Greenpeace International and the European Renewable Energy Council have produced a report titled: "Energy [R]evolution: A Sustainable World Energy Outlook" which provides a detailed blueprint for cutting carbon emissions while achieving economic growth by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy and energy efficiency. Acopy of the full 212-page report is here; a 16-page summary is here.

Under the Energy [R]evolution scenario, global CO2 emissions would peak in 2015 and drop afterwards. Compared with 1990 CO2 emissions would be more than 80% lower by 2050. The report says that by 2050 around 95% of electricity could be produced by renewable energy.

The report also says that this phase-out of fossil fuels offers substantial additional benefits such as energy security, independence from world market fuel prices as well as the creation of millions of new green jobs.

By 2015 global power supply sector jobs in the Energy [R]evolution scenario are estimated to reach about 11.1 million, 3.1 million more than in the business-as-usual Reference scenario. By 2020 over 6.5 million jobs in the renewables sector would be created due a much faster uptake of renewables, three-times more than today.

The report finds that this can be achieved with proven technologies by adhering to five key principles:

• Equity and fairness
• Respecting natural limits
• Phasing out dirty, unsustainable energy
• Implementing renewable solutions and decentralising energy systems
• Decoupling growth from fossil fuel use.

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The world’s worst underground coal fires are in Inner Mongolia. Some have been burning for 50 years. The amount of coal being burned is estimated to be about 20 million tonnes a year.

The Inner Mongolia regional government has now announced plans and financing of 200 million yuan ($au36 million) to begin extinguishing the fires.

According to the plan, half of the fires could be extinguished by 2012 simply by digging coal out of the path of the fires and covering the fires with sand.

The government said that the fires were caused by "improper mining practices" and "dry weather" but did not explain why it has taken 50 years to produce a plan to put them out.

Collapsing coal seam burning in an open pit mine in the Rujigou coalfield in China. 

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Australian clean coal technology specialist Linc Energy  has signed a major new partnerhip with British fuel cell firm AFC Energy for a demonstration project that the two companies believe could revolutionise the coal industry.

The firms believe that combining underground coal gasification techniques with hydrogen fuel cell technologies will provide a significantly cleaner and cheaper way of generating energy from coal.

Underground coal gasification is an established energy generation technique, which involves burning coal underground to produce hydrogen and carbon monoxide that can then be used to power gas turbines. However, under the plans proposed by Linc Energy and AFC, the resulting gases would be mixed with steam to produce carbon dioxide and hydrogen. The hydrogen would then be used to power fuel cells, while the CO2 will be captured and injected back underground.

The fuel cells would use the hydrogen to produce electricity and heat, with distilled water the only by-product from the process - a 1,000 megawatt power station would produce over 2.5 billion litres of clean water a year.

Advocates of the technique argue that it is cheaper and less environmentally damaging than mining, transporting and burning coal in a standard coal-fired power plant and then capturing the carbon dioxide emissions afterwards. Linc Energy also argues that underground coal gasification can reach coal fields that would be too expensive to mine traditionally.

"The future of this concept is simply staggering," said Peter Bond, chief executive of Linc Energy. "It could easily be the ultimate answer for clean coal power many of us are looking for, and it’s only one or two years away from reality."

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The U.S. Geological Survey has reported that economically extractable coal reserves in the United States, typically estimated at some 240 years worth, could be substantially less than previously thought - perhaps only half the previously estimated reserves.

The news is consistent with the findings of a 2007 National Research Council study and is similar to other reports of overestimates of economically recoverable coal reserves in other countries.

China is the world’s largest coal producer - mining twice as much as the United States, which is the second largest producer. The Energy Watch Group has predicted that Chinese coal production will peak in 2015 and will go into a steep decline after 2020. The most optimistic estimates put Chinese peak coal production at around 2030.

The UK and Germany were once major coal producers. UK production peaked in 1913 and German production in 1958. Canadian production peaked in 1997.

Russia has large untapped reserves of coal but most of it is "dirty" brown coal in difficult locations.

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Wired magazine has reported that Scientists at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg have developed an improved technique for producing liquid fuel from coal.

The process of producing liquid fuel from coal has already been used on a lage scale - in Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa  It’s not only the regimes that have used it that leads many to see this process as evil. Coal-derived fuel could produce as much as twice as much CO2 as traditional petroleum fuels and at best will emit at least as much of the greenhouse gas

The traditional process uses carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and hydrogen to produce the liquid hydrocarbons. The new process uses just CO2 and hydrogen. The new production method also allows a lower limit on the amount of energy needed to transform solid coal into fuel. Theoretically, the energy required could be reduced from 1,000 megawatts per 200,000 litres of fuel to 350 megawatts per 2000,000 litres but even a small efficiency gain would make the process competitive with many renewable energy processes.

Pushker Karecha of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies commented that "The bottom line is that there’s one fatal flaw in their proposed process from a climate protection standpoint. It would allow liquid fuel CO2 emissions to continue increasing indefinitely."

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Dave Rutledge, chair of the California Institute of Technology’s Engineering and Applied Sciences Division, has produced a new calculation of the world’s coal reserves which is much lower than previous estimates.

According to Professor Rutledge’s model, the total amount of available coal, including all of the coal already mined, is only 662 billion tonnes. In contrast, the World Energy Council’s current estimate, based on government figures, is that there is 850 billion tonnes of coal still in the ground still available to be mined.

If the new figures are correct, burning all of the available coal and all other fossil fuels would increase atmospheric CO2 to 460 parts per million - just enough to raise temperatures by 2 degrees celsius. Click here to read the rest of this entry.

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China’s dirty and dangerous coal mining industry cost the country a hidden $250 billion last year in lost and damaged lives, wasted energy and environmental devastation, according to a survey by experts from the coal heartland of Shanxi province, Peking University, the Chinese government’s top energy think-tank and the Chinese Center for Disease Control.

Last year nearly 3,800 miners died in explosions, flooding and other underground accidents. Although that marked a 20 percent decrease from 2006, it is still the most dangerous mining industry in the world. Each tonne of coal produced means 2.5 tonnes of water are polluted, while coal mining waste makes up some 40 percent of the country’s solid industrial waste.

The key problems identified by the report are government regulations that distort prices and weak oversight that allows miners to get cheap land, dodge safety and environment laws and ship their coal in dirty, dangerously overloaded trucks.

China is the world’s biggest producer and consumer of coal. Demand is growing so fast that its miners have to produce an extra 200 million tonnes a year to keep up - the equivalent of the entire coal mining industry of a major producing coal country like Indonesia.

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Just four years ago, there were plans to build 150 new coal-fired power plants in the United states. Just 14 of these are still being actively pursued and all of these are still subject to legal action on environmental grounds.

"The enormity of what they were proposing to do provided a platform to have that whole debate about pollution, including global-warming pollution, " says Bruce Nilles, director of the national coal campaign for the Sierra Club, America’s biggest grassroots environment group.

The backlash against coal power in America has become the country’s biggest-ever environmental campaign, transforming the nation’s awareness of climate change and inspiring political leaders to take firmer action after years of doubt and delay. Six states - California, Washington, Oregon  Florida, Idaho and Kansas - have imposed effective moratoriums on new coal-fired power station.
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GreenBiz Café now has a presence on YouTube. Our first video is “Coal: What the Hell Are We Doing?”.

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