Yay, Green China! To Develop World's Largest Coal Mine With Help From Peabody - 50 Million Tons/Yr

[hatrack]

A newly announced partnership between the world’s biggest private coal mining company and coal-burning country cuts against recent efforts to paint China green because of its push on manufacturing wind turbines and solar panels. All of its efforts on renewable energy come atop ongoing expansion of its use of coal.

In a news release issued today, the coal company, Peabody Energy, gushingly describes the company’s partnership with the government of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region and Communist Party on a plan to develop a surface coal mine that will produced 50 million tons of coal a year “over multiple decades.” The news is summarized well by James Areddy and Simon Hall in The Wall Street Journal.

I sent the release to a few experts on coal and carbon dioxide for their reactions. David Victor, the University of California, San Diego, political science professor and author of “Global Warming Gridlock,” noted some subtler aspects of the announcement that point to ever more efficient coal use in China, but also unrelenting growth in coal use — and carbon dioxide emissions. Here’s Victor’s reaction:

"I think the really big story here — from the perspective of the industry — is that China is in the midst of a massive consolidation of its coal industry and a bunch of other efforts, including a larger role for best practice foreign operators like Peabody, that are designed to maximize output of coal and lower the costs, which have skyrocketed. All that points in the direction of making coal more competitive than it has been in the past. Barring a big change in technology and regulation on CO2, that trend is hard to square with widely discussed goals for stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations. If it is any consolation, the average efficiency of coal plants in China has been rising decisively—that doesn’t bend down the emissions curve, but it slos the growth."

EDIT

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/biggest-coal-company-and-coal-country-collaborate-on-mega-mine/

[Desertrose]

1. Oh no! This sucks.

Peabody :grr: ....what they have done to the Navajo isn't bad enough?

[joshcryer]

2. I thought China was supposed to usher in a new green environmentalism with wind?

And solar power?

This was expected, btw.

[pscot]

3. 50,000,000 tons a year

would add around 1.25 billion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere in a decade, so if I switch to cfl's....

[Nihil]

4. "50 million tons of coal a year 'over multiple decades'" ...

And some people seem to think that shoving a few tons of CO2 into
a hole in the ground (then running before it comes back out again)
is going to be the answer to the AGW problem ...

:-(