> China, though, is still adding coal capacity.

It's a bit misleading because China is mostly _replacing_ old coal power plants now.

China has probably passed the peak coal consumption this year, or it will in 2025.

China is also massively building nuclear with 29 reactors being built in parallel.

Source: https://pris.iaea.org/pris/worldstatistics/underconstruction...

Coal has peaked globally, there's no global expansion, 190+ countries are winding back coal save for both India and China which are still expanding at a declining rate and expected to peak and decline in the mid term.

WRT China, they can't over produce renewable energy and be the largest global supplier of green energy without coal .. at least not yet.

It's worth contextualizing that the decline of coal in the US has been fuelled (sorry) more than anything by the rapid expansion of hydraulic fracturing for shale gas extraction. The US is now the world's largest natural gas producer with 60% of that gas being produced by hydraulic fracturing. This isn't going to be easily accessible — or acceptable — everywhere around the world.

Employment in coal extraction is also an interesting graph. Although a lot of it has dropped due to mechanization over the generations (like, from ~1910 on downwards) it's still pretty clear that the old heights of job-creation people might remember with nostalgia are never[0] coming back.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES1021210001

[0] Barring a discovery that coal can be converted into the elixir of youth, etc.

I didn’t read where the US is mining out all their coal deposits and dumping them in the ocean.

Current exploitation of coal in the US maybe be declining, but it is still an important part of a robust portfolio of energy technologies. The US is, in fact, the Saudi Arabia of coal and, to meet robustness requirements for meeting short and long term US energy demand, coal is a common sense component. Maybe eventually only in some mothballed-annual testing-fast restart sense, but it’s a very cheap insurance policy. Keeping the pilot light on for the US coal industry as well, from a National Security standpoint.

Keep improving renewables, but don’t throw away what works. There’s a beauty to a highly diverse portfolio. You sleep better at night.

The reason it's over is because wind and solar have become cheaper than anything else. Solar is currently around $23/MWhr.

Nuclear is around $70/MWhr, one of the most expensive ways to generate electricity.

Solar is highly distributeable so it can be placed closer to where the power is used, reducing transmission losses. It doesn't need to be very carefully sited in terms of where it goes on the grid, and nobody needs to worry about the long term geological stability of the area. It doesn't need to be partnered with another plant for cold starts. It has no safety concerns. It doesn't need any labor to operate - mostly occasional repairs to damage and cleaning. It has no capacity to cause any sort of disaster. It does not generate toxic waste in operation.

Nobody has ever said "don't shoot tank rounds near that solar farm or you might cause thousands of square miles of land to be uninhabitable for centuries."

Nobody has ever said "we need to be concerned about the potential for that solar farm to be used in a program to create weapons of mass destruction"

The administration kowtowing to industry lobbyists to fund nuclear energy when the market was already adding seven times as much renewables as it is decommissioning nuclear capacity...is just corporate welfare, pure and simple.

My understanding on China's coal plants is that it's not the number of them, it's whether they're running that counts. Coal-fired generation is currently cheaper than storage for backing up wind and solar generation and their plants are typically running about 50% of the time right now, expected to run less often as storage and more renewables come online. So China’s coal use could fall despite it adding more capacity.

https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-coal-plants

There's a lot of speculation about when peak coal and fossil usage is going to be in China. There is some suggestion that that might actually be right now. China's aggressive rollout of solar, wind, and battery is shifting a lot of their plans by years or decades. The official line is still that they want to be carbon neutral by 2060. But they might actually get there a lot sooner if the current trends continue.

In any case, the economic case for coal is indeed pretty clear at this point: it's simply too expensive in most markets. Even in markets where coal mining is a big part of the local economy.

And while gas has taken up some of the slack (especially in the US), the vast majority of additions to the grid world wide are renewables.

Peak gas usage world wide is a bit murky. Projections range from right now to 2030 (IEA). But the bottom line is that we're not really replacing coal with gas. There are a lot of gas peaker plants not running all the time that were designed originally to be running 24/7. That massively changes the economics and profitability of these things and makes them a lot less attractive to investors.

Isn't China adding all capacity ?

As China's power consumption grows, is coal occupying a bigger percent of the energy pie or is it proportional growth?

China wants to annex Taiwan. To fight any wau laden with sanctions, it needs energy independence. They don't have natural gas so they're burning coal.

It's not ideal, but at least they have a better reason than Germany shuttering nuclear plants or the US keeping coal alive.

Environmentally, converting coal to natural gas isn't that much of a win. Take methane leaks into account and it might even be worse.

It'd be interesting to see the cost per ton CO2e of paying to shut down gas plants as well.

On the last few years, China's coal consumption has been almost unchanging.

What yeah, makes them one of the countries mostly investing in coal out there. But there hasn't been an increase, and it ought to fall fast at some point to one of the cheaper alternatives.

