Why has the world started to mine coal again?
Why has the world started to mine coal again?
With climate change looming, it seems so completely backwards to go back to using it again.
Is it coal miners pushing to keep their jobs? Fear of nuclear power? Is purely politically motivated, or are there genuinely people who believe coal is clean?
Edit, I will admit I was ignorant to the usage of coal nowadays.
Now I'm more depressed than when I posted this
I don’t think we ever stopped mining it
Yes, the correct answer is that "net zero" Is a greenwashed lie to placate the masses into inaction while the oligarchy continues business as usual until collapse.
https://medium.com/@samyoureyes/the-busy-workers-handbook-to-the-apocalypse-7790666afde7
Why "going back to it" have we ever stopped?
I was going to say, coal remains around 1/3 of our electric generation worldwide (as of 2022): https://www.statista.com/statistics/269811/world-electricity-production-by-energy-source/
Coal can't be reused, created, or otherwise obtained outside of mining. Until we remove our dependency on coal, mining will continue.
No. Among other things it remains the linchpin of energy security for industrial countries like China and Germany that lack adequate domestic oil or natural gas reserves to power their economies with those.
Oil propaganda convinced millions of people that renewable energy sources like nuclear power or wind turbine were dangerous/ineffective.
Basically humans are stupid and don't like change and rich people know and took advantage of it.
How is nuclear renewable?
It's renewable the same way as the sun is: Not, but it will last for a really, really long time.
We all drank the
oilkoolaidNuclear just leads to more war and destruction.
You…can’t be serious right now…can you? Or are you conflating nuclear power with nuclear bombs? Because the two are very different things.
As climate change leads to non-traditional weather, people won’t be able to farm in the same places. People will be displaced, famine will hit. Droughts will clear up water sources and fights over water rights will happen.
The only way to reduce the impact is big, non-emitting power that can run 24/7/365 and the only contender for that is hydro and nuclear. And we’ve already built hydro just about everywhere that’s feasible to do so. With a surplus of cheap energy, we can improve hydroponics/vertical farming, reduce transportation needs for food (by growing it closer to population centers), and develop a means of scalable desalination.
Nah. Nuclear will prevent far more war.
Nuclear power plants used to be built from repurchased nuclear weapon factories so if anything it leads to less war and destruction
It never stopped. Hasn’t even really slowed down.
People need electricity. Renewables are great, but they don’t provide for the full generation need. Coal and natural gas power generation will continue unabated until a better (read: lower price for similar reliability) solution takes their place.
In my opinion, fossil fuel generation won’t take a real hit until the grid-scale energy storage problem is solved.
Hasn’t even really slowed down.
I think thats... not wrong per say, but somewhat misleading. Coal consumption has been steady worldwide for the last decade despite the population going up a whole billion, and as the average persons energy usage has gone up (largely as a result of growing quality of life in developing nations).
Absolutely. Coal has remained consistent as demand for power has risen steadily. Renewables are growing, but remain a tiny slice of the whole generation picture.
Natural gas has become a cheap and reliable replacement for coal over the last 10-15 years as it’s become less expensive to transport. Many coal plants have been converted, even. So as demand has risen, it’s natural gas, not renewables, that is filling the gap.
what is preventing renewables from providing full generation need?
Storage. Coal, natural gas, and nuclear generate power regardless of weather, day and night.
Solar generates plenty of electricity (with enough panels installed), but it slows down significantly under cloudy skies and stops entirely at night.
Wind generates plenty as well…unless the wind stops blowing.
The grid needs power all the time, not just when it’s sunny and windy. For renewables to actually compete, the excess power they generate during sunny and windy times needs to be stored for use when it’s dark and still.
As much as we applaud lithium batteries, our energy storage technologies are abysmally inefficient. We’re nowhere near being able to store and discharge grid-scale power the way we’d need to for full adoption of renewables. The very best we can do today (and I wish I were kidding) is pump water up a hill, then use hydroelectric generators as it flows back down. Our energy storage tech is literally in the Stone Age.
Time. People can see past the storage issue when it's not that big of an issue.
Interconnectors and curtailment at peak output are economically optimal. The renewable transition doesn't seem to be slowing.
The renewable boom has only been going for about 10 years. Give it another 10-20 and the world will look drastically different in one generation.
Coal us and fossil fuels is crashing in Europe and China might have hit peak petrol usage.
The S curve is well in its way.
