Category Archives: Coal

China ‘must shut 600 coal-fired plants’ to hit climate target

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Move towards renewables to hit net zero by 2060 would also pay off with saving of $1.6tn, analysis finds

China must shut down nearly 600 of its coal-fired power plants in the next 10 years, replacing them with renewable electricity generation, to meet its goal of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2060, a report has said.

But replacing the 364GW of coal generation with renewable power would achieve a net saving of $1.6tn (£1.2tn) over the period, since wind and solar power are now much cheaper than coal, according to the analysis company TransitionZero.

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John Barilaro attacks Turnbull over ‘war on Coalition’ and says NSW ‘firmly committed’ to coal

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NSW deputy premier says ‘there will be no moratorium on coal in the Upper Hunter or anywhere else in the state’

The New South Wales deputy premier, John Barilaro, has rejected Malcolm Turnbull’s call for a moratorium on new coalmines in the state and demanded the former prime minister “set aside his war on the Coalition”.

Turnbull said on Wednesday he believed coalmine proposals and approvals in the state’s upper Hunter Valley were “out of control”.

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Yallourn, one of Australia’s last brown coal power stations, to close early in favour of giant battery

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Power station produces 13% of Victoria’s and 3% of national emissions and employs 500 people

One of Australia’s dirtiest coal-fired power stations, Yallourn in Victoria’s Latrobe valley, will close four years earlier than scheduled and be replaced, in part, by a grid-scale battery.

EnergyAustralia announced on Wednesday it would shut the 1970s-built, 1,480-megawatt brown coal plant in mid-2028.

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Cancel all planned coal projects globally to end ‘deadly addiction’, says UN chief

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Call comes at event hosted by UK government, which is under pressure over planned coalmine in Cumbria

All planned coal projects around the world must be cancelled to end the “deadly addiction” to the most polluting fossil fuel, the UN secretary-general António Guterres said on Tuesday.

Phasing out coal from the electricity sector is the single most important step to tackle the climate crisis, he said. Guterres’s call came at the opening of a summit of the Powering Past Coal Alliance (PPCA), a group of governments and businesses committed to ending coal burning for power.

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Mexico was once a climate leader – now it’s betting big on coal

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As the climate crisis worsens, Andrés Manuel López Obrador plans to buy nearly 2m tons of thermal coal from small producers

The men on the midnight shift smoked cigarettes and cracked jokes in the glow of their helmet lights as they prepared to go underground. They were loading safety equipment and coils of pipe onto wheelbarrows, in readiness for a second shift due to start working later that week.

“We’re reactivating the industry,” said Arturo Rivera Wong, who had just taken on 40 more workers at the mine he owns in the scrublands of the border state of Coahuila.

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‘This land feeds our souls’: the battle to save the Rockies from big coal

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Growing opposition to the lifting of mining protections in Alberta has forced the Canadian province to backtrack

To the east of the Bluebird Valley ranch, the grasslands of the Canadian prairies extend beyond the horizon. To the west, the fields rise, and then sharply erupt into the Rocky Mountains.

Cattle graze the 3,600 hectares (9,000 acres) of the Bluebird, an hour south-west of Calgary, and on hot summer days rancher Jolayne Gardner’s children jump into the chilly waters of a creek that threads the rolling hills.

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World needs to kick its coal habit to start green recovery, says IEA head

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Energy watchdog’s Fatih Birol says shift away from coal in key regions needs to be made a global priority

Dependency on coal in key parts of the world is preventing a global green recovery from taking off, and the shift away from coal needs to be made a global priority, the head of the world’s energy watchdog has said

Coal still forms a key part of China’s energy system, and plans are in train for further coal-fired power plants in the country. India is also heavily dependent on coal, and despite increasing its renewable energy generation has shown little sign of reducing its use of the fossil fuel.

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Carbon capture is vital to meeting climate goals, scientists tell green critics

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Supporters insist that storage technology is not a costly mistake but the best way for UK to cut emissions from heavy industry

Engineers and geologists have strongly criticised green groups who last week claimed that carbon capture and storage schemes – for reducing fossil fuel emissions – are costly mistakes.

The scientists insisted that such schemes are vital weapons in the battle against global heating and warn that failure to set up ways to trap carbon dioxide and store it underground would make it almost impossible to hold net emissions to below zero by 2050.

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‘Carbon-neutrality is a fairy tale’: how the race for renewables is burning Europe’s forests

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Wood pellets are sold as a clean alternative to coal. But is the subsidised bioenergy boom accelerating the climate crisis?

Kalev Järvik stands on a bald patch of land in the heart of Estonia’s Haanja nature reserve and remembers when he could walk straight from one side of the reserve to the other under a canopy of trees.

Järvik has lived in the Haanja uplands in the southern county of Võru for more than 10 years. His closeness to the forest has shaped his life as a carpenter and the fortunes of the surrounding villages, with their handicraft traditions – a substitute for farming on the poor arable land. Upcountry, travel literature promotes the region to city dwellers, promising its ancient woodlands as a place to rest and reinvigorate the mind.

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More than 50 Australian coal ships remain stranded off China’s coast despite power blackouts

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Some 53 vessels have been waiting offshore for more than four weeks while coal ships from other countries have delivered their loads

More than 50 Australian coal ships are still stranded off China’s coast, held up by a Chinese government import ban, despite the country facing coal shortages and one of its worst power blackouts in years.

China has rejected suggestions that its October ban on Australian coal has contributed to the coal shortage but the ban has been linked to higher domestic prices. Analysts have said that under the current circumstances any incoming coal would help.

