It lists CS Energy’s Kogan Creek power station, J-Power’s Isogo thermal power station and SaskPower’s Boundary Dam integrated carbon capture and storage project as prime examples of new technology at work which is reducing emissions.
Kogan Creek is Australia’s fourth super-critical coal-fired plant, with the capacity to power up to a million homes using less water through its dry cooling technology, and producing fewer emissions.
Isogo is the next step up in technology: an ultra super-critical plant that has set a new efficiency standard of about 45% while also reducing regulated emissions to those typical of a gas-fired combined-cycle plant.
Boundary Dam reduces its emissions by 1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year – equal to taking 250,000 cars off Saskatchewan roads annually.
The report also comes as both pro and anti-coal forces try to build momentum ahead of the UN Conference of Parties (COP21) forum in Paris in November.
The report follows one published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, which said developing and emerging countries’ coal consumption rose from 1 gigatonne in 1990 to 3.7Gt in 2011.
Author Jan Christoph Steckel called it a “renaissance”
“We are witnessing a global renaissance of coal majorly driven by poor, fast-growing countries that increasingly rely on coal to satisfy their growing energy demand,” Steckel said.
“The low price of coal relative to gas and oil has played an important role in accelerating coal consumption since the end of the 1990s.”
Steckel’s report shows that in the increasingly integrated global coal market, the availability of a domestic coal resource does not have a statistically significant impact on the use of coal and related emissions.
“These findings have important implications for climate change mitigation: If future economic growth of poor countries is fueled mainly by coal, ambitious mitigation targets very likely will become infeasible,” he said.
“Building new coal power plant capacities will lead to lock-in effects for the next few decades. If that lock-in is to be avoided, international climate policy must find ways to offer viable alternatives to coal for developing countries.”
However, the MCA’s paper says that hundreds of new high efficiency, low emissions (HELE) coal-fired plants are in operation, under construction or planned in Japan, China, Europe and elsewhere in east Asia, which plants operate at much higher temperatures and greater pressures producing reliable, base load energy while reducing carbon dioxide emissions by up to 40%.
“In addition to sharply reduced carbon emissions, these plants reduce all other emissions including particulates to negligible levels,” the MCA said.
“These plants continue to deliver baseload electricity at a much lower cost than all other energy sources.
“These plants will ensure coal has a fundamental role to play in the provision of low cost, reliable energy for decades.”
The publication also notes that carbon capture and storage technologies are continuing to be rolled out around the world, pointing to the recent launch of the world's first commercial CCS plant at Boundary Dam in Saskatchewan, Canada.
Boundary Dam has slashed CO2 emissions by 90%.
Coal accounts for 41% of the world's electricity generation and in the past decade the use of coal grew four times faster than renewable energy sources and 50% faster than gas.
The Australian coal industry is our second biggest export earner valued at around $40 billion in 2013-14. The Department of Industry and Science projects that Australia's coal exports will boost national income by around $250 billion between 2014-15 and 2019-20.
Australia is the world's largest exporter of metallurgical (steel-making) coal and second biggest exporter of coal overall. Australia is forecast to become the world's largest coal exporter by 2017.
