UK Generators turn to coal as cost of natural gas soars

Generators turn to coal as cost of natural gas soars - Industry sectors - Times Online

July 25, 2005

Generators turn to coal as cost of natural gas soars
By Carl Mortished

THE high cost of natural gas is forcing electricity generators to burn more coal in an attempt to keep a lid on power prices. A doubling of the price of summer gas over the past two years has encouraged generators to switch back to cheaper coal, but the cost savings come at an environmental price.

Powergen, Britain’s second-biggest generator, said that it was using 20 per cent more coal than last summer, taking advantage of the widening gap between the costs of the two fuels. Last week the company gave in to the cost pressure of rising wholesale fuel prices, introducing steep increases in gas and electricity tariffs for its residential customers.

John Ridley, an energy trader for Powergen, said the company was using more coal than expected. “Coal is the main generating source in the winter months, but in the summer gas normally runs ahead of coal,” he said. “In the summer of 2003, gas was 16p per therm, but this year it’s 30p per therm. You think long and hard about using gas generators.”

Figures from the Department of Trade and Industry, show a significant shift away from gas in the winter months. In the first quarter of 2005, major power producers burned 4.2 per cent more coal than in the same period in 2004. Over the same period, when overall fuel consumption remained static, there was an 8 per cent decline in gas consumption.

Coal was once the UK’s most important source of fuel for electricity generation, but is in sharp decline, condemned for its high sulphur and carbon dioxide emissions.

“Coal generators emit approximately double the amount of carbon compared with gas,” Mr Ridley said.

That means that a generator such as Powergen will suffer an extra cost in buying carbon permits under the new emissions trading scheme.

Even so, Powergen reckons that it is still advantageous in cost terms to use up coal stocks rather than burn expensive North Sea gas.

The Large Combustion Plant Directive, a European Union environmental law, will between 2008 and 2015 progressively force the closure of coal-fired power stations that lack flue-gas desulphurisation units, equipment that cuts the emission of sulphur dioxide.

According to Powergen, the cost of equipping old generators with such technology is huge; the company spent about £300 million refurbishing Radcliffe, a coal-fired generator in Nottinghamshire.

Instead, the company expects that much of the UK’s coal-based electricity generation will be closed over the next ten to 15 years.

Bush Administration Unveils Alternative Climate Pact

Bush Administration Unveils Alternative Climate Pact - New York Times

July 28, 2005
Bush Administration Unveils Alternative Climate Pact
By REUTERS
WASHINGTON, July 27 (Reuters) - The Bush administration, which is pushing alternatives to the Kyoto accord on global warming, unveiled a six-nation pact on Wednesday that promotes the use of technology to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The six nations, the United States, Japan, Australia, China, India and South Korea, will build on existing bilateral agreements on technology sharing to control emissions, but will not set mandatory targets.

President Bush said in a statement that the Asia-Pacific Partnership for Clean Development and Climate, which will be formally introduced in Vientiane, Laos, would address global warming while promoting economic development.

But environmentalists criticized it as an attempt by Washington to create a distraction ahead of United Nations talks in November in Montreal that will focus on how to widen the Kyoto accord to include developing nations after 2012.

The approach of looking to technology for solutions to global warming was emphasized by Mr. Bush at the Group of 8 summit meeting in Scotland when he called for a "post-Kyoto era." The United States, which creates the biggest share of greenhouse emissions, and Australia are the only developed nations that have not ratified the Kyoto accord. But Japan, China, India and South Korea have ratified Kyoto, which demands cuts in greenhouse emissions by 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2008 to 2012.

"As far as I can tell, there's really nothing new here," said Jeff Fielder, an analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council in New York. He said that the bilateral agreements already served the purpose of technology sharing but that companies would not have an incentive to deploy it without a strong signal sent by mandatory limits.

"I think this is aimed at complicating the Montreal talks," he added.

