Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Is Australian coal still “naughty”, if the coal is burned in China?
Aussie PM Tony Abbott has infuriated greens in the last few days, by approving a gigantic new coal mine in the state of New South Wales.
According to Breitbart;
Last week a contentious A$1.2bn open cut coal mining project was given the thumbs up by the Environment Minister, Greg Hunt, allowing for 268 million tonnes of coal to be extracted until 2046. The mine is in the state of New South Wales. The project, the third begun under Mr Abbott in less than 12 months, was approved after rigorous environmental testing and consultation with the local community.
Yes, there were Green Party opponents who called the mine ‘disastrous’ and ‘economically insane’, but in the end the mine went ahead because of the national interest.
Mr Abbott’s stated belief is that fossil fuel not renewable energy holds the key to a viable future – not just in Australia but across the developing world. In November last year he said:
“For the foreseeable future coal is the foundation of prosperity. Coal is the foundation of the way we live because you can’t have a modern lifestyle without energy, you can’t have a modern economy without energy.
“So if we are serious about raising people’s living standards in less developed countries, if we are serious about maintaining and improving living standards in countries like Australia, we have to be serious about making the best use of coal.”
However, Breitbart also cites an interesting statistic, that 73% of Australia’s coal is exported, presumably mostly to China.
President Obama has effectively granted China a “free pass” until the 2030s, to emit as much CO2 as they want. So there is no problem with China digging up vast quantities of their own coal, and burning it in Chinese power plants.
But why does the coal China burns have to actually be mined in China? If a given quantity of coal is going to be burned anyway, thanks to China’s free pass, doesn’t it make sense for as much of that coal as possible to be mined in the most ecologically friendly fashion possible, in tightly regulated Australian mines?
If Australia mines the coal, but the coal is burned in China, who carries the green “guilt”? Is the burning of the Australian coal in China sanctioned by China’s free pass, or does the coal count against Australia, even though the coal is being burned in China? Or does Australia have to accept shame just for the amount of coal in transit, which is instantly transmogrified into “good coal” when it crosses the Chinese border? Or does Australia only have to feel green guilt, if it can be demonstrated that the Australian contribution has increased the total quantity of coal which China is burning, over and above what they would have burned were they fully dependent on domestic supplies? In this case, would Australia only have to feel green “guilt”, for this hypothetical surplus?
If it is agreed that Australia has created such a surplus, can Australia’s green “guilt” be assuaged by scaling back Australian production, to eliminate the Australian sourced surplus, and filling the resulting demand gap with coal sourced from China? So any consequent overall surplus is purely a decision of China, and therefore sanctioned by the Chinese CO2 free pass?
If this is unacceptable, could some Australian coal mines be temporarily redesignated as Chinese embassies, and therefore become technically part of the People’s Republic of China? Australia of course would be entitled to charge a “rent” for land occupied by China embassies – said rent to be approximately the income the Australian government would have made, by taxing Australian coal producers who would otherwise have mined coal from the redesignated Chinese embassy land?
In any case, shouldn’t greens be encouraging Australia to help China minimise their ecological footprint, by encouraging Australia to export as much coal as possible, to minimise the amount of coal sourced from less regulated Chinese facilities?
The watermelons are full of conundrums, ironies, and hypocrisies of “do as I say, as I do.”
Drill baby, drill. Dig baby, dig.
Burn baby burn.
that too.
“Satisfaction came in a chain reaction
(Burnin’)
I couldn’t get enough, so I had to self-destruct
The heat was on, rising to the top
Everybody going strong, and that is when my spark got hot”
https://youtu.be/A_sY2rjxq6M
Until the greens run the country, they’ll just have to cop it sweet !
on this one..NO! NO ! NO! not because I am the teeniest bit worried re burning coal at all
BUT this mine is in an area of very good soil and is some of our rather rare good ag area in Aus.
meanwhile we have other already good mines being run at part time or mothballed due to falling prices and LACK of Demand..
Peabody is flogging off his investments as an example.
Vic brown coals been redflagged as no use..so mines there are now idle or underworked too..may as well mine it n crush it and make soil improver from it FFS!
far more efficient that faffing round burning wood for
Biochar” that costs hugely to buy and uses energy to make.
idiot green tech crap idea;-/
hell for that..go back to burning stubble n plough it back in, knocks weed seeds and sweetens the soil and golly..NO profit to mr monmongrel chem co and mates.
the smoke from burning paddocks also seemed to help bring the rains, as bushfires do.