There are concerns outside of the list you wrote. For example:
- people need energy and coal is a source of energy
And they’re going for coal in some places because the political situation has made other reliable energy sources unavailable:
- the Russia-Ukraine war has destroyed natural gas supply lines to Europe
- anti-nuclear activism has resulted in lack of nuclear investment
Outside of coal, nuclear, and natural gas, there aren’t many options for reliable sources of electricity.
Because it got cheaper than natural gas.
Nobody thinks it's clean, they just don't care.
Again? Did we stop?
It doesn't look like anyone has mentioned metallurgical coal yet. Even if you don't burn it for energy, the carbon in steel has to come from somewhere and that's usually coke, which is coal that has been further pyrolised into a fairly pure carbon producing a byproduct of coal tar.
How much of that carbon is emitted Vs embedded in the steel matrix? 50%?
I'm not actually sure. I imagine it depends on how exactly it's mixed in.
The green alternative would be to go back to charcoal (or "biochar" if you want to sound fancy), but it might be a bit more expensive.
So that's where the name coke comes from! TIL!
Coal is just Cola with the letters swapped around.
Climate change 'looming'? Dude, it's already here.
Oh good, let's quibble about semantics instead of actually discussing the meat of the problem.
First time online? But yes it's annoying.
It's not about semantics. It's abut the fact that it's already too late and people are still not doing anything. Why do people still mind coal? Because our civilization is not ready to deal with climate change. Nothing serious will be done about it.
Meat? I .. I'm vegan!
/s
Sad reality people doesnt want to realise/acknowledge..
Because the ecofanatics focused on fighting nuclear power for 50 years instead of fighting fossile fuels.
Fast forward to now, renewable are not ready at all and they need fossile fuels anyway to provide steady energy. But geopolitics is making oil too expensive, so countries are mining coal again.
In brief, ecofanatics were stupid (and still are) and war in Ukraine.
Were they stupid or deliberately misled, propagandized and manipulated by the fossil fuel industry? Sure some of them were stupid, but I don't think that's the whole story.
It didn't, at least not in the way you think. The headlines of the past few days show the aftermath of the last decades: industry contracts that were made in the last century and the political heritage of a generation of politicians who are no longer in power.
Coal is being phased out and that's not changing. It cannot change substantially anyway; there is only so much coal in the gound. Recent political decisions moved to keep most of it there. For technological, political, economical and industry related reasons this won't be a fast process unfortunately.
One of the roadblocks of our transition to a sustainable energy supply is how much money (and in our capitalisic society, therefore, power) the industry itself holds. Coal lobbies will work hard for you not to think about them too much. Nuclear lobbies will work hard for you to blame those pesky environmentalists. A game of distraction and blame shifting. This thread is a good example of how well it's working.
Our resources are limited. This is true for good old planet earth as well as our societies. We only have so much money, time, and workforce to manage this transition. And as much as I'd love to wake up tomorrow to a world with PVC on every roof, a windmill on every field, and decentralised storage in every town center, this is just not realistic overnight. We'll have to live with the fact of our limited resources and divert as much as possible of them towards such a future. (And btw, putting billions of dollars in money, time, and workforce towards a reactor that will start working in 10-30 years is not the way to do this, as much as the nuclear lobby would like you to think that.)
As many people pointed out, we never stopped. Nor will be stop for decades to come. Unlike what people hear online, change takes time.
It's also something I wish people would keep in mind more when evaluating whether decisions or even whole politicians and their terms have an effect or what effect: A large portion of your own term in an office is spent on realizing the decisions made by your predecessor, and/or trying to prevent their worst effects. Conversely, anything a current politician does will have most of it's effects after they left office.
Oh absolutely. The first year of any new president will mostly be governed by what policies were signed under the previous president.
And many of times, certain agreements are multi year ones which yiu have little control over.
Either way, we have time. Yes, we shouldn't lose momentum to keep the changes coming, but holy crap we have some people in here who never step away from the internet and are fed an endless stream of over hyped doom and gloom.
Time of something we don't have the luxury of.
Relax. Get off the internet for a few days. We got time.
This is why the whole Stop Oil crew need to take a deep breath.
What do they think is going to happen if we suddenly stop using oil? It is phased approach but, no, bank's are bad for funding them.
Reliance on oil and coal is an immediate human need but it will diminish.
When has it ever been a realistic worry that we would just very suddenly completely stop using oil? This is like being in a car careening down a hill and saying to the people saying "hit the brakes!" "Woah whoa, do you have any idea what would happen if we deccellerated to a complete stop in a millisecond? We'd be crushed flat! "
Maybe if we had decided to "stop oil" like 60years ago, it wouldn't be an issue anymore? But since we didn't 60 years ago, perhaps we should have plan to replace fossil fuels with something that burn and can provide power day or night, rain or shine and maybe we should start building these things NOW.
