Securing the Supplies of Fossil Fuels - Energy and Climate: How to Achieve a Successful Energy Transition - page 101

Even so, the price of coal also increased sharply and rapidly in 2008. The
CIF price of steamcoal reached around 300US $/toe in July, falling back to
around 200US $/toe in September 2008 (compared with 600US $/toe for
natural gas and 700US $/toe for oil at the same time).
In China, the rapid increase in demand has led to a very ambitious
planning of renewal and growth of the power generation capacity in the
years to come. China plans around 1GWof additional capacity eachweek
over 20 years. The additional capacity in China amounted to 50GW in
2004, 70GW in 2005 and 102GW in 2006. China aims to install an
overall capacity of power generation between 1200GWand 1300GWby
2030 [87].
The world consumption of steam coal for power generation might
therefore increase from 1500Mtoe in 2000 to 2500Mtoe in 2030. Coal
ensures around 40%of power generation, which amounts to around two-
thirds of the worldwide coal consumption.
Furthermore, if, in the future, it becomes difficult to satisfy the demand
for engine fuels by deriving them only from oil supplies, the production of
synthetic liquid fuels from coal will increase rapidly. The yield of such a
transformation is unfortunately comparatively low: an amount of 2.5 toe
of coal is needed to replace 1 toe of oil. Large emissions of CO 2 therefore
result from such a transformation. Synthetic fuels can also be produced
from natural gas or biomass and the future outlook for these synthetic
fuels is discussed in the next section.
The increase of coal production poses difficult problems from the
environmental standpoint, both at the local level (emissions of different
contaminants: SO x ,NO x , solid particles, mercury, etc.) and at the global
level, due to the level of CO 2 emissions. The situation is especially
worrying in China, where coal accounts for 77% of power generation
and in India where 70% of power capacity is coal based.
Technologies for 'clean coal' power generation are available or
under development. The main difficulty stems from the need to limit
CO 2 emissions. If the comeback of coal is confirmed, it will cause a
significant increase in CO 2 emissions. CO 2 emissions per kWh of
electricityproducedfromcoalarefromtwotothreetimeshigherthan
in the case of natural gas, as a result of the combination of two factors
(a lower efficiency and a higher level of CO 2 emissions per output
energy unit) [88].
The situation can be improved by increasing the efficiency of coal-fired
power plants. The efficiency of the most recent coal-fired power plants is
close to 45% and in the future efficiency close to 50% is expected, which
is well above the world average.