Australia exports high grade coals, keeps low grade coals at home. Shrinking domestic comsumption makes some mines uneconomical, but doesn’t impact others.
ozspeaksup does not know what he is talking about. I live less than ten kilometers from the Shenhua mine site and the mine is NOT in area of good farming soil.
The Liverpool plains are a large flat area of black (basaltic volcanic) clay soils which must be preserved at all costs. However, the Shenhua open cut mine is in the adjacent hilly country which have very poor (sandy) soil. The mine is located on the South Western side of Watermark mountain and it is mostly over three kilometers from the good soils on the edge of the Liverpool plains i.e. there are two large hills between the mine site and plains (Black Mountain and then Watermark mountain).
The Shenhua mining proposal has gone through three separate environmental studies which have looked in great detail at its effects on the environment. All three studies have agreed that it will have very little effect on the adjacent farmland and the aquifers that support it. The nearest aquifers are located 400 to 500 metres below the ground while the mine itself will never exceed 40 metres in depth. The Gunnedah Formation aquifer is the one used by local farmers to irrigate their crops. Extensive mapping and geological surveys indicates that there is a 1 kilometer buffer between the edge of the disturbance zone for the mine site and the edge of the Gunnedah Formation. Continuous ground water monitoring will be in place to ensure that this buffer will be maintained.
To drive a point home – the water that seeps into the aquifers on the Liverpool plains from the runoff from surrounding hill country has been seeping through the embedded coal seams for millions of years. How do I know this? If live in a village between the hill country and the Liverpool plains and the locally sourced underground water is so infused with sulfurous compounds that you can literally light the water emerging from the taps (faucets) in our village. This has been always been the case. Indeed they have been mining coal in the hill country a few kilometres west of the Liverpool plains for almost 100 years and no farmers have protested [at least up until now].
Ozspeakup,
Could you please respond to Ian Wilson’s very informative post? Or is your silence a sign of you conceding grudgingly?
Here’s a useful diagram to get an idea of the Australian Energy situation:
http://www.cleanenergyregulator.gov.au/RET/Forms-and-resources/australian-energy-flow-diagrams
It only gets reviewed every couple of years, but it doesn’t change significantly over time. Australia exports far more energy than it consumes. We also export far more energy embodied in other goods (e.g. aluminium) than we import. I started a PhD on “Australia’s Invisible Energy Trade” but got borerd with it. The preliminary findings were quite clear cut.
The OP doesn’t mention the end user of the final products, whoever that might be. The person who buys a stainless steel product in Walmart that was made in China with Aussie coal and iron ore… who caused that chain of events to occur in teh first place? The final demand for the stainless steel product. Apporitoning blame to any particular step in the value adding chain is folly.
I think the previous post may give us the AGW answer. Issue indulgences for coal burning. Who cares if it works as long as apostles like Al Gore and Mike Man can build their castles and fleets.
err , “… not as I do.”
I think he meant “do as I say I do”.
Every damn bit of that coal will eventually be dug up and burned.
Try and tell a man that his freezing family can’t burn the accessible coal beneath their feet, and I will show you a man who leads a war against those fascists.
I agree. It is all going to be dug up and burned, and the earth will be like a big Swiss cheese wheel in the end.
Why fight the inevitable?
There is nothing more dangerous on this planet than a human being when the only choice you leave them requires either they kill you or they let their children die.
Greens won’t be happy until we’re all back in skins and living in caves.
Being happy is not on any Green’s agenda. They have no idea what the word means. They would have made perfect minions under Stalin or Mao – and still fume that they missed that chance.
When you say “all back in caves…” I think you may have meant “the worthy survivors of the cull of useless eaters back in caves…”
No skins! Aren’t you keeping up? Animals have a right to live as much as we! Humans need to return to the trees!
What do you mean? Don’t the trees have rights?
LoL … yes, our own skins 😉
Australia could say they were introducing China to a western custom called Santa Claus. With over 1.3 billion people, there has to be some naughty children in China. How many stockings would 268 million tons of coal fill anyway?
umm.. and just where do you think most Christmas presents are made ? 😉
North Pole, Andy.
http://www.rockyhigh66.org/stuff/North-Pole-Board-Games-Factory.jpg
So, first things first. China is not the main export market for Australian coal. Most of it goes to Japan, South Korea and other Asian countries.
Secondly, the project will mine 260 million tonnes, but then over 100 million tonnes will be returned straight back into the ground as coal reject, following the processing of the raw coal to create a marketable product. This mine will have a yield of about 60%.