They're all triggered into thinking the world is going to collapse tomorrow, and it is infuriating.
In 50 years, we're still going to have cars that run on gas. We'll still have plastic bags and straws. The world will not have ended.
The worst part of all this doom and gloom is that it is going to make some people think nothing can be done, so why bother. Then there are going to be some 9ther people who want change, but after a few years they will start to wonder why hasn't the environmental apocalypse happened yet and start thinking it was all a sham. You already hear that from people who grew up in the 70s when the last time this kind of thought was spreading. Back then everything was about global warming this and global warming that. We were going to boil over all our oceans and everyone was going to die. That never happened, obviously. In more recent years scientists have changed their views to the current climate change model where they state that some parts of the globe will actually get colder while other parts will get hotter. We will have more severe storms. That seems to reflect more of what is happening these days, but even the most doom and gloom scientists aren't claiming we will all die in a few short months. Yet that's kind of the hysteria of far too many folks online.
Yes, we have to do something, but relax, it's not going to all collapse by next week.
In my country, because of a decades long fearmongering and disinfomation campaing that destoyed the nuclear energy industry. So now we're stucked with coal to keep the power running at night and during winter.
Well, nuclear energy is expensive anyways and the amount of uranium on this world seems quite limited.
It's just not the technology of the future. In the long term we should use regenerative energies that are way cheaper.
Right, but that's why people are talking about nuclear as a bridge technology, not as a permanent solution. Whether or not we can make it pencil out before smashing through all of the critical tipping points in global temperature averages is not something I'm qualified to have an opinion on, but I'm credibly informed that we might at least want to give it a serious look.
Over here (Australia) we never stopped. Our coal lobby is simply too influential with our government.
It's never really stopped.
But from the actions of those in power it seems they're just plowing through climate change and making money whilst they can. Imagine the decision is we're fucked anyway so let's get mine whilst I can and see if it helps me survive.
Because of the war against nuclear plants. Our green party shut down nuclear plants in favor for renewable energy. But as predicted, renewables don't meet our demands. So the green party started building gas plants to compensate instead of keeping nuclear running.
So why? Because of green idiocracry that demand the impossible of green energy (at this moment) and nuclear = evil
$$$
I blame the release of both Factorio and Victoria 3.
Actually I thought it's maybe because our crazy "friend", who recently decided to show how it never actually left from behind the red curtain, had no problem shelling multiple nuclear power plant sites. Just saying.
Obligatory: we didn't stop.
There's also good reasons to have a fistful of generation plants with coal or natural gas.
To put it simply, nuclear is clean, far cleaner than just about anything else we have. If you compare the waste product with the energy produced... It's just not an argument that nuclear loses versus something like coal. Where coal puts out its waste mainly in the form of smoke, nuclear waste, like discarded nuclear power rods, are a physical and far more immediately dangerous thing. The coal waste kind of blends in, and lobbyists have been throwing around "clean coal" for a while... Although coal use has gotten a lot more efficient and produces less waste than before, it's still far more than what nuclear could do. "Clean" coal is a myth, it's just "less bad" coal, with good marketing.
Regardless, coal and natural gas fired plants can ramp up and down far quicker than nuclear possibly could. Where nuclear covers base demand and can usually scale up and down a bit to help with higher load times, to cover peak demand, coal and natural gas can fire up and produce power in a matter of minutes. With nuclear, they have to ramp up slowly to ensure the reaction doesn't run away from them, and to ensure all the safety measures and safeguards are working as intended as the load increases. It's just a fat more careful process.
The grid is hugely complex, and I'm simplifying significantly. But from the best of my understanding, nuclear can't react fast enough to cover spontaneous demand. So either coal or natural gas needs to exist for the grid to work as well as it does.
Wind is unpredictable and solar usually isn't helping during the hours where the grid would need help with the demand. The only viable option is with grid scale energy storage, which can hold the loads while the nuclear systems have a chance to ramp up.
There's still far more coal fired plants in the world than we need for this task alone, so there's still work to be done... But I suspect coal use will diminish, but not be eliminated from grid scale operation for a while.
Aren't most base-load nuclear plants typically paired with an energy storage solution like a gravity battery to habdle burst loads?
To my knowledge, apart from very new battery-based systems, the most common energy storage used for grid scale applications is pumped hydro, and even that is pretty rare... Either you need geographic features that make it viable, which is relatively rare in proximity to all the geographic features you would need for a nuclear plant, or you need to build such structures which is insanely expensive.
