COAL’S importance to baseload power generation and advances in technology that have helped reduce the fuel’s carbon footprint were being understated by its opponents, said Vuslat Menar, MD of Menar, a South African coal producer.
Bayoglu said it had been falsely claimed renewable power could become the sole source of national energy. “To be clear, no viable modern economy can run without some form of baseload — whether in the form of coal, gas, nuclear, geothermal, or some combination of these,” said Bayoglu. He was commenting in a column for the Financial Mail last week.
“The truth is that coal keeps evolving,” said Bayoglu.
“Its usefulness does not depend on discarding other sources of energy,” he said. “It coexists with oil, gas, nuclear and renewables. While one-dimensional renewable enthusiasts wish to kill coal, to the detriment of economic competitiveness, those involved in coal’s production and use embrace its evolution and renewables.”
In recent years, discussions about thermal coal have acknowledged its contribution as part of a suite of energy solutions – a view supported by world demand which has not tapered as forecast prior to the Covid pandemic and Ukraine’s invasion by Russia.
The difficulties of transitioning developing economies to renewable power, its cost and its limitations, and coal’s new favour in developed economies have changed the way the International Energy Agency (IEA) talks about the market’s prospects.
Previous forecasts of coal peaking by 2013 have been quietly filed away. Now the agency talks of a “plateau”. Carlos Fernández Alvarez, head of gas, coal and power markets at the IEA, acknowledged recently: “We changed our wording.”
The world burns nearly double the amount of coal today that it did in 2000, and four times the amount it consumed in 1950. Every minute, 16,700 tons of coal are excavated globally — enough to fill seven Olympic swimming pools, according to a report in the Financial Times in July.
Bayoglu said coal production in South Africa also underpinned economic development and healthcare provision.
Commenting on clean coal technologies, Bayoglu said they were already operational worldwide, including facilities in China and the United States. In South Africa, the Kusile power has become the country’s first facility to employ desulphurisation technology that removes sulphur oxides from exhaust gases.