Isn't "natural" gas a scam to keep polluting? Why not nuclear and within a lifetime renewable energies?

If I'm reading this right, they just added up the remaining amortized capital cost of the plants, doubled that to give the investors a return, and divided by the amount of CO2 emissions that would be avoided.

They don't mention cost of replacements, or the costs of climate damage.

You can also float solar PV on the reservoirs, re-using the grid connections with extreme complementarity (since you want to hold the hydro power back when the solar is producing).

> which is so extensive that moving power from supply to demand works over several time zones.

It's not really possible to do that in China...

Global high, sure, and yet at the same time a very probable peak with a future of steady fall:

    For the forecast period, we expect a net reduction in global coal production starting in 2024, which would mean global coal production peaking in 2023 in line with global coal demand.

    Ongoing declines in the United States and the European Union are likely to be complemented by reduced production volumes in Indonesia, as Chinese demand for seaborne thermal coal is likely to decrease.

    The last bastion of remarkable growth in production is India, serving the growing demand from its power sector.

    Our model suggests that declines in other countries will more than offset this growth

The Permian-Triassic extinction. A massive intrusion of basaltic magma into the The Tunguska Basin that also created the Siberian Traps. The intrusion heated organic-rich sediments and evaporites (salt, anhydrite) and caused eruption of gases. Siberia is littered with enormous pipes as much as 1 km in diameter that erupted massive amounts of gas during the event. In addition to CO2 and methane, the gas was loaded with chlorinated hydrocarbons from the salt, which could have devastated the ozone layer.

I've seen an estimate that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere may have reached as high as 30,000 ppm (3%).

It was bad luck for the Paleozoic world that this massive mantle plume came up in perhaps the worst possible place.

Some of these pipes became filled with magnetite and as a result are mined for this rich iron ore.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_ext...

> Though the current rate of greenhouse gas emissions is more than an order of magnitude greater than the rate measured over the course of the PTME, the discharge of greenhouse gases during the PTME is poorly constrained geo-chronologically and was most likely pulsed and constrained to a few key, short intervals, rather than continuously occurring at a constant rate for the whole extinction interval; the rate of carbon release within these intervals was likely to have been similar in timing to modern anthropogenic emissions.

Modern CO2 increase has been going on for 200 years, and is theorized to be comparable to one of the bursts that occurred during the Permian-Triassic extinction. However the PTME witnessed a few such bursts over the course of tens of thousands of years. CO2 levels sextupled from a base that was not much lower than where CO2 levels are today.

It's a warning about the dangers of CO2, but given the corrective actions already taking place I don't think CO2 levels will reach anywhere near those seen during the PTME. Most importantly CO2 level increases are driven by human activity which is a lot easier to modulate than volcanoes.

Steel uses so much carbon that it’s been a target for using hydrogen as a reducing agent. There are a couple ironworks that have already started converting.

That’ll still leave concrete as one of the next largest sources, even if the rebar gets a smaller footprint.

There are two types of coal, metallurgical and thermal.

Energy for steel production can come from coal, but doesn't need to, coal bound with iron to make steel is a different reaction to burning coal for energy.

"Green steel" (as odd as that sounds) is an active area of research ATM, promising but there's a looong way to go to reduce the emissions from a billion+ tonnes of steel per annum (and concrete production and other resource processing).

One of the biggest Steel mils here in Argentina had a dedicated forest with 30.000.000 eucaliptus to make the coal. So it's possible to use carbon-neutral coal. More details (Spanish) https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aceros_Zapla_S.A.

Electrocatalytic production or using electrolytically produced hydrogen can also make new steel.

Baseload power comes at the expense of renewable power, the latter of which is much cheaper, much faster, and less riskier to deploy than nuclear. Peaking gas plants are much quicker to build than nuclear and should tide us over until grid storage (of all kinds) catches up – which looks to be around 1-2 decades at current scaling and about the lead time for a nuclear power plant

> No other technology comes even close to the energy density of nuclear power.

The dollar density is also huge.

Trying to get new reactor design actually deployed in the US is brutally expensive. And figuring in the cost of nuclear waste disposal kills the project.

All other means of grid power generation are able to externalize expenses. Our society, for better or worse, won't let anything "nuclear" get away with that.

I don't think I'm anti-nuclear power. The only thing that works against nuclear, in my opinion, is the time it takes to build. A lot of solar and wind and battery can be built in the decade (if not more) that it seems to take a nuclear power station to be built.

Having said that, given the increasing power demands of civilization, why not both in parallel?

You don't need dispatchable baseload and batteries do scale enough. If nuclear was cost competitive, I'd support it, but it's just not. Look at how much renewables China is building vs. nuclear, if you think this opinion is somehow political in nature, it's not.

The goal should be increased generation of power while mitigating worst climate change scenarios. Coal deserves to die.