Very little coal is imported into China. Until a few years ago, China was a net exporter of coal. Right now, they have vastly reduced imports from the recent peak, which represented only a very small proportion of their total consumption.
China has no shortage of coal. In fact, if it weren’t for the Mongols, China was on the verge of its own industrial revolution about 500 years before the European one, so advanced was their steel-making.
AP, I was about to say this, but you said it first, and better & briefer.
Curious the pause at the brink; they took the road more travelled, and that has made all the difference.
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It is interesting that until recently, Australian coal exports were running at very similar levels to Chinese coal imports. However, the Chinese were not importing all this coal directly from Australia.
Perhaps the Greens could be renamed ‘Latter Day Mongols’.
The real and manifold benefits of atmospheric CO2 enrichment far outweigh any negative effects. Increased extraction of Australian coal means more lives lifted from poverty in China and India, which is a very positive thing. Australian Prime Minister is a staunch supporter of coal and for all the good it has brought the world.
It is of course better so tee the coal being mined under Australian environmental jurisdiction and occupational safety rules than to leave that to the chinese, whose standards are poor to non-existent. It’s a win-win-situation, I suppose.
Actually, a lot of our coal also goes to Japan, Korea and India, depending on type of coal.
A fair chunk of our coking coal (steel making) does go to China and Japan.
but the thermal coal (power stations) is more widely spread.
Obviously it is not a static market and I haven’t kept up with it the last few years.
The reserve bank does some good statistics on where stuff goes, but finding the most recent graphs of destinations is not easy.
http://search.rba.gov.au/search?q=coal+exports&entqr=0&sort=date%3AD%3AL%3Ad1&output=xml_no_dtd&client=newRBA&ud=1&oe=UTF-8&ie=UTF-8&proxystylesheet=newRBA&site=RBA-all
I should also mention that Australia is also a supplier of uranium. 🙂
I read somewhere that Australia has 2/3 of the known uranium reserves. Someday when the anti nuke nuts are cold and hungry Australia will be the energy kings.
A little less than 1/3 but what is interesting is the low production relative to reserves. Is Australia having political trouble exporting? Is it government policy to hold on to their uranium reserves?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_reserves
And lead … think bullets
Well the mine, the subject of this post, is being developed by a Chinese company, so its already ‘Chinese coal’ as its removed from the open cut pit.
On the other hand, we have heaps of coal and iron ore, and if we could get the coal and the iron ore to the same place easily, we could become the world supplier of steel !
http://www.eastwestlineparks.com.au/
“Aussie PM Tony Abbott has infuriated greens in the last few days”
More than Greens. The loudest opposition has come from local farmers and their representatives.
Anyone who feels ‘green guilt’ for releasing CO2 into the atmosphere is mentally handicapped. They are incapable of understanding the well documented laws explaining the science of energy transfer. We normally try to help handicapped people so they don’t injure themselves. Why aren’t we helping the greenies?
Speaking as a Brit, our cousins in Australia have a record of just doing something simply and with common sense. Their immigration policy is envied by the British people. I wish them all the good fortune in the world with their energy and export policies, and hope they continue to mine more coal, which they can extract quite cheaply. Go Aussies.
Hear hear
jim in this one case..N stokes comment re the Farmers whos prime land is being stuffed around for this DOES have a very valid post..and the extra kicker is? china I believe is planning on importing workers
when we need emloyment for already our of work miners with skills here
that said
NO need for this mine at all
they could have bought any one of a number of already working mines. AND kept their staff in work
I am not a native English speaker. Is that the reason I have problems understanding what your are saying? Or is it your lack of proper grammar and interpunction that is troubling me?
If you have to burn coal, it might as well be Gondwana coal – very clean with few nasties as it was laid down at the current south pole before the contents started their northern migration.
i wish Abbott could put someone in charge of the UK National Grid who thinks the way the Aussie Government does. The current incumbent thinks it’s ok to run with zero safety margin & a wing & a prayer using wind & solar power to complement fossil fuels in the middle of winter. A disaster in the making…….
yeah sort of, BUT we also have HUGE costs added for supply n services after they dropped the carbon tax..
we are being gouged by supply cos
and
Mandatory “dumb Meters” in Vic..for something so super duper, theyve managed to over charge repeat charge and generally create a mess AND we pay for it ongoing and rising quarterly
power day rate is avg round the 29c a kw hr…total bloody rip off the only time anyone not in a fulltime max wage job can afford to turn the oven /washer/ etc on is after 10pm at night or weekends…and when enough people wise up then I bet that off peak rate also soars.
