Coal industry told to clean up its act
The world's coal industry needs to sharpen up its act in order to meet tougher environmental standards amid increasing global concern over rising greenhouse gas emissions, experts said yesterday.
The call at an industry conference in Singapore came as top experts under the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) gathered in Paris to carry out a massive review of the evidence of global warming.
In a 2001 report, the IPCC declared that carbon pollution from burning oil, gas and coal had helped drive atmospheric levels of CO2 to their highest in 420,000 years.
CO2 is the principal "greenhouse gas", a term that applies to half a dozen gases that linger invisibly in the atmosphere, trapping the Sun's heat instead of letting it bounce back into space.
A coal miner from a pit in Kamp-Lintfort, Germany. AFP |
"The coal industry cannot simply watch what's going on in the world," said Jeffrey Mulyono, chairman of the Indonesian Coal Mining Association.
"If the industry does not increase its efficiency, from the mining perspective and in the power plants, it will have tremendous implications for the industry itself."
Coal currently powers 40 percent of the world's electricity needs, and this share is expected to rise to 45 percent by 2030. Production growth in the last three years equalled the output in the previous 23 years, Birol said.
Unlike oil in which a majority of the reserves are concentrated in the politically volatile Middle East region, coal reserves are evenly distributed across continents, insulating prices from the shockwaves of geopolitical tensions, Birol added.
This and relatively lower costs have made coal an attractive electricity source, despite environmental concerns.
Some conference delegates voiced concerns that coal-mining and coal-fired power plants were not getting more efficient, and that low-grade coal is still being marketed.
Birol said in response to one question that the industry must learn from the lessons in the natural gas sector, where demand has slowed down from two years ago due to high prices.
"The coal market is a bit different, I know. But one should not take it for granted that if the efficiency goes down, if it is coupled with a lot of concerns coming throughout the world, this may well have implications on the coal industry," he said.
AFP
(China Daily 01/31/2007 page16)
