Sep 2006
As far as the public is concerned, coal is the Rodney Dangerfield of fossil fuels—it gets no respect. Coal is dirty, lumpy, and unremarkable. It is a game show booby prize; a punishment for bad children at Christmas. In terms of our daily lives, coal is almost wholly out of sight and out of mind. And yet the entire industrial revolution was founded on coal. (The steam engine gets all the press... but think of the steam engine as the Lone Ranger and coal as Tonto. Without his trusty companion, the Lone Ranger would never have gotten any glory.)
Oil may hog the limelight these days, but coal has not gone dormant. If anything, today's world relies on coal more than ever before. According to recent figures from the World Coal Institute, 24.4% of primary energy consumption worldwide comes from coal. Coal's share of worldwide electricity generation is 40.1%. In the United States, more than half the country's electricity comes from coal; in China and Australia the totals approach 80%; in Poland and South Africa, the totals are above 90%.
For perspective on how much physical coal the world eats up, consider that the electricity required to power a single 100-watt light bulb, left on 24 hours a day, would consume 714 lbs of coal over the course of a year. Most of us don't leave our lights on round the clock, but we do tend to have many going simultaneously. (Never mind all the other doodads and gizmos around the house.)
As it turns out, the world's heavy coal users (folks like you and I) don't even know they have a habit. That ignorance is a luxury, provided by the blessings of modern technology. For the majority of its history, coal has been a particularly nasty source of urban pollution.
Blackened lungs and reddened eyes go all the way back to the High Middle Ages. In the year 1285, King Edward I (commonly known as Edward the Longshanks) had two great battles on his hands. In Scotland there was William Wallace; at home in London, there was coal. The King tried, and failed, to curtail London's use of coal on public health grounds. Harsh bans and brutal penalties were put in place, but acrid smoke continued to foul the air. With the city growing rapidly and the forests in retreat, London's pressing need for fuel and heat bested all else.
Some 500 years after Longshanks, the potent combination of coal and steam had transformed England and kicked off the industrial revolution. By the 1850s Britain was officially urbanized, with 51% of the population living in cities rather than the countryside. And what living hells those early industrial cities were, Manchester chief among them—sky black with smoke, ground black with soot, the very air choked with dust. Scores of Manchester children were struck with Rickets, a vitamin-deficiency malady that softens the bones, due to lack of exposure to sunlight. Fifty-seven percent died before the age of five. Those children who survived typically toiled the rest of their lives away in the factories and the mines.
All that misery is gone now (in the West at any rate). There are no more local fumes. Modern coal-fired power plants are paragons of efficiency and discretion. Leviathan jets of flame ten stories high consume as much as five hundreds tons of coal per hour, hidden in the confines of gigantic boilers that convert heat into steam and steam into electricity. It all happens behind closed doors, on guarded grounds outside city limits. We no longer see, smell, or taste the coal. We only flip on the light switch.
Yet for all the cleaning up the coal industry has done, we are still paying a heavy toll for its use. It's true that western coal plants no longer belch black smoke; their emissions have been vigorously scrubbed and filtered, in accordance with the law. But these scrubbed emissions still make an alarming contribution to the likes of global warming, acid rain, and other slow-burning environmental concerns.
Meanwhile, in the East, particularly China, many cities still look like the Manchester of old. The New York Times reports that China uses more coal than the United States, Japan, and the European Union combined. What's worse, China's plants are older, less efficient, and more prone to toxic emissions than their regulated Western counterparts. China's massive pollution clouds have been known to travel the breadth of oceans, clogging up filters as far away as Lake Tahoe. With India following in China's sooty footsteps, we have a global pollution epidemic in the making.
So, should we feel gratitude or disgust towards old king coal? It's hard not to feel a mix of both. On the whole, coal has been very good to us. As a driver of the industrial revolution (however hellish initial conditions were), coal brought about the rise of manufacturing and the high standards of living the West now enjoys. As an ongoing source of cheap power, coal now gives China and India a chance at continued rapid growth. But none of this is without cost. A terrible price was paid, and there could be more dues on the way.
With that said, we won't be going off coal any time soon. Energy economics tilt heavily in coal's favor, especially in the developing world. New coal plants, still being built at a rapid clip, have operating life spans of half a century or more; it wouldn't make sense to mothball them prematurely. Countless existing plants have decades left to go. Last but certainly not least, countries like China and India also have to deal with an emerging middle class and the rise of consumption-based lifestyles. They may need all the energy sources they can get their hands on, both old-school and new, to keep up with demand in future years.
