Dot Earth Blog: Energy Agency Sees Global Coal Boom Unabated, Europe's Binge Temporary

The International Energy Agency?s Medium-Term Coal Market Report, issued today in Paris, is essential reading for anyone wishing to maintain a reality-based view of global trends in fuel use. While many energy forecasts end up wrong, on short time scales like this, that?s less true.

Some bullet points: The proportion of global energy supplied by coal is approaching that for oil. China and India see unabated growth in coal burning through the next five years. The surge in exports of coal from the United States to Europe should peak soon.

The news release ? appended below ? says it all, and the findings it describes reinforce my assertion awhile back that there?s plenty of denial to go around in the arguments over climate and energy trends and policies.

Anyone making the case that some magical application of a carbon price, in the United States or elsewhere, can ride to the rescue of the climate system is missing the primacy of real-time energy needs over long-term climate concerns.

That doesn?t mean there?s nothing to be done, of course.?Some important advice comes from Maria van der Hoeven, executive director of the energy agency, in a Huffington Post piece today:

First, final energy can be consumed in a more efficient manner, which requires less primary energy, including coal.

Second, existing technologies that use coal more efficiently can be deployed, particularly in the power sector, which accounts for two-thirds of global coal use. A single, large coal plant, if built with the best-available technology, can reduce emissions by the annual equivalent of taking a million cars off the road compared to the subcritical coal-plant technology still prevalent in most countries.

Third, new technologies, such as underground coal gasification and especially carbon capture and storage, can ? if given substantial financial support ? reduce emissions substantially from coal use in power plants and industrial facilities.

But the biggest hope for reducing emissions from coal may come from policies that encourage its replacement by lower-emission energy sources. A meaningful carbon price can do this, but so can cheap natural gas ? as recent U.S. experience suggests. The boom in unconventional natural gas has prompted U.S. power generators to switch from coal to gas en masse.

The U.S. experience suggests that a more efficient gas market, marked by flexible pricing and fueled by indigenous unconventional resources that are produced sustainably, can reduce coal use, CO2 emissions and consumers? electricity bills, without harming energy security. China, Europe and other regions should take note. [Read the rest.]

For more, revisit my related post, ?Can China Follow U.S. Shift from Coal to Gas?? There?s excellent reporting in last month?s feature in The Times, ?With China and India Ravenous for Energy, Coal?s Future Seems Assured.?

[9:10 a.m. | Insert | More of the logic in expediting a shift from coal to natural gas in developing countries comes from the latest pollution mortality estimates, as reported in the Global Burden of Disease study in The Lancet.]

Here?s an excerpt from the agency news release:

Coal?s share of the global energy mix continues to rise, and by 2017 coal will come close to surpassing oil as the world?s top energy source, the?International Energy Agency?(IEA) said today as it released its annual?Medium-Term Coal Market Report?(MCMR).

Although the growth rate of coal slows from the breakneck pace of the last decade, global coal consumption by 2017 stands at 4.32 billion tonnes of oil equivalent (btoe), versus around 4.40 btoe for oil, based on IEA medium-term projections. The IEA expects that coal demand will increase in every region of the world except in the United States, where coal is being pushed out by natural gas.

?Thanks to abundant supplies and insatiable demand for power from emerging markets, coal met nearly half of the rise in global energy demand during the first decade of the 21st Century,? said IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven. ?This report sees that trend continuing. In fact, the world will burn around 1.2 billion more tonnes of coal per year by 2017 compared to today ? equivalent to the current coal consumption of Russia and the United States combined. Coal?s share of the global energy mix continues to grow each year, and if no changes are made to current policies, coal will catch oil within a decade.?

China and India lead the growth in coal consumption over the next five years. The report says?China will surpass the rest of the world in coal demand during the outlook period, while India will become the largest seaborne coal importer and second-largest consumer, surpassing the United States?.

Amid concern about the impact of Chinese uncertainty on coal markets, the report offers a Chinese Slowdown Case. This scenario shows that even if Chinese GDP growth were to slow to a 4.6% average over the period, coal demand would still increase both globally and in China ? indicating that coal demand is not likely to stop growing even with more bearish economic perspectives.

Click here for related slides from the news conference.

Source: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/18/energy-agency-sees-global-coal-boom-unabated-europes-binge-temporary/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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