Beautiful, Clean Coal
“Old King Coal” courtesy of University of Florida library
(https://lnkd.in/exr49VnY)
The death of coal, held to be the eldest and ugliest of the three fossil fuel siblings, has long been exaggerated Mark Twain-style. While oil and natural gas needed to be tolerated for some time in the “energy transition”, dirty coal – responsible for soot, smog and respiratory disease -- was already beyond the pale for many decades in most Western developed countries.
The latest twist in this tale of a death exaggerated starts with a Guardian story on Monday last week. In his trip to China – the world’s largest coal consumer by far, and with no letup in sight -- the UK Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero Ed Miliband “is hoping to shape a new global axis in favour of climate action along with China and developing countries, to counter Donald Trump’s abandonment of green policies in the US.” Then, on Saturday, the Daily Mail reported that Miliband “admits his solar panels bought for English schools and hospitals are Chinese and may be made using coal.”
The hubris and the irony leap out.
The birthplace of coal and the industrial revolution and which once “ruled the waves” of 70% of the globe, Great Britain closed its last coal plant last year. It is number 22 on the list of the world’s largest CO2 emitters accounting for a puny 0.8% of global emissions. This pales in comparison to China at number one, spewing out 34% of the world’s emissions and to the US, the next largest emitter, at 12%.
Apparently, “Mad Ed”, with his folly of climate leadership, still believes that the sheer illustrative example of a net-zero ‘green’ UK will lead the world into ditching fossil fuels. As my colleague Ben Pile said pithily of Mr. Miliband’s China visit, “don’t make me laugh.” In an oft-cited statistic, China builds an average of two coal power plants a week.
Meanwhile, in the latest sign that all is not well in the climate policy consensus between the two main parties in Parliament, leader of the Tory opposition Kemi Badenoch said in a speech (also on Monday last week) that net zero cannot be achieved by 2050 "without a serious drop in our living standards or by bankrupting us."
The irony of calling for a “green industrial revolution” with solar and wind panels, batteries, and electric vehicles which are largely themselves made with cheap Chinese coal power seems to be beyond Miliband’s mental grasp.
Import reliance on China under the dictatorship of the CCP also seems to be of less concern to him than the alternative. God forbid dependence on foreign oil and gas imports: cue “geopolitical shocks” and the “whims of foreign tyrants”. Never mind that the largest suppliers of oil and gas to the UK are Norway, the US and Qatar, now that ‘climate leader’ Great Britain has barred itself from exploiting its own ample domestic oil and gas resources in the North Sea and onshore sites.
But leaving aside the hubris and irony, there is a final twist to coal’s exaggerated death narrative last week. On the same day that the Guardian wrote about Miliband’s noble goal of getting China on side in the “fight against climate change”, President Trump came out in Truth Social:
After years of being held captive by Environmental Extremists, Lunatics, Radicals, and Thugs, allowing other Countries, in particular China, to gain tremendous Economic advantage over us by opening up hundreds of all Coal Fire Power Plants, I am authorizing my Administration to immediately begin producing Energy with BEAUTIFUL, CLEAN COAL.
Far From Death, Coal is in Rebirth
A source of dirty soot, smog and adverse respiratory health in urban areas, coal was the classic sunset industry in the West. But local politics and swing states matter in US elections as failed presidential-hopeful Hillary Clinton found out to her cost in 2017. She claimed her biggest regret was in doubling down on ex-President Obama’s “war on coal” and proclaiming in her campaign trail that “we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”
At the national level, the extraordinary surge in projected electricity demand driven by exponential growth in AI, data centres and crypto-mining has taken centre stage. In a video interview on the sidelines of the CERAWeek energy conference in Houston two weeks ago, US Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said that the country should restart shuttered coal-fired power plants under President Donald Trump’s national energy emergency declaration: "I think as part of the national energy emergency which President Trump has declared we’ve got to keep every plant open. And if there have been units at a coal plant that have been shut down, we need to bring those back on."
The Interior Department said in an email to Reuters it was committed to "revitalizing the coal industry through the reduction of regulatory barriers and the promotion of energy independence." Secretary Burgum said “We got to keep every coal plant open.... there is no Energy Transition but Energy Addition…we need to avoid the mistakes made by the UK and Germany of de-industrialising…we need abundant, reliable, low-cost energy.”
The Suez Moment in Carbon Imperialism
In the annals of decolonization, the ‘Suez crisis’ refers to the British–French–Israeli invasion of Egypt in 1956. This was followed by U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower’s strong warning to the British government threatening serious damage to the country’s financial system by selling the American government's bonds of pound sterling.
President Eisenhower’s refusal to go along with the Western imperialist impulse then is comparable to President Trump’s refusal now, nearly 70 years later, to get on board with the Paris agreement or any of the related initiatives in the globalist UN-led climate agenda. At a stroke, the Trump administration’s “energy dominance” policies have put the US on the same side as the major developing countries in the world. Countries in the Global South have long had to justify their coal-powered industrialization strategies to climate-obsessed Western elites at the annual UN climate change summits (“Conference of Parties”).