When I hear ‘smart’ I feel the sting of the lash.
================
At last!! a politician with commonsense, a rare breed indeed.
Arthur,
The pathological hatred of Abbott by those of the left is something to believe. This guy could shut down all our coal mines and he still wouldn’t make the greens happy. In the end, he simply chooses to do what’s best for Australia, the greens can go to hell.
Heh, with Abbott, they scrape their bellies open on the tip of the iceberg.
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On a side note, the australian “Black” coal burns far cleaner than most of the coal China can get from its domestic mines.
So technically australia is being a good citizen by helping our chinese neigbours reduce the amount of pollutants they will be putting into the atmoshpere.
There is a bumper sticker here that I see a lot.
“Fertilise the bush, bulldoze in a Greenie”
Not true. It is mostly related to the bells and whistles on the facility doing the burning and associated pollution controls, not the coal itself.
Assuming that no scrubbing is used, combustion of a lower sulfur coal will emit less sulfur dioxide. If scrubbing is used, a lower sulfur coal scrubber would consume less lime for example. Same reasoning applies for other pollutants.
I’m still peeved that they aren’t counting the CO2 emitted from bio-fuels. That’s the real scam – it’s not like it doesn’t get into the atmosphere – Lord only knows what that CO2 is attributed to once it’s there – because it’s still there. :/
well not biofuels BUT some EU analretentive are now claiming organic farms produce more co2 etc than commercial..
theyd be the same fools who think Monsanto and mates chem farming is sustainable and good for the soil. or people n animals.
dunno bout you but a newly upped allowable intake .5of a gram of roundup(up from .3) in my body PER KILO of bodyweight coming in via my food daily, depending on what I eat..doesnt make me feel very happy about it.
of course thats assumed adult intake
what about kids? how much glyphosate a day do they need as RDI? I wonder?
coal is the LEAST of our problems when the scrubbers are fitted n working
Again, I can’t understand a word you are saying. Please put some effort in writing proper English.
‘Organic’ farms are certainly bad for the environment – land-intensive. Land is an inelastic resource – so ‘organic’ agriculture promotes cutting down rainforests. Glyphosate was an excellent invention, useful in energy-saving ‘no-till’ agriculture.
We should use the greens idea of fossil fuel taxation for coal.
We COULD pull out 1000 Mt per year from that mine, but we will only pull out 500 Mt, thus halving our emissions for the year.
You’re not doing it right, use greenie logic. Claim it may be able to produce 2000 Mt per year, but since we only mined 500, the emissions are cut by 75%!
Every engineering calculation and every scientific premise connected to the cult of CAGW has been distorted or is just incorrect.
The calculation and total CO2 difference CO2 coal vs natural gas does not include the energy required to transport the natural gas long distances in pipelines or to liquefy and then to heat up the liquefied natural gas, both of which use 30% of the transport CH4. In the case of Europe were the transported distance is extraordinary as the Europeans refuse to all the evil fracking it is 40%.
Due to the above engineering fact that cannot be avoided due to basic physics the CO2 benefit of burning natural gas rather than cool is only 10 to 20%.
A 10 to 20% benefit in reduced CO2 does not justify paying three times as much for the energy to use natural gas rather than coal, particularly if a country is running a deficit. (i.e. Almost every country.)
P.S. The absurdity of the CO2 sin calculations reaches astronomical levels if one adds the scientific fact that 2/3 of the recent CO2 rise was due to natural reasons (the planet warmed) rather than anthropogenic CO2 emissions and more than 2/3 of the recent warming has also due to natural reasons (changes in the solar cycle.) rather than anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquefied_natural_gas
I assume that the energy required for bowl mills, etc. that coal needs but that gas doesn’t is negligible?
Joe, the coal plant I worked at (just precipitators, no scrubber) had ~3% auxiliary power cost. The ball-mill-power had to be a small percentage of that. So it’s not insignificant, but just barely.
Auxiliary power costs on new plants w/scrubbers is considerably higher, of course. With proposed carbon-capture, aux costs would be ridiculously high, something like 25-30%. That’s not even considering capital and maintenance costs. Modern plants I visited had a large percentage of the entire maintenance force working non-stop on all the “pollution” equipment — especially scrubbers.
beng135:
Thanks for the data point. I hadn’t even thought about scrubbers as an energy loss. (And I’m surprised there are some plants that don’t have them, since I saw installations forty years ago already that did.)
