Coal and Power Density - RB

This is a portion of Robert Bryce’s newsletter dated January 21, 2022.

Coal piece in The Hill, Power of Power Density Robert Bryce January 21, 2022 Back in 2009, I visited the Cardinal Mine, an underground coal mine in western Kentucky that is owned by Tulsa-based Alliance Resources Partners. I’ve also been to the North Antelope Rochelle Mine in Wyoming, operated by Peabody, which is the world’s biggest coal mine. Those experiences shaped my views of both the coal business and the fuel’s continuing importance for electricity production. Indeed, the visit to the Cardinal Mine provided the opening scene in my fourth book, Power Hungry. I wrote about my visit to NARM in Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper, which was published in 2014. That’s a longish introduction for this week’s “news” letter, but it’s germane to the first item today, which is my latest piece in The Hill, which attracted a fair amount of attention, including more than 2,000 comments and about 500 shares. As I have said many times, people love to hate the coal industry. But the Iron Law of Electricity has not been repealed. Coal is going to stick around for a long time to come because the global economy runs on electricity and coal continues to be one of the cheapest ways to produce the juice we need. Two of five items today: •

Coal and the Iron Law of Electricity in The Hill

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My TED-style talk at TPPF: The Power of Power Density

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Last Sunday, The Hill published my piece on the surge in coal use here in the U.S. and around the world. I wrote: •

So much for the myriad claims about going “beyond coal.” According to a new report from the Rhodium Group, U.S. coal consumption jumped by 17 percent last year compared to 2020 levels. That’s a huge increase, which Rhodium says was “largely driven by a run-up in natural gas prices.” Rather than burn gas, which averaged about $4.93 per million Btu last year — more than two times the price in 2020 — many electricity producers chose to burn coal instead. The surge in domestic coal use is significant for two reasons.

First, it proves again that coal remains an essential fuel for electricity producers both here in the U.S. and around the world. Second, it shows that the Biden administration’s pledge to decarbonize the electric grid by 2035 is little more than wishful thinking.

I concluded: •

In short, it’s easy for politicians and climate activists to vilify hydrocarbons, hype renewables, and talk about quitting coal. But as the Rhodium Group’s report makes clear, economics matter. The U.S. and other countries aren’t going to suddenly quit using coal (or natural gas) to produce electricity because doing so would be too expensive. I’ll end by making the same point I have been making for more than a decade: If policymakers are serious about decarbonizing the electric grid, they need to get serious about nuclear energy. And they need to do so now.

Again, here’s a link. Please share it.

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The Power of Power Density Power density is perhaps the most important and yet least-understood metric in physics. That’s why I was pleased to have the opportunity to boil down that subject to its essence -- and convey its importance -- and do so in front of a live audience.

Yesterday, I delivered a 10-minute TED-style talk on power density at the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s annual Policy Orientation meeting here in Austin. TPPF kindly provided me with the video of my presentation which I just posted on my YouTube channel.

If you watch “The Power of Power Density,” you will see that I’ve come up with a complement to the Iron Law of Electricity. (Full credit for the original ferrous rule goes to Roger Pielke Jr., who coined the Iron Law of Climate.) I have long said that energy networks that rely on low power density sources (corn ethanol, wind energy, and solar energy) require massive resource inputs to counter that low power density. Those inputs include land, fertilizer, copper, steel, and other things.

That fact led me to coin the Iron Law of Power Density, which says “the lower the

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power density, the higher the resource intensity.” Offshore wind provides a good example of the Iron Law of Power Density because each megawatt of offshore wind requires, according to the International Energy Agency, about 10 times more critical minerals than does natural gas.

I will be writing more about the Iron Law of Power Density in the future. Again, here’s a link to my talk.

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