At the COP26 summit held in Glasgow in 2021, it was no surprise that India, China and several other developing countries launched a last-minute objection to language that called for the “phase out” of coal. The final text of the Glasgow Agreement called only for the “phase down” of coal. At the following COP27 negotiations in Egypt, India demanded that coal not be “singled out” in the final agreement and that “all fossil fuels” be treated as equals.
In preparing for COP28 held in Abu Dhabi in 2023, the position of India’s Power Minister R. K. Singh, representing the world’s third largest energy consumer, was unequivocal. He stated that “There is going to be pressure on nations at COP28 to reduce coal usage. We are not going to do this... we are not going to compromise on availability of power for our growth, even if it requires that we add coal-based capacity.”
Speaking at the “Powering Africa Summit” in Washington, D.C., US Energy Secretary Chris Wright told African leaders and their people that the Trump administration “has no desire to tell you what to do with your energy system…We had years of Western Countries, including my own ( USA) shamelessly saying (to Africa), ‘don’t develop coal, don’t develop coal, coal is bad’, that’s just nonsense, 100% nonsense.’ Mr. Wright was rightly calling out the hypocrisy of Western nations denying developing counties access to the energy ladder -- ascending from “traditional biomass” (wood, agricultural residue and cow-dung) to coal, oil and gas -- that the West itself had successfully climbed and benefited from.
Among the abounding ironies in the tale of King Coal’s exaggerated death is the case of West Germany. The combination of the shutdown of nuclear power by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s green inclinations and the sanctions on Russian piped natural gas exports in the wake of the Ukraine war made domestic coal – the dirtiest lignite variety at that -- the default choice in Germany. According to the IEA, Germany’s “significant reversal” drove European coal consumption for power up 9% in 2022.
More egregious, however, is Germany’s substantial imports of South African coal. One commentator on X with over 140 thousand followers aptly described European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s visit to South Africa last week to promote -- among other things -- the “clean energy transition” as follows: “The EU is pushing "clean energy" on South Africa all while they're literally importing our coal to keep their own lights on, lol. Hypocrits (sic).”
The world’s largest coal power consumers in Asia such as China, India, Indonesia and Vietnam now no longer need to face off what the-then senior economic advisor to the Government of India Arvind Subramaniam called carbon imperialism a decade ago. In a 180-degree turnaround from the global climate agenda supported by the previous Bush, Obama and Biden administrations, “carbon imperialism” is now no longer a US foreign policy objective.
Coal Reclaims Its Throne
Coal is what physicists call a “dense” energy source. A Tesla battery weighs over 500kg and requires 25-50 tons (i.e. thousand kgs) of minerals to be mined, processed, and transported. Yet, the Tesla battery’s stored energy is equivalent to a mere 30kg sack of coal. That sack of coal of course is cheap, versatile and readily transportable. And the Tesla battery merely stores power, you still have to get the electrons from elsewhere.
Unlike oil and natural gas, coal is a “non-political” fuel. It is the world’s most abundant energy resource. Its deposits are spread widely, if unevenly, around the world. Its biggest exporters, in rank, are Indonesia, Australia, Russia, the US, Colombia and Canada. In Asia, China, India, Vietnam and Indonesia are among the world’s largest consumers of coal and among its largest producers. They depend heavily on it for their energy, and hence national, security.
Coal, commonly vilified for being the dirtiest fossil fuel, is in fact a success story of scientific progress. Key pollutants from coal combustion in power generation plants have fallen dramatically with technological improvements over the past several decades with the development of high-efficiency, low-emission plants. These 4th generation “ultra-supercritical” plants have dramatically reduced emissions of pollutants that adversely affect human health, including carbon monoxide, lead, sulfur dioxide (by 98%), oxides of nitrogen (83%), ground-level ozone and particulate matter (99.8%).
The major remaining emission by coal power plants, carbon dioxide, contrary to common perception, is not a pollutant. Indeed, it is vital to plant growth and, hence, human life. Consistent with President Trump’s caps-on remarks on “BEAUTIFUL, CLEAN COAL”, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin has requested permission from the White House to reverse the 2009 endangerment “finding” that allowed the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide as a “health threat” during the Obama and Biden years.
Coal and Human Flourishing
Coal transformed human life for the better, first in England and northwest Europe, then in the US, and later in other parts of the world. In the US, coal production grew 16-fold between 1870 and 1920. By the 1880s it had become the leading source of energy in the country and remained so until the middle of the twentieth century when it was superseded by oil. By 1900, the U.S. had also become the richest and most powerful country in the world. Even in 2022, after a century and a half of intense mining, the U.S. remains the world’s 4th largest producer of coal. The U.S. also retains the largest coal reserves in the world.
Coal use in the US had been in steep decline since 2000, partly as the result of the shale gas revolution taking off. However, it now no longer looks as if coal – accounting for about a fifth of power generation in utility-scale facilities -- will disappear from the US energy scene in the next few decades. President Trump has vowed to end the war on “beautiful, clean coal.” With the forecast surge in electricity demand, both natural gas- and coal-derived power will be needed.
