Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Lump sums
David Strahan, Guardian
Oil production may soon ‘peak’, but what about coal? David Strahan reports on the recent figures that suggest global reserves may not be nearly as plentiful as the industry and governments have led us to believe
—
For weeks, South Africa has suffered rolling blackouts caused in part by a shortage of coal. Gripped by unusually bitter snowstorms, China recently banned coal exports for the next two months. And at Newcastle, Australia, the world’s largest coal export terminal in the world’s largest coal exporting country, the queue of carriers waiting to load has been known to stretch almost to Sydney, 150km to the south.
Coal, for so long the Cinderella of fossil fuels, is suddenly not just in demand but in desperately short supply. The world’s biggest producers and exporters are struggling, and the price of imports to Europe has doubled to almost $140 (£70.5) per tonne over the past year. “It’s a global crunch,” says John Howland, managing editor of the international coal industry magazine McCloskey’s Coal Report.
The immediate reasons for the price spike are soaring demand, inadequate infrastructure and bad weather. But now there are also gnawing doubts that global coal production may, within the next few decades, face fundamental geological constraints, or “peak coal”.
Ask most energy analysts how much coal we have left, and the answer will be a variant on “plenty”. The latest “official” statistics from the World Energy Council put global coal reserves at the end of 2006 at a staggering 847bn tonnes. Since world coal production that year was just under 6bn tonnes, the reserves-to-production (R/P) ratio – the theoretical number of years the reserves would last at the current rate of consumption – is well over 100 years.
It is commonly assumed, therefore, that there can be no shortage of coal this century. However, a clutch of recent reports suggest that coal reserves may be hugely inflated – a possibility that has profound implications for global energy supply and climate change.
(5 March 2008)
Downward spiral (UK coal)
John Vidal, The Guardian
The government insists that the UK has “considerable” coal reserves, but declines to be more precise. However, reserves are clearly nothing like what they were believed to be less than 30 years ago.
In 1980, the UK claimed “proved recoverable reserves” of 45bn tonnes to the World Energy Council (WEC). This figure has been continually revised downwards to only 0.22bn tonnes in the WEC’s last report.
But the government is committed to support what is left of an industry that 100 years ago employed more than one million people and which dug 250m tonnes of coal a year. In the past seven years, it has subsidised coal by more than £200m, even though output has continued to fall.
(5 March 2008)
U.S. coal power boom suddenly wanes
Mark Clayton, Christian Science Monitor
Worries about global warming and rising construction costs give the edge to natural-gas and renewable-energy plants.
—
Concerns about global warming and rising building costs are blocking construction of new coal-fired power plants in the United States and pushing utilities to turn to natural gas and renewable power instead.
Utilities canceled or put on hold at least 45 coal plants in development last year, according to a new analysis by the US Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory in Pittsburgh. These moves – a sharp reversal from a year ago, when the industry had more than 150 such plants in development – signal the waning of a major US expansion into coal.
(4 March 2008)
Keeping coal in the spotlight
High-powered P.R. firm goes to work polishing the image
Mike Gorrell, Salt Lake Tribune
Coal people think their industry is misunderstood.
So they set out last fall to change the hearts and minds of the American public.
They hired R&R Partners, a public relations company with an office in Salt Lake City that was behind the popular “What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas” slogan, to develop a $35 million campaign. Its aim is to influence people to think of coal as a cost-efficient source of electricity rather than one of the culprits behind global warming – and to keep coal central to discussions about the country’s energy future.
“It’s our job to keep coal at the table. It’s not there now,” said Robert Henrie, a Salt Lake-based principal in R&R Partners and a strategist well acquainted with the bad-news stories that plague coal.
(1 March 2008)
Beyond Bali (Canada and carbon sequestration)
Peter McKenzie-Brown, Language Matters
With the latest UN conference on climate change relegated to history, Canada’s oil and gas industry is now ready to focus on implementing some solutions
—
… Given the glacial pace of implementing global treaties, the first steps in managing carbon emissions need to be taken locally. An industry of national and global importance, Canada’s petroleum sector can become a leader in taking those local steps. More to the point, a group of large players in the sector have already begun to do so through an initiative called the Integrated CO2 Network (ICO2N or, more simply, ICON) – a proposed system for the capture, transport and underground storage of carbon dioxide.
… Using carbon dioxide from an industrial source for enhanced oil recovery is increasingly economic as energy prices rise. But can pumping GHGs into the ground be economically viable if it isn’t being done for a commercial purpose? According to Kaufman, this is the sticking point. “There is no value chain for CO2 capture,” he says. “It is extremely difficult from a pure market standpoint to make it profitable.”
The ICON consortium of mostly blue chip companies with Alberta operations wants to develop a national greenhouse-gas collection, pipeline and storage grid with roots in the Alberta oil industry and branches across the country – from British Columbia to Nova Scotia (see map ).
In the beginning, the network would capture carbon dioxide from sources in north-central Alberta, including Fort McMurray, Fort Saskatchewan and the coal-fired power plants near Wabamun Lake. The carbon dioxide would be transported by pipeline to suitable geological sites for storage and to EOR loranios- for sale to oil producers. About 1,000 kilometres of main pipeline and 400 kilometres of small collector lines would ultimately be needed for this system, which would be built up over a decade or more. Longer term, carbon-capture could be done elsewhere in Canada, which has suitable geologic storagic basins in nearly every province and territory.
In effect, ICON is proposing a vast network of waste treatment facilities, and the industry believes sharing of the costs of this network with energy consumers is appropriate since “it is more difficult and more expensive for consumers to make emission reductions directly.”
This article was first published in Oilweek.
(1 March 2008)
