The World Has a Serious Coal Problem

Comments

• poVoq@slrpnk.net ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  There is nothing inherently preventing these things to be done with electricity from renewable sources (and the carbon for the chemical processes only acts as a cheap oxygen acceptor). It is just that burning coal is still cheaper and has existing infrastructure.

  There are many economic areas where replacing fossile fuels is indeed very difficult, and only mining somewhat falls into those. The material processing necessary for solar panel production would be actually more simple and energy efficient with electricity. For example a lot of aluminium ore is already processed with electricity produced from geothermal sources in Europe.

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• count_dongulus@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I feel like an ethics-optional group that wants to really end the use of coal could run a campaign of breaking into or drilling down to the most profitable commercial coal seams and lighting them on fire. More Centralia, Pennsylvanias, especially in populated areas, would probably permanently dampen the domestic industry and drive prices far upwards leading to the faster growth of alternatives. The obvious tradeoff is, those seams your group lit are going to burn for a very very long time, so you’re causing some emissions in exchange for a global reduction.

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• palitu@aussie.zone ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  This article ignores a lot of reality when it comes to firming renewables, and my paranoia was triggered when they wrote mainstream media.

  Shilling out for the fossil fuel lobby.

  Sure, it is not going to be easy, or quick (enough), but cost is going to drive out the more expensive forms of generation, which will be coal and gas.

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  • wolfyvegan@slrpnk.net ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Do you know of a way to efficiently produce the infrastructure needed for solar, wind, etc using energy from solar, wind, etc such that the energy return on energy (ERoE) is high enough? That seemed like the crux of the argument made in the article, and I’d be interested to read a rebuttal.

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    • palitu@aussie.zone ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I think that is a bit of a mis-direct. We don’t need that now, but we do need to develop it. There are plenty of electricity sources that provide enough for industry (plenty of hydro as a simple example).

      The chemical processes require research and subsequent change, but removing thermal coal and just using coking coal is a massive reduction in coal usage. Maybe that is ok to get us over the hump. There is a lot of research into direct reduced iron, which is an example of removing coal from that particular process. It is not impossible, but currently maybe not too easy.

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    • MrMakabar@slrpnk.net ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Image

      Thats from 2010 btw. Oil got even worse with fracking and solar and wind way better. Wikipedia has a bunch of examples.

      en.m.wikipedia.org/…/Energy_return_on_investment

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• wolfyvegan@slrpnk.net ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It would seem that scaling back the use of many modern technologies is both necessary and inevitable. When hydrocarbon-based energy sources run out, it’s back to old-fashioned carbohydrates…

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