Like many wars, the war on coal does not always make a great deal of sense, whether in terms of intentions or methods. I certainly do not know the names, addresses and telephone numbers of most of the instigators of this proposed conflict, but I have heard people say that President Obama is one of them. I also remember seeing a statement in very large letters in the international edition of The New York Times stating that future energy supplies will feature a large amount of natural gas, and the accompanying exposition claimed that the present large-scale reliance on coal might soon be passé.

Needless to say, the International Energy Agency (IEA) plays a leading role in this  burlesque, because just as real soldiers are told to leave their switch blades in the barracks and rely on their rifles when they go into combat, it happens to be true that in the struggle to reduce poverty and declining standards of living, coal is an invaluable weapon, though perhaps not everywhere, and if voters think that an Energiewende a la Ms Merkel has a future, they will eventually be taught an unpleasant lesson. The lesson turns on the indisputable fact that there is too much energy in the billions of tonnes of coal in the crust of the earth for this commodity to be dismissed like an outmoded zoot suit.

According to Maria van der Hoeven, executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), the technical advances that are being made on the ‘Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) Front’ should be regarded as a “milestone” in the promotion of ‘green energy’. She says that “Carbon capture and storage is the only known technology that will enable us to continue to use fossil fuels and also decarbonize the energy sector.” That statement is illogical for a number of reasons, with one of the more obscure being that if CCS was as effective as she and some others believe, then billions or hundreds of billions of dollars would already be earmarked for it, especially in China, where the political elite has started to lose patience with the environmental shortcomings in their large cities. 

As it happens, one of the most prominent energy consultants in Germany, the MIT graduate Jeffrey Michel, has called CCS “a thermodynamic travesty”, but as a brilliant student of thermodynamics at Illinois Institute of Technology, I prefer to label the most enthusiastic recommendations in its favor lies or misunderstandings. Moreover, as a result of living in Sweden, I have heard all that I want to hear about that subject because of the CCS and coal mining activities of the Swedish utility Vattenfall in Germany.

If we look at the cost of an average CCS investment involving a new power station, one constantly hears that it can involve a doubling of capital expenditures, and ostensibly a reduction in the amount of electricity that can be produced. To be fair, this phrasing   would not be encouraged in my classroom, because what has probably happened is that – if profit maximization is the object of the exercise – the increase in capital expenditures calls for a smaller amount of electric generation.

But that’s not all. When movers and shakers from the world’s energy industries and seats of government met in New York at the end of September, 2014, the message dispatched by some of the most influential was that coal was a scourge that should be replaced by natural gas. That kind of talk was apparently intended to increase the revenues of energy companies, as well as to help mobilize enthusiasm for a forthcoming UN summit in Paris in the early summer of 2015, when  our political masters are supposed to finalize a comprehensive agreement to limit carbon dioxide emissions.

Whether this gas-friendly message was acceptable to the thousands or tens of thousands of folks in the streets of ‘The Big Apple’ who were demanding a fossil-free world is uncertain, nor do I have any opinions about what would have happened if I had been on the speaker’s platform on that occasion, because I would have informed the assemblage  early in my world-class lecture that more nuclear was the way to go. If that had been greeted with applause, I might also have said that regardless of what happens at the Paris talk-shop, more coal is going to be burned, and nothing short of martial law can prevent it.

REFERENCES 

Banks, Ferdinand E. (2014). Energy Economics: A Modern First Course , In process (with present versions of 200 pages published on the sites 321 Energy, and EnergyPulse).

______. (1985). The Political Economy of Coal. Lexington Massachusetts: D.C. Heath & Co.