That page combines electricity and transportation energy. If you just look at electricity generation (see page below), coal accounted for 20.8%, while renewables accounted for 20.1%. However, note that they didn’t include behind-the-meter PV generation in those numbers. Their estimate of 49 billion kWh for rooftop solar would be roughly 1% of the 4116 billion kWh total, so would put renewables over the top vs coal by this measure.
Thats what Climate change and this thread is about - Total Co2 emissions.
Anyways - I still do not get why @Francis_Vaughan claims that coal is still the elephant in the room !! Other sources generate far more power than coal.
Looking at the data from this site
US electricity generation emits about 1.5 billion (short) tons of CO2 annually. More than half of that is from coal, while coal supplies around 34% of the electricity. If I did the math right, converting all the coal plants to natural gas would reduce total emissions by 500 million tons - 33%.
You are right that in 2020, 7% of US Greenhouse Gas Emissions came from Nitrogen Oxides, 11% from Methane (much of it fugitive), and 3% from fluoro-chloro-carbons (freons). The balance 79% are CO2 emissions.
US Electricity generation is only about 25% of the US CO2 emissions. Even if half of that emissions is Coal, it is by no means “The Elephant in the room”. But I guess, one can always narrow the data sub-set to make something look way worse that it is.
I think the only one to worry about is increasing N2O. The vast majority of the increases is from fertilizers as you say. Maybe some nitrogen fixing bacteria can replace fertilizers.
I didn’t call it the elephant in the room, but I would call it low hanging fruit.
Also, @Francis_Vaughan was talking about industrial usage of coal as well as electrical generation. My data just indicates an 8% reduction in overall emissions from converting coal generation to natural gas. Only a piece of the coal issue.
Coal accounts for 14 out of 35 gigatonnes of CO2 production annually worldwide. So worldwide it is 40%. Yet its energy content for those CO2 emissions is about half that of oil/gas.
The reason I call it the elephant in the room is because it is a huge massive juicy low hanging fruit that seems to get totally ignored. It is really hard to come up with any activity to reduce CO2 emissions that betters just putting all your effort into wiping out coal. The same is true for any effort to address climate change. Trillion dollar project? Just invest the money in wiping out coal. You won’t do better.
An electric car run from a coal fired power station is a worse CO2 emitter than a conventional ICE based car. The efficiencies in large scale power production are wiped out by the worse energy versus CO2 of coal. If you buy an electric car in a region where coal fired electricity is the dominant source you are adding to the problem, not improving it.
We don’t need to become totally carbon free. Replacing all coal with renewables would come pretty close to fixing the problem. Mopping up the remainder of the CO2 problem could be done at leisure. So yeah, not having coal front and centre in any conversation about climate is missing a large lumbering critter banging about and breaking things in the room.
From everything I’ve heard (except FUD produced by the anti-EV industry) that is not true at all. For support, I give you the results of a US Dept of Energy emission calculator. The car I selected was a 2020 Tesla Model 3 Standard Range located in Morgantown WV (zip 26501; WV generates almost all its power with coal). Results: the Tesla emitted 130 g/mile while a typical new ICE car emits 410 g/mile. That includes upstream emissions for the ICE, which is the CO2 emitted to get the fuel from the well to the car. But even without the upstream emissions, the typical ICE vehicle has over 300 g/mile emissions.
Not true. A coal plant in the US produces around 2.23 lbs CO2/kWh. A Model 3 can go about 4.4 mi/kWh, so it emits around 0.51 lbs CO2/mi if 100% coal powered. A gallon of gas is around 20 lbs CO2, so the Model 3 is equivalent to a 39 MPG car. That’s right in the ballpark of what a sporty sedan would get.
But it’s also not the whole story, because that gallon of gas also took about 7 kWh just to refine. Refineries tend to be fairly local, and may very well use the same mix of energy. If that’s the case, the gas actually produces 36 lbs CO2 total. The Model 3 gets 71 MPG equivalent compared to that, which is very good indeed (even if we downrate a little to account for transmission losses).
And that’s if coal is 100% of the power, which it rarely is. If there’s any natural gas, let alone solar/wind/nuclear/hydro mixed in, the EV looks even better.
All that said, I agree that coal is the lowest hanging fruit. Though it’s almost too low-hanging to worry about, at least in the US. No new plants have been built in years, nor are any likely to be built from this point on, and in fact they are being retired at a rapid rate. Couldn’t speak for other countries, though.
A few years back, I started a thread asking what was the most recent coal-fired power plant in the US. The answer was a small one in Alaska which was not quite operational in 2018 and another somewhat larger one, also in Alaska, in 2015. The newest large utility plant was in 2013.
As far as other countries, China may still be building some. Other countries in Asia, ditto.
It’s not simply a matter of the large scale of the power plant versus the small scale of a passenger car. Conventional gasoline spark-ignited engines operated at light loads are very inefficient. And they do operate at light loads almost all the time. As @dtilque showed, battery-electric vehicles are far better than ICE vehicles even when they are supplied almost entirely by coal-derived electricity.
Not just some - a lot.
