Time to bury coal

Despite emissions targets, Europe is still addicted to generating power from dirty coal. It's time for governments to take a stand and cut coal altogether, says Dr Doug Parr.

Last week the European Union announced it is taking the UK government to court over a breach of emissions limits at the Aberthaw coal-fired power station in Wales. If the EU wins, the plant will no longer receive special dispensation to exceed the legal cap on emissions of the toxic pollutant nitrogen oxides (NOx) currently in force across the bloc.

Its operator, RWE, will finally have to choose between closing the plant or fitting it with scrubbers. Either option should help reduce the 1,600 deaths and £2.7 billion in health costs caused each year in the UK by coal pollution. But whilst Aberthaw is a particularly dirty power station (it also appears in WWF’s ‘dirty thirty’, the European power plants producing the most CO2) its problems are by no means unique.

The coal industry, from mine to turbine, is in very deep trouble. Peabody energy, the number one private-sector coal company in America and the world, has seen their share price drop by 87% over the last five years, whilst the US’s number two and three have both dropped by over 95%. Enel are moving out of coal, and E.on is in the process of hiving off its fossil fuel assets.

China, the great hope of the industry, particularly in coal-exporting Australia, has reduced its coal use. Media organs outside the radical green left like The Telegraph, The Economist and Bloomberg have been trailing the industry’s imminent demise. To top it all off, the leaders of the UK’s three main political parties have made a joint pledge to phase out unabated coal from our energy mix. Even coal’s ugly sisters, the oil and gas industries, have taken to comparing themselves to coal in the hope they’ll seem more attractive by contrast.

Some people are alarmed by this apparent collapse of the industry which started the industrial revolution, but we shouldn’t be. Coal is the leading source of carbon, sulphur dioxide (SO2), NOx, and mercury. It’s hazardous to the human body as well as  to the global climate. Whilst a saner world would have phased out coal decades ago, recent progress shows that perhaps we’re not quite as masochistic as many in the environmental movement had feared. This is very good news. What we should be alarmed about is the continuing resistance to this change.

“You would expect to see huge efforts to develop functional, affordable CCS systems – not just issuing statements about how this is expected, but actually making it happen.”

As environmental concerns rose up the political rankings from a hippy eccentricity to a second-tier issue, polluting industries responded by changing their ‘race to the bottom’ approach into a race to be second from bottom. The unrestricted destruction of natural resources moved from being a welcome sign of economic growth to a PR problem requiring a PR solution.

But companies and countries who still see climate concerns as a PR problem are going to be at a severe competitive disadvantage this century. Think tanks are already warning about ‘low carbon leakage’ as the technologies and businesses of the future leave European shores for countries where the political environment is innovative and forward-thinking rather than concerned with propping up incumbents.

The UK government and RWE, Aberthaw’s operators, are not unique in their inertia – many large organisations have the turning circle of a super tanker. And there is legitimate sympathy for those employees who will be affected by a transition to a more sustainable economy. But the manner in which governments around Europe are pandering to the interests vested in coal will do us no good at all.

It’s time to start planning for the well-being of the workers and communities affected, not keeping the owners and shareholders happy. Yet aside from one or two notable exceptions, European governments are still swimming against the tide and sacrificing the health of these communities to try to keep coal profitable.

Europe’s next set of restrictions on hazardous emissions from both existing and new coal plants are currently being formulated. The industry was allocated 137 places in the delegations negotiating this, and managed to capture a total of 183. The UK’s ‘government’ delegation was mainly drawn from industry, and Greece’s was composed exclusively of industry lobbyists from one company.

The entirely predictable consequence of this is that the current EU proposals for limiting pollution from existing coal plants are a lot less stringent than China’s. They would allow new coal plants to be built in Europe which would emit 5 times the SO_2, 2.5 times the NO_x,2 times the particulates, and 5 times the mercury of the cleanest currently operating coal plants. 

A coal industry which is really planning for the future would be cleaning up its act, and not only in terms of these toxic pollutants.

You would expect to see huge efforts to develop functional, affordable CCS systems – not just issuing statements about how this is expected, but actually making it happen.

Their current approach suggests much of the industry has given up hope of finding a place in tomorrow’s economy, and are focussed on sweating as much from their declining assets as they can before the coffin lid is nailed shut. The problem is, tens of thousands of people will end up paying with their health for the industry’s reluctance to clean up its act.