Jim Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said there was no attempt to undermine the Kyoto pact.

Kyoto by Degrees

WSJ.com - Kyoto by Degrees

Kyoto by Degrees
June 21, 2005; Page A16

Something strange is happening in the U.S. Senate -- or at least stranger than usual. The world's greatest deliberative body is hurtling toward passage of limits on greenhouse gases, even as the scientific case for such a mini-Kyoto Protocol looks weaker all the time.

Recall that as recently as 1997 the Senate voted 95-0 for the Byrd-Hagel Resolution assailing Kyoto's provisions. Bill Clinton never even brought the Protocol up for a vote. But all of a sudden such limits are said to be a political "inevitability" in a Republican Senate. Energy Chairman Pete Domenici says he's open to the John McCain-Joe Lieberman mini-Kyoto, and New Mexico Democrat Jeff Bingaman is proposing an amendment that would impose even stricter limits on fossil fuel use.

Politics is often illogical, but this momentum seems entirely untethered to real science. Since that Byrd-Hagel vote eight years ago, the case for linking fossil fuels to global warming has, if anything, become even more doubtful. The Earth currently does seem to be in a warming period, though how warm and for how long no one knows. In particular, no one knows whether this is unusual or merely something that happens periodically for natural reasons. Most global warming alarms are based on computer simulations that are largely speculative and depend on a multitude of debatable assumptions.


Then there's the famous "hockey stick" data from American geoscientist Michael Mann. Prior to publication of Mr. Mann's data in 1998, all climate scientists accepted that the Earth had undergone large temperature variations within recorded human history. This included a Medieval warm period when the Vikings farmed Greenland and a "little ice age" more recently when the Thames River often froze solid. Seen in that perspective, the slight warming believed to have occurred in the past century could well be no more than a natural rebound, especially since most of that warming occurred before 1940.

Enter Mr. Mann, who suggested that both the history books and other historical temperature data were wrong. His temperature graph for the past millennium was essentially flat until the 20th century, when a sharp upward spike occurs -- i.e., it looks like a hockey stick. The graph was embraced by the global warming lobby as proof that we are in a crisis, and that radical solutions are called for.

But then, in 2003, Canadian mathematician Stephen McIntyre and economist Ross McKitrick published a critique calling Mr. Mann's work riddled with "collation errors, unjustifiable truncations or extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculations of principal components, and other quality control defects." Correct for those errors, they showed, and the Medieval warm period returns.

Mr. Mann has never offered a serious rebuttal to the McIntyre-McKitrick critique. He has refused to fully explain his methodology, claiming he's the victim of "intimidation." That's odd when you consider that the sine qua non of real science is independently verifiable and reproducible results.

Meanwhile, a review of about 200 different temperature studies was published in 2003 by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the journal Climate Research. It likewise reaffirmed the longstanding consensus that there have been large temperature variations over the past millennium.

So what would be a fair representation of how most scientists view the climate of the past 1,000 years? We'd suggest the graph nearby, which we reprint exactly as it appeared in the first report of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (hardly a group of oil-funded hacks) in 1990. It shows that our own warming period is neither unique nor all that hot.

There are other reasons to doubt the global warming alarums. For example, the computer models that predict it suggest the upper atmosphere should have warmed substantially in recent decades. But data from weather balloons and satellites don't match the projections.

There's also the matter of the alleged melting of the Antarctic ice cover, threatening a catastrophic sea level rise. In fact, recent data suggest the ice is thickening and temperatures are dropping in most of the continent. Finally, an increasing number of scientists are concluding that variations in solar radiation associated with sun spots -- that's right, the heat of the sun -- play a major role in Earth's climate.

To add it all up, the Earth is slightly warmer than it used to be a century ago, but no one knows why. Even if fossil fuels were the cause, Kyoto would make little difference, especially with China and India understandably bent on oil-fueled growth to lift their citizens out of poverty. And a warmer Earth may not be any worse than a colder one, certainly not for the longer growing seasons it would allow in the world's temperate zones. None of this justifies passing, for the first time, limits on greenhouse gases that would impose hundreds of billions of dollars in compliance costs on American energy production.