Also, it seems that energy expended in extraction must be greater for coal than for gas, although I haven’t been able to determine whether it’s significant in either case.
The whole CO2 thing is absurd, purely and simply because the Greenhouse Effect is a myth! The average temperature of the atmosphere IS -18C. That we only care about the bottom 0.01% of it where atmospheric pressure increases that average is irrelevant to the greenhouse con.
The amount of CO2 the atmosphere gained is less than the amount of CO2 that was injected into it by fossil fuel burning. Nature has been removing CO2 from the atmosphere. Sometimes people don’t get this right because they equate a gigaton of CO2 with a gigaton of carbon – which is the carbon in 3.67 gigatons (petagrams) of CO2. The global carbon budget for the years 1959-2010 is available from the Tyndall Centre at http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/global-carbon-budget-2010.
The best answer for the questions asked in the posting: “all of the above”. For in religious reasoning all answers are valid to some groups.
Fundamentally though, coal is good for both China and Australia.
Lol. Though the arguments being made against this particular coal mine, for once, aren’t about CO2 (at least not officially). The protests over this mine have been about farmland on or nearby. Many farmers who are Abbott supporters have gotten very angry because the man who had been elected to government for that region had promised that the mine wouldn’t go ahead. The fact that he is a Cabinet Minister as well (Barnaby Joyce) has really put the cat amongst the pigeons.
The Greenie handbook states that someone has to be punished for the carbon “sin” of coal. While usually that means whomever burns it is the guilty one, in this case since China gets a free pass, it’s the producer, Australia. So bad, bad Australia. Prepare to get spanked soundly in Paris.
Paraphrasing the pig’s “four-legs good” mantra” Socialism good (well, China is actually not even communist right but more of a military-led capitalistic-dictatorship), capitalism evil. China will NEVER be properly condemned by today’s international enviro’s.
“President Obama has effectively granted China a “free pass” until the 2030s, to emit as much CO2 as they want. So there is no problem with China digging up vast quantities of their own coal, and burning it in Chinese power plants.”
Frankly, I don’t think China gives two hoots about what Obummer or the US of A thinks. The US of A can give China a ‘free pass’ or not and China will do what China wants to do as long as it is for the interests of China.
China will sign anything that won’t cost them or affect their march to improving their lot. I’m sure when the leaders of China get together, they roll on the floor laughing with tears flowing, mocking the western leaders about the bull*hit they are pursuing called…what’s the current term?
The stance on coal is an oddly hypocritical one. I’ve heard many times environmentalists justify or even blame Developing World emissions on Western nations because so the logic goes “We create the demand for what they are manufacturing”. In this case China is creating the demand for what Australia is mining. Following their logic it isn’t Australia’s fault they are mining coal it’s China’s.
Of course I’m just being deliberately dense. The logic of that claim is questionable at best. Personally I’ve gone so far as to suggest it is simply a continuation of an old idea. What environmentalists suggest, but will never admit, is that their logic hinges on the idea that Developing Nations which are predominately Asian or African can’t think for themselves and need the guidance of predominately Caucasian and mainly European or European descended individuals in order to make choices. Some day we will hopefully look back at that kind of thought and correctly label it as racist or discriminatory, little different then the idea that African Americans shouldn’t be removed from slavery because they like or need the conditions in order to function.
Peppersauce
I think rather it is the environmentalists’ “religion” to maintain – to worship actually – a Margret Meade attitude of the “noble savage” living unpolluted and holy in a pristine green environment of selflessness and virtue, untainted by ANY evil “modern world” vice, pollution, illnesses, or moral problems.
It is not so much that today’ environmentalists want the blacks and Asians to remain slaves, but more that they want them to remain virgin and pristine locked in a zoo behind plastic walls in their pygmy hide huts or bamboo shelters on view as the “recipients” of the enviro’s altruistic motives to preserve their ancient cultures of filth, sweat, blood, manure, illness, internal parasites, disease, early death, and lifelong starvation.
+100
RA, it makes them feel good that others are living closer to nature. History has proved that they like it that way. Take for example the Indians (Native Americans). The white traders always found it difficult to trade with them because they didn’t want metal knives or guns or any other thing that had been manufactured by a technology more advanced than theirs. They preferred to live in the stone age.
(Now where did I put that really BIG “sarc tag”…….