The main issue with grid scale anything, is that until very recently, most energy companies have been living on insanely long timelines, far longer than most industries. Infrastructure, when built, almost always has multiple decades of lifespan if not longer. Most energy storage tech that's old enough to be considered for the time that many of the nuclear were built, did not have multiple decade lifespans and would need full or at the least the majority of their working material replaced within a decade at best. For an industry where a new facility will last 50+ years, that's not a good investment. The only long term solution that would last is pumped hydro. This is changing and new grid-scale storage tech is reaching a high level of development, aka, almost ready for large scale production.
Simply put, if you think about the technology that was available when these facilities would have been built, around 50-80 years ago for many, energy storage wasn't something that people really thought about, you either had live delivery of energy (from generator to device in micro-seconds) or primary cell batteries, like alkaline. Without much in-between, and most of what was there wasn't grid-scale, not even close.
Sure, there are newer reactors than that, but a remarkable number of nuclear energy facilities are many decades old, most of the viable grid scale energy storage tech has been developed in the past decade or so.
To be clear, nuclear plants usually have conventional generators, often diesel, but that energy isn't for export (for sale to customers), it's used to restart the pumps and power the facility for a cold start of the nuclear generation systems. And that's about it. 50 years ago, you didn't have viable energy storage for the grid, everything was generated as it was used, when the load increases, fire up more generation capacity. So base load was handled by plants that needed to run 24/7 like nuclear, since it's difficult or impossible to turn them off, and they would ramp up when demand increased, and any gap would be filled by plants that can go from off to making energy in minutes, like coal and natural gas.
To summarize, with the exception of pumped hydro, nothing is capable of handling that much power for the grid. We're not talking a few minutes of energy storage, this is more like an hour+ as reactors heat up and more turbines come up to speed. The only energy generation that can meet that demand that quickly is coal/gas-based plants and pumped hydro, with pumped hydro being so difficult to build, coal and gas are used. Of the gas-powered plants, natural gas is the most economically viable.
This is changing, but the infrastructure in use is usually significantly older than the technology you're mentioning.
I know Germany is shutting down its reactors and without Russian gas they need to get a reliable baseload power generation from somewhere… :/
Coal is decreasing in Germany because of renewables.
More renewables has come online than was lost from nuclear.
I'm sure places that are still banning nuclear power aren't helping either.
It will slow when nuclear is the main energy source, especially in the United States (its currently ~47%)
Nuclear can also get recycled, and for the average American, the actual waste that can no longer be recycled is about a soda can (standard 12 ounce can)
Imo, the US needs to work toward nuclear usage being 90-95% instead of using coal. There's still a need for natural gas but it can be minimized
Imo, the US needs to work toward nuclear usage being 90-95% instead of using coal. There's still a need for natural gas but it can be minimized
Why? Wind and solar are cheaper, faster to build and don't produce toxic waste. They can easily cover most of the energy needs. Or technically all of it, once you start using any overcapacity for hydrogen production (which is needed for carbon neutrality anyways).
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Here in Texas, we use wind and solar a lot. That's why in 2021 when it froze, we had zero power. The wind turbines were seized from the freeze and snow covered the solar panels. We had dropped our coal production until we had to suddenly go to 100% utilization.
And with it being texas and hardly snowing, we don't have infrastructure in place for the roads. There's no snow plows, road salt, tire chains, etc..
Fuel reprocessing through the purex process has never been economical and frankly doesn't make much sense. You'd want to increase the volume of those very nasty fission products for eventual storage through vitrification anyway (inverse square law gets very important for big gamma emitters) so you'd need a big site regardless. It's fine if you're recovering plutonium to make a bomb, but it seems to create a lot of chemical waste without much benefit otherwise.
The fuel is cheap. It’s the reactors are consistently over budget. Westinghouse Electric is bankrupt because of the last nuke they built.
Tf you mean stopped
- a German
Yes, countries like Germany are turning to coal as a direct result of nuclear-phobia.
The US, with all its green initiatives and solar/wind incentives, is pumping more oil than Saudi Arabia. The US has been the top oil producer on whole the planet for the last 5-6 years. The problem is getting worse.
Sorry, this is just false info. Germany is not turning to coal as a result of your called nuclear phobia.
I will repeat my comment from another thread:
If you are able to read German or use a translator I can recommend this interview where the expert explains everything and goes into the the details.