President Bush can in good conscience offer a polite rebuff to his friend Tony Blair when the British Prime Minister presses for American action on climate change at the upcoming G-8 summit in Scotland. Likewise, if Senators are going to insist on passing a pork-laden energy bill, the least they could do is avoid senseless limits on future economic growth such as the Kyoto-lites on offer from Messrs. McCain, Lieberman and Bingaman.

U.S. to announce 'Beyond Kyoto' greenhouse pact

Science News Article | Reuters.co.uk

U.S. to announce 'Beyond Kyoto' greenhouse pact
Wed Jul 27, 2005 12:28 PM BST



By Michelle Nichols

CANBERRA (Reuters) - The world's top polluter, the United States, is set to unveil a pact to combat global warming by developing energy technology aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions, officials and diplomats said on Wednesday.

China and India, whose burgeoning economies comprise a third of humanity, as well as Australia and South Korea are also part of the agreement to tackle climate change beyond the Kyoto protocol.

Kyoto requires a cut in greenhouse emissions by 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12 but the United States and Australia have never ratified the protocol because it excluded major developing nations such China and India.

Diplomats in the Laotian capital Vientiane said the pact would be formally announced on Thursday when U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick holds a press conference attended by representatives of the other signatories.

Zoellick is attending a regional forum in Laos.

Details of the pact remain unclear but it appears to echo recent comments by President Bush who advocated the use of technology in curbing growth in greenhouse gas emissions rather than setting targets he believes threaten the U.S. economy.

Australian Environment Minister Ian Campbell said on Wednesday that the five countries had been quietly working on the pact for months.

"It's quite clear the Kyoto protocol won't get the world to where it wants to go ... We have got to find something that works better -- Australia is working on that with partners around the world," Campbell told reporters on Wednesday.

LIMITED USE

The Kyoto protocol, first agreed in 1997, came into force in February after Russia ratified the pact but analysts say the protocol is of limited use because many signatories are already above their emission targets.

"We need to expand the energy the world consumes and reduce the emissions. That's going to need new technologies, it's going to need the development of new technologies and the deployment of them within developing countries," Campbell said.

As economies expand, the world is consuming more energy and is producing more greenhouse gas emissions, particularly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels such as coal in power plants and petrol in cars.

Many scientists say emissions need to be cut by 50 percent to try to limit the impact of global warming.

"I think it is a good idea because the development of these technologies is important and I've always said there has to be a partnership between North and South in these technologies. This is one way of working together," said Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

"It does not interfere with the Kyoto protocol," he said.

Japan, the world's number two economy, appeared to welcome the pact but others were critical.

"This is all about taxpayers' money being diverted from developing clean renewable technologies to try and make burning coal less dirty," Bob Brown, leader of the minority Australian Greens party, said in a statement.

Australia and China are the world's largest coal exporters, while the United States is also a top exporter.

"If it's an agreement about appropriate technology transfer. It could be a useful tool, but not at the expense of the only international agreement to deal with climate change," said Greenpeace Energy Campaigner Catherine Fitpatrick.

A panel of scientists that advises the United Nations has said world temperatures are likely to rise between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees Celsius by 2100, triggering more frequent floods, droughts, melting of icecaps and glaciers and driving thousands of species to extinction.

Scientists say the planet's average surface temperature has increased by about 0.6 degrees Celsius over the past century.

Researchers say further warming is inevitable because of the huge amount of extra carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere by man's activities but the degree of future warming hinges on how nations control their greenhouse gas emissions now. (Additional reporting by Jon Herskovitz in VIENTIANE, Himangshu Watts in NEW DELHI and Masayuki Kitano in TOKYO)

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