In the international scene, the US is no longer aligned with the EU and the “collective West” (Canada, Australia, etc.) in driving the globalist climate agenda. Institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF – captured by the climate industrial complex – have long vetoed financing governments in the Global South from developing their domestic fossil fuel resources. With a major say in the funding and management of these financial institutions, the US may no longer tolerate such practices. Energy Secretary Chris Wright certainly has no inclination to participate in what has been perceived by many in the Global South as carbon imperialism.
Ed Miliband’s trip to China has been exposed for its hubris and clueless irony. With the Trumpian counter-revolution in energy policy, the demonization of fossil fuels has ended at least in the US within the collective West. Coal, now capable of being burnt cleanly via 4th generation low-emission plants, will once again take its rightful place in the story of human flourishing. That is not a moment too soon.
A version of this article was first published in the Daily Sceptic (https://dailysceptic.org/2025/03/25/beautiful-clean-coal/)
Two Interview excerpts in Africa, from 2018, about Clean Coal
Professor Rosemary Falcon heads the Sustainable Coal Research Group at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg, where the late Nelson Mandela studied law in the 1950s.
Falcon leads a team of nine academics along with 20 Mastersand doctoral students who, with their own laboratory at Wits, say they have proved conclusively that clean coal is not only possible, but among the cheapest ways to generate electricity on a continent where more than 600 million Africans live without power.
“It starts by understanding that coal varies enormously,” she said.
Each region has a different recipe of minerals and fossil matter, and if you give me a lump of coal out of Kenya, the US, Europe, India or Colombia, I can probably tell you where it’s from.”
In North America, she said, coal was formed in hot, steamy swamps, and it burns rapidly. Ours was formed at the end of an ice age and burns for longer and at a higher temperature
“An industrial boiler from Europe, fed with South African coal, will melt because our product burns so hot. But we also have more ash that actually absorbs heat, making the fire less efficient. So one of the first steps is to alter the coal before you light the fire. Or build a boiler designed for each coal type.”
Working with Falcon is Dr Nandi Malumbazo who took her PhD in chemical engineering at Wits. “In Africa, the use of coal is growing and that’s something we have to deal with,” she says.
“The challenge is to burn it more cleanly and this starts at the mine with techniques we’ve developed to separate poor quality coal from the better stuff that is already less toxic.
“You then crush it and remove elements that will not contribute to a good burn. Like unleaded petrol, you’re starting from a better place. Less ash, less fumes, more heat and a longer burn. From there we’ve done experiments and written up peer-reviewed research to show we can use it way cleaner than in most countries.”
The Wits research has drawn praise from across the continent. Dr Samson Bada of Nigeria has joined the team, along with Dr Jacob Masiala from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Both are working on ways to get the lights on in Africa and keep the air clean. There are also post-graduate staff and students from Zimbabwe, Botswana and Mozambique.
“If we mix pulverised coal with bamboo, something that grows well in Africa, we take emission levels down even further,” said Masiala.
“Of course, a bamboo plantation also gives you carbon credits, and we can grow it on old mine sites to rehabilitate the ground. It’s a winner on so many fronts.”
[https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2018-03-15-op-ed-clean-coal-is-the-way-to-power- africa-and-sa-academics-know-how/]
Roger Crisp
Here are the facts on a couple of misunderstandings in the article. Firstly, it doesn't matter much whether UK solar panels are made with power from oil, gas, nuclear or wind. A solar farm lasts 30 years, with a 15 month energy payback in not so sunny Northern Europe. Elsewhere, the energy payback is less than a year.
A 104 MW UK solar farm generates 11.5 MW (11% capacity factor) x 8,760 hours/year, so 100 GWh/year. The output saves UK gas power and 50,000 tonnes of CO2 per year (at 500 gm/kWh). If the solar panels are made using 100% coal power (twice the emissions of gas), it takes 3 years of a 30 year life to break even, so the saving is 90%, 45,000 tonnes/year.
China was 62% thermal supply in 2024. So the saving per year is 47,000 tonnes of CO2 vs 50,000 if the panels were made using renewables. The use of coal in China hardly affects the CO2 savings.
Secondly, China is busting a gut to peak coal use and installed more solar and wind than the rest of the world put together in 2023 and 2024. Wind and solar power has a lot of curtailment recently, as the transmission grid hasn't caught up yet.
If you project the current trends, Michael Barnard reckons by 2035, China will have lower total CO2 emissions than the USA. See https://cleantechnica.com/2024/09/30/china-likely-to-have-lower-ghg-emissions-than-usa-by-2035/. China will expand renewables installed per year even further and will soon be dramatically cutting total generation from coal. Even while it keeps all its coal plants open to handle occasional peak times when the wind speed is low and it is cloudy - it will be using coal as the resource to balance its grid.
There is a huge difference in having huge coal capacity for backup, while reducing the TOTAL use of coal as a grid fuel. Only use counts for CO2 emissions, not capacity installed. China will get rid of most coal use by 2035, but the USA won't be able to reduce CO2 emissions (from coal, gas and oil) as fast, due to Trump's policies. China will catch the USA.