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Russia rules out cutting fossil fuel production in next few decades

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Energy minister says Moscow will also focus on clean-burning hydrogen and carbon capture

Russia has no plans to rein in its production of fossil fuels in the coming decades despite the global efforts to shift towards low-carbon energy, according to its energy minister.

Alexander Novak told the Guardian that Russia did “not see that we will achieve a peak in [gas] production anytime soon” because the world’s appetite for gas would continue to grow in the decades ahead despite its growing number of climate targets.

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Chinese mining firms in Zimbabwe pose threat to endangered species, say experts

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Two companies granted permission to clear land at Hwange national park, home to cheetahs, elephants and rhinos

Rhinos, giraffes, cheetahs and other endangered species face a new threat in Zimbabwe’s Hwange national park: Chinese mining companies.

Zhongxin Coal Mining Group and Afrochine Smelting have received permission from the government to begin environmental impact assessments for drilling, land clearance, road building and geological surveys at two proposed sites inside the park, which is home to almost 10% of Africa’s remaining wild elephants.

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Is this the end for ‘king coal’ in Britain?

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As the black stuff burnt in the UK plummets to a level not seen since the early steam age, we trace its long, deep history and the problems left in its wake

Britain achieved an unlikely status as a power provider last year. Its annual consumption of coal plunged to the lowest level in 250 years. According to figures released last week, a mere 8 million tonnes were incinerated in UK factories and power plants. That is roughly the same amount that was burned nationally in 1769, when James Watt was patenting his modified steam engine.

That invention helped to spark the Industrial Revolution and triggered a massive rise in annual coal use in Britain, which soared to well over 200 million tonnes by the mid-20th century. Now levels have plummeted back to their original pre-revolution state. King coal – once the undisputed ruler of British industry – has finally been dethroned.

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India plans to fell ancient forest to create 40 new coalfields

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Narendra Modi’s dream of a ‘self-reliant India’ comes at a terrible price for its indigenous population

Over the past decade, Umeshwar Singh Amra has witnessed his homeland descend into a battleground. The war being waged in Hasdeo Arand, a rich and biodiverse Indian forest, has pitted indigenous people, ancient trees, elephants and sloths against the might of bulldozers, trucks and hydraulic jacks, fighting with a single purpose: the extraction of coal.

Yet under a new “self-reliant India” plan by the prime minister, Narendra Modi, to boost the economy post-Covid-19 and reduce costly imports, 40 new coalfields in some of India’s most ecologically sensitive forests are to be opened up for commercial mining.

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EU’s greenhouse gas emissions continue to fall as coal ditched

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New figures for 2018 show 2.1% drop on previous year in switch to renewables

Greenhouse gas emissions in the EU continued their fall in 2018, the latest year for which comprehensive data is available, according to a new report from Europe’s environment watchdog.

Emissions fell by 2.1% compared with 2017, to a level 23% lower than in 1990, the baseline for the bloc’s emission cuts under the UN’s climate agreements. If the UK is excluded, the decline since 1990 was smaller, standing at 20.7%.

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Deputy PM ‘very concerned’ over reports China’s power plants warned not to buy Australian coal

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Michael McCormack says trade minister and diplomats are trying to fix the issue

Deputy prime minister Michael McCormack is concerned coal exporters could face a tougher time selling the commodity into China.

There are reports the Chinese government is warning state-owned power plants not to buy new shipments of Australian thermal coal and instead favour domestic products.

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Anthony Albanese backs Adani coalmine but criticises proposed Collinsville power plant

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The ALP leader says a feasibility study into a new coal-fired power station in Queensland is ‘hush money’ for climate sceptics

Anthony Albanese says he supports jobs and economic activity from the Adani coalmine, but he has blasted a feasibility study into a new coal-fired power plant in Collinsville as “hush money” for climate sceptics in the Coalition.

In Queensland on Wednesday for his fourth “vision statement” since taking the Labor leadership, Albanese told reporters the ALP needed to improve its electoral performance in the state given the poor showing in last year’s federal election. He said he was listening to voters in a number of regional centres.

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Clive Palmer company reapplies for mine four times size of Adani’s Carmichael

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Exclusive: public notice on proposal was placed in classifieds of paper in Queensland town of Emerald

A Clive Palmer-controlled company has applied for a mining lease and environmental authority to build a massive coalmine four times the size of Adani’s in the Queensland Galilee Basin.

The Galilee Coal project – formerly called China First – has not progressed since it gained federal environmental approval in late 2013.

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‘Human rights before mining rights’: German villagers take on coal firm

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Residents say they will not be ousted by energy firm seeking to expand the Garzweiler mine

A group of villagers living on the edge of one of Germany’s biggest surface coalmines have vowed not sell their properties to the energy company RWE, and to mount a legal challenge against any attempt to oust them from their homes.

The protest alliance is the first coordinated effort in more than 10 years against the expansion of the Garzweiler mine in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, which threatens the existence of 12 villages that are home to 7,600 residents. Demolition of the first four villages is scheduled to begin in 2023.

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Lambasting China over their emissions might impress the US but it could be costly for Australia | Frank Jotzo

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In many regards, China’s climate action is stronger than that of Australia or America, at much lower levels of development

Visiting the United States, Australia’s prime minister demanded of China “participation in addressing important global environmental challenges” in light of its “new status and responsibilities”. As part of a broad call to expect more of China, the comments on environment caught attention as they were made at the time of the UN climate summit.

Pointing to China’s emissions growth as an excuse for lack of climate action in Australia was in vogue a decade and longer ago. Then, China’s energy use and carbon emissions rose sharply with its investments in factories, infrastructure and housing. But things have changed in China, and there no longer is a formal distinction between climate pledges from developed and developing countries. In many regards, China’s climate action is stronger than that of Australia or America, at much lower levels of development.

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