cure.
Still in R&D admittedly, but micronuclear should do the job well.
No research is going to replace the carbon in steel with something clean, your article is about the energy used in steel production and not the elemental carbon going into the steel itself.
Is that what you meant to say? How is carbon in steel not "clean"?
This is a combination of multiple factors
- Indian coal is pretty poor quality and has lower energy density, imports could be better economically for power plants.
- The true cost of mining with all the regulation and corruption is making imports cheaper for many plants.
- Major mining players are grappling with huge debt and do not necessarily have the ability to take up new projects
- Coal India a government owned entity controls most of the market and transportation is dependent on Indian Railway also fully government owned, other contracts/ services have to be also favorable/in-place to make a mine viableWhere has so much less regulation around coal mining that local production is being undercut?
The Government pretty much owns most of the demand (power plants), transport (Railways), the largest player (Coal India) so the economics can become really distorted
India has never had an economic right party in power at all. It has been various flavors of populism and socialism. The recent agriculture bill is an interesting case in point.
I recently met someone who was leasing oil wells (edit: natural gas, not oil) that lacked sufficient pressure to pump gas into a pipeline. The wells still had enough pressure that you could use them as an immediate fuel source so they were hooking up a few cryptocurrency mining rigs to a generator there. Apparently the companies who own the wells like this because they don't immediately have to declare the wells abandoned and pay the cleanup fees.
https://www.epa.gov/ust/frequent-questions-about-underground...
The generators can run off crude oil directly?
Step 2: Buy the mine
Step 3: Go bankrupt
Maybe that would work?
A small player would jump at the chance to buy a mine for cheap if they were reasonably confident they could actually walk out of the deal owning a mine for cheap.
There is a while section about this on Wikipedia.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia_Raj
And this : https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://...
Also this : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suryadeo_Singh
There are also a bunch of Bollywood movies with Coal Mafia as a background. "Gunday", though not about coal Mafia, is pretty entertaining.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Eastern_Coalfields [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Coalfields
Also, most underground mines are converted to above ground open cast mines, so there are associated health problems for us. Also, the temperatures in summer routinely hit 50 degree celsius, but most houses have no airconditioning. We just curse and exist in those temperatures.
So the Mafia became politicians :)
https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/bitcoin-market-data-exc...
Since we're farther north, solar is nothing but a tax write off if there is a loss. Wind is very unreliable and touchy. If it's too windy, we gotta stop them or their velocity gets so fast it pulls the fiberglass apart. Too little and it can barely generate power worthwhile. We're trying what we can but not only to shareholders, but to people who buy power from us, we can't exactly tell them "yeah we're gonna institute brown outs because we want more green energy." I mean we'd have numerous states breathing down our necks and nobody would look upon us favorably during rate increase time.
Coal is here to stay for a solid hundred years and I don't care what anybody says. Unless we hit a power storage revolution to that of computers, we will not be escaping fossil fuels. They are still far too abundant, cheap, and reliable.
And yes Natural Gas is increasing, but we were talking about coal. Coal has been going down for over a decade now in all sectors, and will continue to go down.
US electricity generation for coal has been going down every year. In 2020 combined renewable energy generation (hydro+solar+wind+biomass+geothermal) surpassed coal energy generation.
So you're talking nonsense.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/topic/0?agg=0...