Coal, The Fuel We Ignore But Cannot Replace

For years now, coal has been treated like a relic… a dirty word,  something we were told would quietly disappear during the “energy transition”.

But yet, here we are… global coal consumption has definitely not declined, quite the contrary, it has only grown from roughly 6 billion tons in 2008 (when I wrote my first book on coal “The Renaissance of Steam Coal”) to around 9 billion tons today. Not to mention the seaborne trade which almost doubled! So the question is not whether coal is disappearing as we were told, it’s whether we misunderstood this useful black rock in the first place.

Our material world runs on something we are avoiding…

We like to think we live in a “clean” digital world with all our devices, apps, AI and cloud storage, but our physical world has not gone anywhere and should also be considered in this equation.

Steel, cement, metals, fertilizers….so many elements needed to actually build our modern lives which still heavily depends, directly or indirectly, on coal.

Did you know that roughly one-third of all coal is used not for electricity, but for industry? In fact, when you include electricity used for industrial purposes, more than half of all coal globally is consumed by industries keeping our daily amenities running :

• steel production,
• cement manufacturing,
• chemicals and fertilizers,
• high-temperature industrial heat (also used to make silicone for those very popular solar panels), and on and it goes.

Take coal out of that system, and you don’t just lose power, you also lose the ability to build and improve our physical environment.

The surprising reality about electricity is that coal still produces over a third of global electricity… not because coal is the trendy choice, but rather because it works, its “democratic”, and so damn low cost!

Let’s look at why I am saying this:

• coal plants are not weather dependant. They don’t stop when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine
• coal doesn’t run the risk of exploding, you can have months of fuel supply sit in your back yard, no complex storage and auxiliary systems required and it is abundantly available with no region monopolizing supply
• coal plants sit there, quietly and reliably doing their job, at low cost, hour after hour year after year, decade after decade
• and a modern coal-fired power stations can emit less particle emissions than a busy intersection!

This is also why, when energy systems are under pressure, coal keeps reappearing, even in countries that claim to have moved on from it.

The scale of coal

Each year, humanity extracts around 110 billion tons of resources from the Earth and coal alone accounts for about 9 billion tons thereof.

Nearly half of global shipping activity is just moving energy in the form of oil, gas, and coal from one place to another. Coal is not a niche fuel…it’s one of the largest moving pieces of the global economy with 1.5 billion tons shipped each year.

Now, I suspect you have heard of the “we cannot mine coal forever” argument and yes, that is correct, but we are not running out of coal any time soon! Not even close!

Depending on how you measure it, the world has:

• over 100 years of proven reserves and
• thousands of years of total resources we already know of today, 20-30x more than gas, oil, or uranium

coal is also geographically widespread meaning it’s not easily controlled, disrupted, or “turned off.” From an energy security perspective, that matters…a lot!