Coal-fired power plants

Definition: Power-generating plants that burn coal to produce electricity

The dirtiest of fossil fuels, coal is the most widely used source of electricity generation worldwide. Between 2002 and 2008, worldwide consumption of coal rose by 30 percent, two-thirds of which went into power generation. In 2023, despite global efforts to reduce carbon emissions, a number of countries, including South Africa, China, and India, derived more than half of their energy from coal.

Coal is the most widely used source of electricity generation worldwide, responsible for 36 percent of energy produced worldwide in 2022. Coal was the most plentiful fossil fuel available at that time; at that time it was estimated that 90 percent of the earth’s remaining fossil-fuel reserves were in the form of coal.

Coal is also the most dangerous fossil fuel according to climate scientists, as most coals produce roughly 70 percent more carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas linked with global warming) per unit of energy generated than natural gas and about 30 percent more than oil. Despite these concerns, global consumption reached 8.3 billion metric tons in 2022, the largest amount up to that point in history and a 3.3 percent increase over the previous year.

Coal poses environmental problems other than carbon emissions as well. The mining of coal produces methane, and its combustion produces sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide in addition to carbon dioxide. The transport of coal also usually requires more energy than the transport of any other fossil fuel.

The Role of China

During the 1980s China replaced the Soviet Union as the world’s largest coal producer. China controls 43 percent of the world’s remaining coal reserves, and it used coal to generate more than 80 percent of its electrical energy at that time, spewing out some 19 million tons of sulfur dioxide per year. By 2005 China was using more coal for electrical generation than the United States, the European Union, and Japan combined.

From 2004 to 2009 China increased its coal consumption an average of 14 percent per year, adding one to two coal-fired electricity plants per week to meet the demands of its booming economy, which was involved in human history’s largest-scale industrialization. Many of the plants built in China during this period use old technology that lacks protections against pollution; it is expected that they will operate for an average of seventy-five years.

In 2020 China committed to becoming carbon neutral by 2060. That same year, coal accounted for more than 56 percent of China's energy generation. In 2022 China continued to derive more than 56 percent of its energy from coal, burning more than 4 billion tons of coal that year; this was more than the rest of the world combined. Other developing and middle-income countries also relied on coal as a major energy source; in the early 2020s South Africa, India, and Indonesia, along with China, were the most coal-dependent countries in the world. However, in terms of coal consumption, the global leaders at that time were China, India, the US, and Japan, in that order.

Carbon Sequestration

In 2007 James E. Hansen, an expert in atmospheric physics and director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), proposed that a moratorium be placed on construction of new coal-fired power plants until technology allowing the capture and sequestration of the carbon dioxide produced by such plants is more widely available and economically feasible. About a quarter of power plants’ carbon dioxide emissions will remain in the air more than five hundred years, long after new technology is refined and deployed. Hansen estimated that all power plants without adequate sequestration will be obsolete and slated for closure (or at least retrofitting) before 2050.

By the beginning of 2008 the European Commission was weighing whether to require new power stations to include facilities that will retrofit to store greenhouse gas emissions through carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology once it became available, the first legal move of this type in the world, and a large step toward making CCS a commercial reality. The requirement as written does not include a date on which actual CCS would be required. Installation of CCS technology, now still in its infancy, could reduce global carbon dioxide emissions by one-third by 2050, if widely deployed. By 2010 Norway, Great Britain, China, and the United States were planning CCS pilot plants.

In 2021 the Global CCS Institute announced that global CCS technology had reached a capacity of 40 million tons of carbon dioxide. However, in that same report, the Global CCS Institute estimated that it would take over $1 trillion of further investment into CCS technology by the midpoint of the twenty-first century in order to limit global warming to just 2 degrees Celsius.

Throughout the early 2020s, as many governments and private entities explored carbon capture and sequestering and worked on developing new technologies, CCS also drew criticism from environmentalists and other groups who felt that efforts to improve CCS incentivized the continued use of coal and other fossil fuels while drawing attention away from efforts to reduce carbon emissions.

Opposition to New Plants

In 2007 opposition to the building of new coal-fired plants accelerated in the United States. In one instance, when the mayor of Missoula, Montana, won city council support to buy electricity from a new coal-fired plant starting in 2011 to save the city money, he was inundated by hundreds of e-mails and phone calls from protesting constituents. Between 2006 and 2008 plans for eighty-three coal-fired power plants in the United States were voluntarily withdrawn or denied permits by state regulators.

Cancellations or delays of coal-fired power plants continued into 2009, when NV Energy delayed a plant in eastern Nevada until such time as “clean coal” technology is available, and Southern Montana Electric Generation and Cooperative halted work on a plant near Great Falls in favor of building wind turbines and another plant that will burn natural gas. Michigan’s governor, Jennifer Granholm, told regulators not to approve any of five new proposed coal-fired plants in her state until all feasible and prudent alternatives had been considered. Peabody Energy dropped plans for a coal-fired energy plant in western Kentucky in favor of a plant that would convert coal to natural gas. In early March, 2009, Alliant Energy dropped plans to build a very large coal-fired power plant in central Iowa that would have provided enough energy to supply 500,000 homes. Several of these actions were challenged by coal-power advocates.

The Clean Power Plan, drafted by the Obama Administration in 2015, included measures to cut carbon emissions from electricity generation by more than 30 percent by regulating the operation of nationwide power plants. However, it was blocked by Congress several months after its announcement, and the Trump Administration began the process of repealing the act in 2017. Then, in 2022, the US Supreme Court ruled in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) did not have the authority to force existing power plants to shift away from using coal as a power source but may continue to regulate existing plants through the usage of emission reduction technologies. This decision arrived during the resurgence of coal as a fuel source due to an increased demand placed on the material as global economies were recovering from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020 and the effect that the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine had on gas prices worldwide.

The US burned 469.94 million short tons of coal in 2022, despite the closure or reduced production of multiple coal-fired power plants. However, that year also marked the first time that renewable energy sources (such as wind, solar, hydropower, and geothermal energy) produced a greater share of US electricity than coal. That year, 19.5 percent of US electricity came from coal, a decline of over 3 percent compared to the previous year, while 21.5 percent came from renewables; nuclear power was responsible for 18.2 percent of US electricity. Despite growth in renewable energy use, natural gas consumption also grew; it remained the largest source US energy source and was responsible for 39.8 percent of US electricity generation in 2022.

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