ENERGY IN CONTEXT: A FOSSIL FUEL PRIMER - Hydrofracking: What Everyone Needs to Know - page 4

Coal has been used as an energy source around the world for centuries. The
Chinese, who thought coal was a stone that could burn, used it to smelt copper
some 3,000 years ago. Coal is mined by various methods, including drilling of ver-
tical and horizontal shafts; strip-mining, in which enormous shovels excavate sur-
face layers of rock and earth to reveal coal seams; and mountaintop coal mining,
in which entire mountaintops are removed, exposing coal deposits, while the waste
rock is dumped into valleys and streams.
Coal is a cheap and plentiful fuel that has provided employment for millions of
people around the world, and yet the carbon dioxide it produces is the most signi-
ficant greenhouse gas, and it wafts ash into the air. This air pollution is environ-
mentally destructive, and, according to the National Research Council, kills more
than 10,000 Americans every year. 5
Nevertheless, coal remains popular: even in this day of global networks and hy-
brid cars, coal provides two-fifths of the world's electricity. 6 In the last decade, the
world's electricity production has doubled, and two-thirds of that increase has been
powered by coal. Indeed, if this growth rate continues, coal could supplant oil as
the world's primary energy source by 2017. 7
The main drivers of increased coal use have been the surging economies of
China and India, and steady demand from Western Europe. In 2001, according to
the IEA, China's demand for coal was roughly equivalent to 60 million tons of
oil. 8 By 2011, that demand had tripled, and China surpassed the United States as
the largest energy producer in the world. (China's domestic coal industry produces
more primary energy than oil from the Middle East does.) India's demand for coal
is also booming. By 2017, the IEA estimates that India could overtake the United
States as the world's second-largest user of coal. 9
Even green-conscious Western Europe is burning more coal, although it is con-
sidered the most polluting form of energy. Coal is cheaper than natural gas in
Europe, whose domestic gas industries lag far behind America's. Countries like
Germany are pushing renewable energy, such as solar and wind power, which has
eroded the creditworthiness of conventional utilities. US coal exports to European
countries like Britain and Germany were up 26 percent in 2012 over 2011. 10 Coal
consumption in economically battered Italy and Spain has also jumped, despite ef-
forts to capitalize on Italy's wind and Spain's sunshine.
Thanks to the shale reserves tapped by hydrofracking, America is moving in
the opposite direction. In 1988, coal provided 60 percent of US power; by 2012
that number had been cut in half, and coal generated only a third of US electri-