You’ve heard the pronouncements: “Coal Is Dead and Oil Is Next.” “Glasgow is the Death Knell for the Coal Industry” (Boris Johnson).
“Coal is declining sharply, as financiers and insurance companies abandon the industry” (Yale360) “Parties to accelerate efforts towards the phase-down of unabated coal power” (COP26 agreement). The unspoken reality is the opposite: Demonizing coal has increased coal consumption.
MISH explains in his article The Big Green Push to Get Rid of Coal Had the Opposite Effect. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.
An alleged big win to eliminate coal turned into a bust and then some.
Investors Pushing Mining Giants to Quit Coal is Backfiring
Bloomberg has an interesting story on how Environmentalists Pushing Mining Giants to Quit Coal has backfired.
It was supposed to be a big win for climate activists: another of the world’s most powerful mining companies had caved to investor demands that it stop digging up coal.
Instead, Anglo American Plc’s exit from coal has become a case study for unintended consequences, transforming mines that were scheduled for eventual closure into the engine room for a growth-hungry coal business.
And while it’s a particularly stark example, it’s not the only one. When rival BHP Group was struggling to sell an Australian colliery this year, the company surprised investors by applying to extend mining at the site by another two decades — an apparent attempt to sweeten its appeal to potential buyers.
Now, after years of lobbying blue-chip companies to stop mining the most-polluting fuel, there’s a growing unease among climate activists and some investors that the policy many of them championed could lead to more coal being produced for longer.
BHP may end up holding on to the Australian mine it was battling to sell, Bloomberg reported last week. Earlier this year, Glencore Plc sounded out a major climate investor group before announcing it would increase its ownership of a big Colombian coal mine, according to people familiar with the matter.
India now burns more coal than Europe and the U.S combined and miners are betting on rising demand over the next decade from countries such as Vietnam, Bangladesh and Indonesia, although pollution concerns and cheaper alternatives threaten to derail those plans.
Tough to Eliminate Coal
The push to abandon coal made selling the mines difficult. So companies chose to extend their life. Developing countries that invested in coal-powered electrical plants that have many years of useful life want reparations to develop new plants. New wind and solar plants are cheaper but unreliable. And they are not cheaper than plants already built. Moreover, wind can die for days and solar has on average 12 hours a day of outages. This places additional capital investment requirements for countries to build energy storage facilities. China alone is currently building or planning coal power plants that are the equivalent of six times Germany’s entire coal burning capacity.
It’s tough to get rid of coal when you build more coal plants than you retire.
via Science Matters
November 15, 2021 by Ron Clutz
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