coal growth

Mining Weekly 5th December 2011

COAL GROWTH

Anglo American believes that the thermal coal that the company mines will continue to drive economic development around the world, growing from the current 40% of the global energy source to 43% by 2035.

“We’re not looking at a massive change overnight in some of the developed countries and similarly in the case of China, where 88% of the energy source is coal-related and the projection is that is will come down to less than 70%, but China demand is continuing to rise.

“Clearly coal’s not going away and clearly there’ll be a continuing dependency, and the question is how we think about that and how we also drive some of the other commodities we produce, like platinum, to contribute to the reduction of carbon output and the issue of climate change,” Carroll told Mining Weekly Online in a media interface at which executives Godfrey Gomwe, Chris Griffith, Norman Mbazima, Seamus French and Neville Nicolau also provided detailed input on the carbon reduction steps being taken throughout the Anglo American group.

Nicolau told Mining Weekly Online that the company was taking steps to lower the energy-intensity of platinum processing.

Nicolau said that the company had reduced its absolute energy consumption by 15% and increased the volume produced with the lower level of electricity.

“By doing that, we keep marginal operations going and we keep people in jobs, which is very important in South Africa,” he said.

Solar-powered housing for many of its 55 000 employees was within municipalities and not mine villages and the government had taken the unprecedented step of taking out full-page advertisements in national media to acknowledge Anglo American Platinum’s social initiatives.

Mbazima told Mining Weekly Online that, under any climate change scenario, the use of coal would still be on the annual increase for a long time to come.

He said that the world would have to find ways of using coal in a more sustainable way, while at the same time taking into account the hard reality that 1.3-billion people around the world were still without access to electricity.

Using mainly coal-fired power stations to bring most of those people into the electrical fold would probably increase greenhouse gases by only one per cent.

The quality of mainly domestic power station coal needed to be improved in order to reduce emissions.

The power stations themselves needed to take steps to improve their efficiency from the current global average of 28% and South Africa’s upcoming Kusile power station was set to improve that efficiency to 40%.

“If you waved a magic wand and turned all the power stations in the world into super crucial or ultra critical stations, you would probably halve the amount of greenhouse gases being put into the atmosphere from power generation,” Mbazima said.

The biggest potential abatement was through greater power station efficiency and the final possible measure was to capture the carbon dioxide emerging from power stations and to use it to grow biomass/algae or to capture it and store it underground.

Internally, the company was working to drive operational excellence around operational efficiency and energy usage and had invested $180-million in low-carbon technology.

The company was a member of FutureGen, which was planning to build a zero-emission coal-fired power station.

Technologies for carbon capture and storage were proven and what was required was demonstration at a commercial scale and the company was working with governments around the world to achieve that.