Don't repeat the stories of the far right and nuclear lobby. Nuclear will always be more expensive than renewables and nobody has solved the waste problem until today. France as a leading nuclear nation had severe problems to cool their plants during the summer due to, guess what, climate change. Building new nuclear power plants takes enormous amounts of money and 10-20years at least. Time that we don't have at the moment.
There is no "nuclear lobby" stop making shit up. Nuclear isn't profitable, that is why we don't have it. If it's not profitable, there will be no industry lobby pushing for it. The fact that it isn't profitable shouldn't matter. I care about the environment and if Capitalism can't extract profit without destroying the environment (it can't) then we need to stop evaluating infrastructure through a Capitalist lens.
As people pointed out in another thread, nuclear energy is NOT the future and also a really bad short term solution,so countries like Germany are going back to coal short term to make the transitions to renewables in the meantime.
It's not a great solution, but without Nordstream, there's really not much else more sensible to do right now, just to make the transition.
Fantastic. We're doomed
People will do everything that givesthem an advantage in anykind of way. If coal is an affordable resource to fulfill a need it will be mined and put to use.
You may change the view on a thing for a few persons, but never of all of them.
Same reasons we won't solve the climate crisis, democracy and capitalism are not great at dealing with long term, side spread problems.
If you re-open a coal mine in a depressed community, you've earned a lot of votes while the people who were on the green side of things are diffused throughout the world.
Socialism into communism has been disapproval far worse from an environmental point of view. Well from nearly every metric.
Even with the best form of political and economic systems, people still will use every resource possible if it makes their life that much more comfortable.
I'm not saying democracy is a bad thing. But, it is important to understand flaws that are inherent to it. Long term problems are a particular weakness for democratic governments as there is almost no incentive to deal with them instead of short term "sugar high" projects.
I disagree with much of China's strategy but the sort of moves being an autocracy allows enables it to simultaneously pursue a policy of economic growth while planning for the future. (You also get stuff lile the belt and road initiative, which was an incredibly ambitious program.)
Again, I am not saying China is better or democracy is bad. There are a BUNCH of huge flaws to autocratic governments like China's. But, democracy is going to particularly struggle with these sorts of long term threats.
It's still needed until the transition to full renewables is viable in most places. People still need to afford electricity so it's a means to an end
Why do we still do stuff like fracking, just to get the last bit of C out in the air?
Rhetorical question, please don't answer.
Will renewables ever be viable in countries like the UK or Ireland, where there isn't actually a whole lot of land for things like solar and wind?
Renewables are already viable in the UK and making up an ever increasing percentage of electricity generation. Additionally, the time when it's windiest in the UK is also the time when electricity demand is at its highest.
Using coal for electricity in the UK is now rare. Coal only made up 1.5% of electricity generation in the UK in 2022. Just ten years ago coal generation was nearly half.
Seriously? I didn't know it was anywhere near that low. That's great assuming they haven't just replaced it with gas or something similar, although gas is supposed to be better than coal.
There is tonnes of sea around the UK and Ireland and the UK are operating among the largest offshore wind farms. Also the offshore wind is generally stronger and more consistent, which is why they continue to expand their capacities. The UK is currently at 14 GW and Ireland is trying to catch up, now planning a 3 GW farm.
Yes, but it would require government spending and in the UK we currently have theives and billionnaires in charge who don't even think kids should be able to eat at school.
Wind turbines can be located off shore. Energy can also be harvested from wave action.
Out of necessity probably. In Germany for example they're turning off nuclear power plants and replacing them with coal because nuclear is dangerous apparently. However you still need to produce the power somehow to run the country. Not even the most hardcore climate activists want to sit in a dark, cold apartment with no power.
Germany is not replacing nuclear plants with coal. They are replacing them with renewables and the plans to phase out nuclear are 10 years, respecitvely 20 years old, but thanks to nuclear lobby meddling they went back on phasing them out and then back on going back again because of Fukushima. So because of pro nuclear we got less renewables and more coal than if we just had sticked to the initial plan in the first place.
They're burning coal to produce the energy they otherwise would have done using nuclear so I don't think there's anything wrong about what I said. If you turn off a nuclear power plant you're going to need to produce that energy by some other means. They're not building new coal plants to replace nuclear but they're continuing to use/reopen coal plants that shouldn't have to be used anymore. Germany is the world's 4th biggest coal consumer.
the problem with nuclear power is the waste. no ody wants it, nobody can agree on a place to put it. also the amount of power germany got from nuclear before shutting down the last plants was verry low.
In Finland we place it in a deep tunnel dug into the bedrock where it will be put into capsules and buried in clay. The waste however is a big issue, there's no denying that.