The newly added capacity under construction was three times more than the rest of the world combined, said Helsinki-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) and U.S. think tank Global Energy Monitor (GEM).
While new permits were suspended in 2021, they resumed in 2022, with five projects with a total capacity of 7.3 GW approved for construction in the first six weeks of the year, the research showed.
And Germany has been shutting down Nuclear plans and using Brown Coal, a lot before the Ukraine crisis
Japan promised to stop using Nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster, but quietly restarted Fukushima once the brouhaha had died down.
Poland has lots of indigenous coal and has shunned the push by EU to go towards natural gas
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-05/poland-shuns-gas-in-new-energy-plan-as-coal-makes-a-comeback
The point here is that although people all over the world are committed to reducing emissions, they are even more committed to their sovereignty and independence from foreign interference on their energy needs.
I’d like to understand what will happen to the economies of the middle-East countries, Russia, Norway, Venezuela, Australia, Canada, etc - when the world moves away from fossil fuels ? These countries have a big part of their GDP come from fossil fuels.
This is known as the curse of oil.
For Australia, and likely Canada, it won’t be that big of a deal. Here in Oz export earning from gas is a relatively new thing. We are the worlds largest coal exporter, but that coal is close to 50/50 thermal and metallurgical (ie for making iron and steel.) Iron ore is by far our biggest export earner. Loss of coal exports will result in significant regional economic impacts in those areas that mine it. However we are pretty used to the commodity boom and bust cycle.
Countries like Venezuela are already doomed. The problem with oil is that the cost to produce varies dramatically. Saudi can produce oil for very little cost, and the cost rises as we go through the nations, with Venezuela sitting pretty much as the most expensive. The crash in oil prices killed their economy overnight. The social impact will be felt for a generation. They are a good example of what may happen to the others.
The curse of oil is that a country can become rich on easy money, and never develop useful infrastructure or capabilities. Citizens buy expensive imported goods, live an idle life, and even when it is clear that the good times will end, nobody feels it is their duty to actually do anything about it. Life is very good. Then the money stops. Things crash badly and quickly. It isn’t just oil money that does this of course. But the insane wealth that can flow makes the shock all the worse when the tap is turned off.
States like Dubai have worked hard to build themselves up. Ironically, Dubai has very little oil. Abu Dhabi is the Emirates state with almost all the oil. Countries like Saudi are trying to diversify, but it is impossible to image that they can bridge the gap from the massive oil wealth they enjoy. The curse of oil is strong on this one. The other oil exporters in the middle east will likely fare as badly. Countries like Bahrain and Qatar are very small, and the wealth huge, so they will be something of a special case. Iran has probably been aided by sanctions as it has had to learn how to avoid dependency on oil income. Their oil is also expensive to produce, so the shock of a loss of markets is blunted there as well. They will probably survive.
Norway invested its gas money in its sovereign fund, and alone of all the exporters has performed very well investing in the country. They have been smart enough to realise this was a once in generations chance and didn’t squander it.
Russia is probably screwed. They have squandered what was also a once in generations opportunity. But they are used to that. Life will stay grim, and nobody will be surprised.
All just MHO.
Carbon cycle experts estimate that natural “sinks”—processes that remove carbon from the atmosphere—on land and in the ocean absorbed the equivalent of about half of the carbon dioxide we emitted each year in the 2011-2020 decade. Because we put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than natural processes can remove, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases every year.
The more we overshoot what natural processes can remove in a given year, the faster the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide rises. In the 1960s, the global growth rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide was roughly 0.8± 0.1 ppm per year. Over the next half century, the annual growth rate tripled, reaching 2.4 ppm per year during the 2010s. The annual rate of increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past 60 years is about 100 times faster than previous natural increases, such as those that occurred at the end of the last ice age 11,000-17,000 years ago.
What strikes me strange about this is that we are told carbon levels have remained relatively stable for the past 1,000,000 years. How could they have remained stable if with all we are adding it still can remove 50%. Volcano’s being one of the primary contributors have become much less active so I would think the levels would have been falling without any additional input.
@Francis_Vaughan - I agree with your assessment with regards to individual countries. However, as Covid and the Ukraine crisis have recently showed, problems in one country quickly cascades into a global problem.
I wonder if the economists / political scientists have models that predict global impacts of humanity moving away from fossil fuels ! Perhaps that’s a separate FQ thread
There’s nothing strange about non-zero-order chemical reactions where the rates depend on the concentrations of the reagents.
Heck, it’s not just chemistry. Any sort of system with an equilibrium can have the position of that equilibrium shifted by exterior forces. The question is like a weight hanging from a spring, and asking how the spring can stretch more when the weight is increased, since wasn’t it already stretched?
Humans produce >100x the CO2 as volcanoes. Why do you think volcanoes have become much less active?
Yes, I am well aware that human activity causes many times what volcanoes contribute. That wasn’t my point. It just doesn’t seem like the numbers crunch right. If the atmosphere had been stable for 1,000,000 years it doesn’t sound right that 50% of the carbon from man made sources would be disappearing as fast as it is disappearing. As for volcanoes, I guess I could look up a source but everything I remember reading throughout my life suggested that volcanic activity had been waning for millions of years.