9 August 2017, The Guardian, Glencore’s Wandoan coalmine wins approval from Queensland government. Glencore’s multibillion-dollar Wandoan coalmine proposal has been granted mining leases years after it was shelved amid falling commodity prices and a ramped-up global response to climate change. On Tuesday Queensland’s natural resources and mines minister, Dr Anthony Lynham, approved three 27-year leases covering 30,000 hectares for the first stage of its $7bn mine near Roma. Doubts about the future of the Wandoan mine had lingered since 2012, amid falling thermal coal prices and a poor market outlook. The approval has enraged environmental groups, who say the government is prioritising a flailing coal industry over communities and putting the state’s agricultural industry at further risk. “For many years local farmers have been fighting this coalmine,” an Australian Conservation Foundation spokesman, Jason Lyddieth, said on Wednesday. “We know that digging up coal and burning it is polluting our air and fuelling climate change. “The Queensland government needs to get serious about preparing for a carbon pollution-free world. It needs to get serious about our water, our land and our air.” Greenpeace said the approval showed the government was more interested in propping up the fossil fuel industry than protecting communities and the environment. “We can either have a healthy planet and thriving Great Barrier Reef or we can have new coalmines, not both,” said a climate and energy campaigner, Nikola Casule. “Our politicians must abandon their coal fetish and instead harness the renewable energy revolution to protect Australian communities and position Australia as an industry leader in this rapidly growing sector.” Read More here
Tag Archives: coal
28 July 2017, Reuters, U.S. coal exports soar, in boost to Trump energy agenda, data shows. U.S. coal exports have jumped more than 60 percent this year due to soaring demand from Europe and Asia, according to a Reuters review of government data, allowing President Donald Trump’s administration to claim that efforts to revive the battered industry are working. The increased shipments came as the European Union and other U.S. allies heaped criticism on the Trump administration for its rejection of the Paris Climate Accord, a deal agreed by nearly 200 countries to cut carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels like coal. The previously unpublished figures provided to Reuters by the U.S. Energy Information Administration showed exports of the fuel from January through May totaled 36.79 million tons, up 60.3 percent from 22.94 million tons in the same period in 2016. While reflecting a bounce from 2016, the shipments remained well-below volumes recorded in equivalent periods the previous five years. They included a surge to several European countries during the 2017 period, including a 175 percent increase in shipments to the United Kingdom, and a doubling to France – which had suffered a series of nuclear power plant outages that required it and regional neighbors to rely more heavily on coal. “If Europe wants to lecture Trump on climate then EU member states need transition plans to phase out polluting coal,” said Laurence Watson, a data scientist working on coal at independent think tank Carbon Tracker Initiative in London. Read More here
7 July 2017, Renew Economy, Coal CEO admits that ‘clean coal’ is a myth. While President Donald Trump continues to tout “clean” coal, coal baron Robert Murray says it’s just a fantasy. “Carbon capture and sequestration does not work. It’s a pseudonym for ‘no coal,’” the CEO of Murray Energy, the country’s largest privately held coal-mining company, told E&E News. Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), also called carbon capture and storage, is the process of trapping carbon dioxide from a power plant (during or after burning a hydrocarbon like coal) and then storing it permanently, usually underground. It’s a technically challenging and expensive process — especially problematic in an era of cheap natural gas and renewable energy. Mississippi pulled the plug on one of the country’s biggest CCS efforts last month after the company spent billions on trying, and failing, to make it work…. That’s why it’s so stunning a top coal CEO like Murray would now say that clean coal isn’t a real thing. “It is neither practical nor economic, carbon capture and sequestration,” he said last week. “It is just cover for the politicians, both Republicans and Democrats that say, ‘Look what I did for coal,’ knowing all the time that it doesn’t help coal at all.” And this is from a guy who is a member of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity — which has spent tens of millions of dollars trying to persuade the public that clean coal is the solution to global warming. If, as Murray says, CCS is “neither practical nor economic,” then coal clearly has no future. Two years ago the nations of the world agreed in Paris to bring global CO2 emissions down to zero in the second half of this century — the only way to avoid multiple, irreversible catastrophic climate impacts. Read More here
30 June 2017, Renew Economy, Another blow to CCS, as EU power giants bow out of Dutch project. European power giants Engie and Uniper have withdrawn from a test project to capture and store carbon dioxide generated by one of several major new coal plants in the Netherlands, dealing yet another blow to the prospects of “clean coal” technology, in which the Australian government and fossil fuel lobbyists still hold much stock. Reuters reported this week that the two companies – one of which, Engie, the majority owner of Australia’s Loy Yang B brown coal-fired power station in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley, and who recently closed Hazelwood, – had told the Dutch government they no longer intended to participate in the CCS project, the biggest of its kind in Europe. Holland’s economic affairs Minister Henk Kamp said in a statement he would “examine whether legal steps can be taken to recoup” unspecified subsidies paid to the companies if they had not changed their minds by mid-September. The minister also said that the companies’ withdrawal from the project “changed nothing” in the government’s resolve to develop large-scale CCS demonstration projects. Read More here