This week we talk about peat, pig iron, and sulphuric acid.

We also discuss the Industrial Revolution, natural gas, and offshore wind turbines.

Recommended Book: Deep Utopia by Nick Bostrom

Transcript

This episode is going live on election day here in the US; and this has been quite a remarkable election season for many reasons, among them that there’s been just a boggling amount of money spent on advertisements and events and other efforts to claim attention and mindshare, and in part because the vitriol and tribalism of the past several elections—an evolved, intensified version of those things—has almost completely dominated all those messages.

And as someone who’s based in a swing-state, Wisconsin, I can tell you that it’s been a lot. It’s been a lot everywhere, as US elections also claim more than their fair-share of news reportage in other countries, but in the US, and in the relatively few states that are assumed to be the kingmakers in this election, it’s been just overwhelming for months, for basically a year, actually. So instead of doing anything on the election, or anything overtly political—there’ll no doubt be time for that in the coming weeks, once the dust has settled on all this—let’s talk about coal. And more specifically, British coal.

Coal has been used throughout the British Isles for a long time, with early groups burning unrefined lumps of the substance to heat their homes, though generally only when their local, close-enough-to-the-surface-to-be-gathered source for the stuff was pure enough to beat-out other options, like peat and wood, which was seldom the case in most of these areas.

It was also used to create lime from limestone, the lime used for construction purposes, to make mortar, and it was used for metal-shaping purposes by blacksmiths.

Beyond that, though, it was generally avoided in favor of cleaner-burning options, as coal is often accompanied by sulphur and other such substances, which means when burned in its natural form, it absolutely reeks, and it can make anyone unlucky enough to be caught in the smoke it creates tear-up, because the resulting sulfurous gas would react with their eye-moisture to create sulphuric acid; not pleasant, and even though it was generally better than peat and wood in terms of the energy it contained, it was worse in basically every other way.

Earlier groups of people had figured out the same: there were folks in China as early as 1000 BC, for instance, who used these rocks as fuel for copper smelting, and people in these same early-use areas, where coal veins were exploitable, were really leaning into the stuff by the 13th century AD, when Marco Polo visited and remarked that the locals were burning these weird black stones, which granted them wild luxuries, like being able to take “three hot baths a week.”

Groups in Roman Britain were also surface mining, using, and trading coal at a fairly reasonable level by around 200 AD, though it was still primarily used to process things like grain, which needed to be dried, and to work with iron—as with those Chinese groups, coal has long been appreciated for its smelting capabilities, because of its high energy density compared to other options.

In the British Isles, though, coal was largely imported to major cities by sea, until around the 13th century when the easily accessed deposits were used up, and shaft mining, which granted access to deeper deposits via at times long tunnels that had to be dug and reinforced, was developed and became common, including in areas that hadn’t previously had surface sources that could be exploited.

In the 16th century, this and similar innovations led to a reliable enough supply of coal that folks living in the city of London were able to largely replace their wood- and peat-burning infrastructure with coal-burning versions of the same.

It’s thought that this transition was partly the consequence of widespread deforestation that resulted from a population boom in the city—more lumber was needed to build more buildings, but they also required more burnable wood fuel—though some historians have argued that what actually pushed coal to the forefront, despite its many downsides compared to wood and peat, is the expansion of iron smelting and the increasing necessity of iron for Britain’s many wars during this period, alongside England’s burgeoning glass-making industry.

Both of these manufacturing processes, making iron and glass, required just a silly amount of fuel—making just one ton of the lowest-grade cast iron, so-called pig iron, consumed something like 28 tons of seasoned wood, and glass was similarly wood-hungry.

What’s more, that combination of city expansion and the King’s desire to massively build-out his Navy meant timber resources were continuously being strained anywhere industry popped up and flourished, so those industries would then expand to areas where wood was still cheap, over time making wood it more expensive there, too. Eventually, wood was costly pretty much everywhere, and coal thus became comparably cheap in these regions, and you could use a lot less of it to achieve the same ends.

Even if that subbing-in led to bad smells and burning eyes and clouds of dense, black smoke wherever it was burned, then, the cost differential was substantial enough to make using coal the better option in many such cases and areas.

This boom in coal usage was amplified still further by the rapid clearing of forests due to the expansion of farm- and pastureland.

It was determined, by the late 17th century, that an acre of farm- or pastureland was worth a lot more than woodland used for timber or other purposes—around three-times as valuable—so there was a large-scale deforestation effort to basically claim as much value from these forested lands as possible, dramatically changing the landscape of the British Isles over the course of just a few decades; this transition in part enabled and powered by coal.

Around the year 1700, about five-sixths of all coal that was mined, globally, was mined in Britain, and that helped power the empire’s industrial revolution later that century, beginning in something like 1760, as the majority of clever devices that arose during that period were powered by coal, and the global industrial revolution that eventually created what we might consider technological modernity arose, initially—at least in this manifestation of the concept—from coal-powered Britain.

What I’d like to talk about today is a remarkable coal-related milestone, considering that history, that Britain recently marked, and what it might mean for this and other fuel-types, moving forward.

—

In 1882, the first-ever coal-fired power station opened in London—a thermal power station that uses coal as its fuel, which basically means you refine the stuff, break it into tiny, semi-uniform pieces, and then feed those pieces into a coal-fired boiler. In that boiler the coal is burned to generate heat, and that heat boils water, the resulting steam spinning turbines which turn generators that produce electricity.

Coal-fired power stations are massively inefficient, with modern versions of the model only boasting a 34-ish% efficiency, meaning about 34% of the total energy contained in the fuel source is ultimately converted into electricity—the rest, about 66% of the energy contained in the coal that’s burned, is lost along the way.

That’s not uncommon for power plants, though other fossil fuel-burning plants are somewhat more efficient on average, with oil-powered plants weighing in at about 37% efficiency, and gas-powered versions managing something like 50-60% at their most modern and sophisticated, though simpler variations of the design only achieve about the same as coal.

All fossil fuel-powered power stations emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as a byproduct of their operation, which has been shown to stoke climate change, and they all have pollutant-related byproducts, as well, though there’s a spectrum: gas is relatively clean-burning compared to its kin, while coal is the absolute worst, releasing all sorts of pollutants into the air with at times severe health consequences for anyone in the general vicinity; oil plants are somewhere in between those two extremes, depending on the type of oil used and the nature of the plant.

Those downsides are part of why newer technologies like large-scale wind turbines and solar panel arrays have been replacing fossil fuel-based power plants in many locales, and quite rapidly, though the infrastructure in many areas is optimized for these older-school options, which means there are the plants themselves, which are often quite large and real-estate-spanning, but there’s also all the mines, there’s the shipping facilities, the processing capacity for the coal or oil or whatnot—it’s a nation-spanning network of buildings and machinery and businesses, not to mention all the people who work jobs related to these vital, energy-creating industries.

Coal was already beginning to decline in the UK 100 years after that first plant was built, so by the 1990s, as gas, often called natural gas as a sort of branding effort by gas companies to make it sound cleaner and more desirable, was at that point already beginning to replace coal in many electricity-generating facilities.

Gas has done the same in many countries—especially those with vast natural sources of it, and the US has opened up a lot of new markets for this fuel type in recent decades, and in the past decade in particular, as it mastered the means of compressing gas into a liquid, often called LNG, and shipping it to ports in Europe around the same time Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was fundamentally rewiring the energy mix on the continent.

So gas has played a role in disrupting coal’s hold in many previously coal-happy areas, including the US. But it was renewables that really turned the tide against coal in the UK, with a combination of solar and wind making up about 6% of Britain’s electricity in 2012—compared to 40% for coal, at the time—but just over a decade later, in 2023, renewables were making up a whopping 34% of the UK’s energy mix, mostly due to the widescale deployment and success of offshore wind farms.

This, paired with the emergence of increasingly efficient appliances and lighting, which sip energy compared to previous-generation bulbs and kettles and refrigerators, meant the UK was able to deplete its coal-usage, even as energy demand increased—because that demand was less than anticipated, due to those efficiencies, and enough new renewables and gas facilities were coming online to meet that reduced demand.

At the tail-end of September this year, 2024, the UK witnessed the shut-down of its last remaining coal power plant, which was built 57 years ago.

This was a meaningful moment, as it marked the first time in about 142 years that coal wasn’t contributing to the UK’s electrical grid, and it has global significance, as while 23 European countries have announced that they will phase out coal in the relatively near-future, and while Belgium was the first previously coal-burning European nation to go fully coal-free, back in 2016, the UK is the first G7 nation to do so—the rest of the G7 having committed to accomplishing the same by 2035.

Decommissioning the plant will take about two years, and that will include the task of reallocating the plant’s 170-or-so employees to other positions within the power network, and going through the many steps required to clean up the area after decades of voluminous pollution, while also getting the area ready for other types of development.

In many cases right now, globally, that means swapping in some other piece of energy infrastructure; in some cases coal-fired plants can be replaced with gas-fired plants, which is still not ideal in terms of emissions, but much better than coal, and in some cases it’s a more significant change, like building-out grid-scale battery arrays, which allow nearby wind turbines and solar panels to store the excess energy they generate when the wind is blowing and sun is shining, so that none of that energy goes to waste, and so it can be used when the wind and sun aren’t cooperating.

The British government is also planning to expand its nuclear power capacity, quadrupling its currently five-strong nuclear power plant holdings by 2050, which is a choice that comes with a lot of its own consequences, including, often, very high price tags on building and operating such facilities. But because of the nature of nuclear power plants—specifically, that they produce high levels of consistent, reliable, emissions-free electricity—that additional expense is often okay, because that steady consistency nicely blends with the inconsistent output of solar and wind.

It’s worth noting that coal-heavy nations elsewhere around the world, like Russia, are currently having trouble with the stuff, Russia’s coal industry reportedly experiencing its worst crisis in 30 years due in part to sanctions, in part to a lack of demand from previous customers that’re transitioning away from coal, and in part due to issues within the industry, itself.

Coal production in Russia dropped by 6.7% year on year in July of 2024, marking the lowest output since the height of the covid pandemic, and it’s estimated that they’ve lost around 27% of monthly output compared to recent peaks.

There are different types and grades of coal, so those numbers are averages, and not all coal-exporting nations are having as much trouble as Russia right now. Australia is the world’s foremost exporter of coal, for instance, and while China is going through some economic complications right now—which is an issue for Australia, because they shipped the majority of their coal to China until just recently—India has been stepping in to pick up the majority of that slack. 

Australia has still cut its coal export outlook by 6% because of those and other geopolitical ripples, and there’s a chance their sales could continue to drop due to the transition to renewables on one hand, and the move toward gas-powered plants on the other.

But some types of coal remain the cheapest form of energy production in some countries, so there’s a good chance that rising stars like India, and possibly Indonesia and other Southeast Asian booming economies, as well, could step in and grab what they can, despite all the downsides of coal, because they can get it at a discount; which won’t be great for coal companies that are used to higher prices, but it likely will allow them to keep operating at something close to their previous capacity for longer than would otherwise be the case, lacking these rising nations that need cheap fuel, whatever the consequences of using it.

In the UK, though, coal is gone, and the remnants of its use are slowly being wiped away: the land cleaned up and repurposed, more of the grid being optimized for cleaner production types.

We’ll probably see a few other big nations accomplish the same over the next decade, but because of all that aforementioned geopolitical turmoil, there’s also a chance those planned end-dates will be pushed: the cheap, dirty needs of the present overshadowing these nations’ cleaner, healthier next-step ambitions.

Show Notes

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=107&t=3

https://e360.yale.edu/digest/uk-last-coal-plant

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-mix-uk?stackMode=absolute&facet=none

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/coal-ash-cancer-epa-north-carolina-b39ddf6a

https://beyondfossilfuels.org/europes-coal-exit/

https://www.npr.org/2024/09/30/nx-s1-5133426/uk-quits-coal-climate-change

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/sep/30/end-of-an-era-as-britains-last-coal-fired-power-plant-shuts-down

https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2016-06/documents/4783_plant_decommissioning_remediation_and_redevelopment_508.pdf

https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/peak-coal/

https://www.moscowtimes.ru/2024/10/07/samii-tyazhelii-krizis-za30-let-vrossii-nachala-rushitsya-dobicha-uglya-a144209

https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/coal-phaseout-UK/index.html

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y35qz73n8o

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/30/climate/britain-last-coal-power-plant.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2024/uk-coal-power-exit/

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/sep/30/the-deep-history-of-british-coal-from-the-romans-to-the-ratcliffe-shutdown

https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/uks-last-coal-plant-shutdown-bodes-well-us-lng-exports-maguire-2024-10-01/

https://www.wired.com/story/uk-no-coal-fired-power-plants-first-time-in-142-years/

https://www.statista.com/statistics/371069/employment-in-coal-mining-industry-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/

https://apnews.com/article/high-court-rejects-uk-coal-mine-whitehaven-83b9b7ceedebee1b70927667987b4dd7

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240927-how-coal-fired-power-stations-are-being-turned-into-batteries

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/britain-become-first-g7-country-end-coal-power-last-plant-closes-2024-09-29/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/30/opinion/england-coal-wind-power.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-fired_power_station

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_Australia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe