The green future of coal mining

coal canell we'll know it as the dirtiest most polluting fossil fuel but what if I told you that coal mining might prove to be a secret weapon in the race to Net Zero let me explain now I want to be very clear coal is terrible for the climate it produces by far the most greenhouse gas emissions per kilowatt hour of energy generated but it's also terrible for humans it produces by far the most deaths per kilow hour generation ated through air pollution and accidents but the history of the industrialized world to date is basically a history of coal the world is scattered with coal mines both large and small that powered the Industrial Revolution and the modern world until the 1960s coal was our dominant source of energy and it still contributes a colossal amount to the global Energy Mix we wouldn't be where we are today without coal unfortunately in several senses fortunately coal is no longer the backbone of our society thank you very much Cole for everything you've done but we'd rather not use you anymore because we now know how awfully polluting you are instead of burning coal to move ourselves around we now use oil and electricity instead of burning coal to heat our homes we now use gas and electricity and instead of burning coal to generate electricity we are increasingly building Renewables such as wind and solar far more than most people seem to realize actually and most of that renewable generation is being built in China where incidentally they also mine more than half of the world's coal and Burn by far the most coal for electricity generation they are apparently preparing for a low carbon future just not for a couple more years which is just swell but even with the Avalanche of Renewables being built right now wind and solar won't be able to provide all the electricity that China and the world needs probably this is electricity generation for the UK grid over the past 24 hours for most of the day the largest source of electricity was wind hey and even in Spring large amount of solar generation took place during the day but as the evening arrived demand clearly Rose because gas fired turbines were turned on or more accurately turned up and that's not great from a carbon perspective in a future grid dominated by Renewables you still have to guarantee power supply even when variable generation doesn't match demand and if you want to do that in a low carbon way there are a couple of options available to you and no this video is is arguing that you should use coal in any way to do that it should be a dead fuel just bear with me you could install lots of storage either pumped hydrop power hydrogen or batteries that can supply the grid when generation doesn't match demand or you can build firm low carbon generation something that can provide a constant supply to the grid without lots of emissions now there are seemingly a growing number of people who know a lot more about grid stability than I do who argue that the first option wind and solar plus lots of storage is the the way to go and I'll leave a link to an opinion piece with that argument down in the references but let's say you don't want to do that and instead want to use firm sometimes known as baseload low carbon electricity Generation Well you've got a couple of options you could use hydroelectric dams much as they do produce local environmental effects flooding a valley and carry the risk of catastrophic flooding and well you know require a valley in the first place you could use nuclear power much as it does have long expensive construction times and elicits very strong reactions from people linked to my video on nuclear a couple of years ago will be up in one of the corners but there is another source of electricity that is low carbon Rock Solid reliable and cheap to run what about geothermal power and what if I told you it could form a key part of our Energy Mix this Century because of the fossil fuel industry and specifically our heritage of coal mining well to properly introduce geothermal energy I thought I'd ask a fellow YouTuber who happens to know a bit about Hot Rocks to give you a primer ah nothing beats a stroll in volcano country hi I'm sup imporium you may remember me from such hits as help step bro I'm stuck in a volcanic Fisher and Yellowstone ER upti dysfunction today we're going to drill haha into geothermal energy geo means Earth and thermal means heat thus concluding our extensive Deep dive into geothermal energy I think s's going to want a bit more than that dog you you you don't think we got it fine Jokes Aside that is what the word geothermal means Earth Heat at its most basic level the deeper underground you go the warmer it gets geologists called this the Earth's geothermal gradient about 20% of this heat is left over from the space rocks that made the Earth first got smushed together with the remainder being driven by the past present and presumably future decay of naturally occurring radioactive isotopes we find inside rocks uranium potassium thorium that sort of stuff in non- tectonically active regions the temperature goes up around 25° for every kilometer you drill until you hit the asthenosphere or the upper mantle of the Earth's interior where the line goes wee so geothermal energy is really simple since most power generation is just using steam to spin a turbine provided the rocks are hot enough and they're permeable enough for water to circulate in them you can drill a holes in the ground pump cold water down one use the hot rocks to boil it and bring the hot water or steam to the surface back up the other drill hole to be used for electricity generation geothermal power plants can generate electricity continuously making it base load capable an important advantage over more intermittent renewable energy sources and since everyone lives on the earth it's practically available everywhere but if that's the case why aren't we using more of it oh it's money at present the majority of conventional geothermal power and energy production occur C in places that are tectonically active this is where geothermal energy is most economically competitive geothermal power has the same economic stumbling block as nuclear power it's pretty cheap to run but it has a huge upfront Capital cost in the case of geothermal plant the main cost is drilling into the ground tectonically active areas are where the heat flow from the earth is biggest and the stresses the rocks are under mean they're often fractured so water can flow through them you don't have to drill as deep into the ground to find geologies that are conducive to economically viable geothermal power production okay to explain this properly we're going to need to Define some terms there's different kinds and classifications of geothermal power convection based systems are ones controlled by volcanic or tectonic activity these systems tend to have very strong heat flows through the crust because there's stuff like magma Chambers not too far below the ground open systems use rocks which have a lot of fractures and faults or are made from permeable material here the water is being pumped through and is moving through the rock FS themselves the majority of geothermal energy being used by humans occurs in these convection-based open systems Iceland sits on a divergent plate boundary so the plates that make up the country are moving away from each other this means the crust in Iceland is thinner this pushes the geotherm up meaning you don't have to go as far underground to find Hot Rocks in your area but we don't just want to look at the geothermal gradient in physics and chemistry you have this thing called a solidus for volcanologists this is the temperature which the Rocks transition from solid to ones that can melt creating magma in typical crust we find in non- tectonically active regions the geothermal gradient doesn't intersect with the solidus so the Rocks get hotter but you don't get pockets of magma in Iceland the steeper and shallower geothermal gradient means that it intersects with the solidus and you you get magma Chambers this helps explain why Iceland is actually several volcanoes in a trench coat masquerading as a country but it also helps explain why so much of Iceland's electricity comes from geothermal sources iing gets a lot of rain so there are a lot of continually replenished underground reservoirs of water being heated up by pockets of super hot rocks and magma not that far underground which are easily exploitable for energy Indonesia is another good Contender for several volcanoes in a trench coat masquerading as a country and another good example of a convection based open geothermal system working in a different way Indonesia's tectonics are very complicated because it sits at an intersection between the Sunder plate the Indo Australian plate the Philippine plate the Caroline plate the maluca plate the bander plate look there's a lot of minor plates in the region okay in subduction zones the geothermal line is closer to what we'd expect to see with a non-tectonic region but the crust that's being subducted is full of hydrated minerals these heat up releasing water into the mantle and lowering its melting point this generates a lot of shallow magma intrusions creating a lot of high enthalpy geothermal systems or places with a lot of heat energy stored in the magma and the potential resources Indonesia has are massive the industrial geothermal wells in kawak kamaj Jang back in 1926 and there's still emitting steam Indonesia could generate between 26 and 29 gaw of electricity if they fully exploited their geothermal resources in fact according to some estimates up to 40% of the world's geothermal resources could reside in Indonesia there are other mechanisms to get subsurface rocks which are hotter than your average bear on a temperature map of the continental United States you can see Yellowstone has a subsurface temperature of over 350° this is because the geothermal gradient is higher under hotpots like Yellowstone where a convex ing plume of hotter than usual magma raises the temperature of the Rocks beneath it not all geothermal systems are convection based the United Dan's deep geothermal power plant in redth Cornwall is an example of a conduction based open geothermal system conduction based systems are ones that exist in passive plate tectonic settings basically they don't get their heat from volcanoes or other tectonic stuff instead they get their heat from Hot Rocks deep underground cormal has a higher geothermal gradient than the rest of the UK thanks to the Granite geology of the region the big Granite outcrops of cormal you might go climb are joined together underneath by huge granitic intrusion called the canbi and bth the decay of radioactive isotopes inside of this Granite intrusion makes it naturally heat producing the granite and killis rocks that make up most of cornwall's geology are also highly fractured and very wet there's a huge family of fults running under Cornwall meaning a lot of hot water is moving through a lot of permeable Rock which can be exploited for energy the United Downs geothermal plant is near the P toe and fault line these systems often require you to drill a lot deeper than geothermal systems based in tectonically active regions the United DS project has drilled two Wells one about 2 and A2 km deep to inject water down oh that's why it's called an injection well and the second the production well goes 5 km down the granite at the base of the production well is between 170 and 190° enough to heat water to super high temperatures and for them to pump the water they get out of the well through a heat exchange and get that delicious steam to use it to spin a turbine the Deep jailing required for cornwall's geothermal makes these sorts of projects expensive and cornwall's climate and geology are unique much to Coral's delight and Devon's dismay so it's not a system that can be replicated everywhere wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait hang on you said as we drill into the Earth it gets hotter by 25° per kilm so why don't we just drill a really big hole in the ground pump water down it and then get that heat from anywhere well that's a great point you geothermal energy has historically been restricted by geography and geology rocks need to be hot and permeable but drill down far enough and you can get the temperatures necessary to boil water the issue is most rock formations deep inside the earth in non-tectonic regions don't have natural cracks and poles large enough for water to flow through them at economic rates these hot dry rocks or to give them their technical term hot dry rocks no that can't be right well what do you know they're actually called that hold some 90% of the total accessible geothermal energy on the planet and we've begun to see the emergence of a new kind of geothermal energy enhanced geothermal systems to exploit this energy egss can work in two ways the first is similar to hydraulic fracking you make the non-permeable rock permeable so water can flow through it the second way works slightly differently instead of pumping the water into permeable Rock systems or aquifers you drill a U-shaped pipe 6 to 7 km down into the Earth where rocks are upwards of 150° you pump water down the big closed loop oh that's why they're call closed systems and let the natural heat of the Rocks warm it up via conduction this is what the company Evo Technologies Incorporated is trying to do with its Jeep geothermal energy concept and it has some pretty sizable advantages over conventional geothermal energy namely that it makes it technically feasible everywhere and you don't need to engage in things like fracking to widen for lines like some geothermal systems do so the risk of induced seismicity in these systems is is lower but the main cost associated with geothermal energy is drilling the B holes to inject water down and bring it back up the deeper you drill the more expensive it gets and closed loop systems are pretty pricey in the United States Drilling to depths of 7 km is required for most EGS plants to be competitive and even then their levelized cost of energy hovers between $60 and $200 per megawatt hour of electricity the cheaper places are ones where conventional geothermal is not only already viable but more competitive bog standard geothermal energy according to Lazard has a levelized cost of energy that today since between $62 and $102 per megawatt hour in addition economic modeling of Deep Well closed systems shows they're not as efficient as conventional geothermal systems which tend to be higher temperature and can support more water flowing through them and conventional geothermal today struggles to compete with solar wind or even currently operating nuclear power stations for firm Basel load power deep geothermal systems are likely to get cheaper with time the US national renewable energy laboratory takes the cost of EGS is dropping to $45 per megawatt hour by 2050 for the time being at least EGS are simply too expensive compared to other low carbon power options we'll have to get used to our geothermal being powered by the smallest and most humble of Nature's creatures the volcano so it's fair to say that geothermal isn't the firm low carbon source of electricity that we can base all our grids on we can't build civilization off the back of geothermal in the same way that we did with C but this Century we still expect geothermal to have a much larger role to play than last century and it's all to do with the fossil fuel industry oil and gas and much more interestingly coal firstly as soup mentioned enhanced geothermal systems have been developed relying on drilling into the Earth and then pumping water cold down hot up now if only we had an industry that specialized in and had spent decades perfecting Drilling and pumping and I don't know maybe faced an existential crisis in the next couple of years and whose employees would need to find new jobs using the same skills D plan Lisa needs braces D plan by transferring skilled labor from the oil and gas industry to enhanced geothermal systems the US Department of energy estimates that domestic geothermal electricity generation could grow by a factor of 20 by 2050 supplying 10% of all electricity in the United States specifically the technology of drilling and then pumping water into rock formations to allow for the flow of fluid has been developed extensively by the gas industry in recent decades because that's what fracking is in fracking you blast rock formations with water to release natural gas methane whereas in the geothermal version you're just trying to create channels for water to flow through and thus be heated and can be pumped to the surface some of the negative environmental impacts such as increased seismicity do remain in the geothermal version but overall the environment mental impact is lower than that of fracking there's a huge opportunity here to transfer technology and skill labor from the oil and gas industry to geothermal which simultaneously keeps carbon in the ground and forms part of a just transition providing jobs to hardworking people whose way of living has just been made obsolete but even with all these positives it's still unlikely that the technology will be the cheapest option on the lowcar carbon electricity menu even if it reaches the US Department of Energy's Target of $45 per megawatt hour then it will be cost competitive with solar today in 2035 by which time solar will be much cheaper so it's unlikely that enhanced geothermal systems will dominate the electrical grid however electricity isn't the be all and end all and this is where coal comes in look at this graph this is where the global average person uses energy divided between three sectors I mentioned at the start of the video heating transport and electricity as you can see electricity consumption is less than 20% of our total energy use as individuals approximately half our en is used in Heating and Cooling either ourselves or more typically water as of 2019 which was the most up-to-date set of figures I could find for this specific calculation globally around 30% of electricity generation is now being done by Renewables which is fantastic and it'll be higher since 2019 but in that same set of figures only around 11% of heating energy and less than 4% of Transport energy is being provided from renewable sources again represent presenting around half of average individual energy use decarbonizing heating is a massive deal and a necessary step to getting to Net Zero here in the UK our heating tends to be supplied by individual gas boilers in our houses and heating represented a third of our total greenhouse gas emissions getting rid of these things would be a big big deal and there just so happens to be a connection between heating coal mining and geothermal energy oh you're still here right if your rocks aren't hot enough for geothermal electricity that doesn't mean you can't use geothermal for other things like heating instead of using geothermal for electricity you pump the warm water through pipes into buildings to heat them instead how effective this is is again constricted by geology huge stretches of Britain have deep deposits of Carboniferous limstone and Sandstone some room between 2 and 4 km down in places like the mendips and the Peak District they're naturally permeable Rock so the water circulates through them easily heated by the geothermal gradient of the earth these limestones are categorized as lukewarm geothermal systems between 50 and 150° and have provided humans with warm water for Millennia bath with its Carboniferous limestones and sandstones has a lot of water moving from the deep Earth to the surface and this warm water is what provided the heat for the Roman baths oh that's why it's called bath the Netherlands exploits their similar geology to heat and cool agricultural green houses and doger Basin the utic Limestone and mid jurasic dolomites that make up the bedrock in the central part of the Paris B has been well developed since the 1960s this can provide lots of heating to buildings at scale but what if you don't live in a region with the geology to support deep geothermal heating well the Earth canth sth provideth the main type of geothermal the UK and other non- geologically interesting parts of the world can expect comes from things called Ground Source heat pumps or gips these can be split into three kinds closed gips open gips and a mysterious third option but they all work on the same principle they use the Earth or underground water as a heat source and sink either absorbing or dumping the heat into the surrounding soil or water geothermal heat pumps work a bit like a fridge or an air conditioner they add or remove heat from the collect as fluids concentrate and transfer it to the building hey look a Simon Clark video on heat bumps closed gups use buried pipes usually in gardens and extract heat from the ground they're closer to solar than geothermal power because they work by relying on the sun to heat up the top layer of the ground pipes installed about 10 m deep circulate a special kind of fluid more sensitive to temperature changes than water and use the heat retained by the ground to warm and cool buildings in Winter you get the heat from the ground and put it into the building and in summer you flip it you take the heat from the building and you dump it into the ground open gips work by extracting heat directly from groundwater taking advantage of the fact that subsurface water has a relatively stable relatively warm temperature year round so the heat pumps can more efficiently exchange heat between the water and the building it's heating or cooling so you could go for the open or close systems over by the lovely Smithers or you can trade it all in for what's in this box the Box the Box remember how I said that the world is littered with these Co mines vestages of when the world ran on coal well if you don't maintain such mines then they flood and being so deep in the earth and exposed to the geothermal gradient the flood waters of these mines can be surprisingly warm 20 even 25° celius so you can pump that lukewarm water to the surface extract heat from it with a heat pump which you then Supply to a house and then pump the cooler water back into the mine it's effectively an open Gip with warmer water wait wait wait you're proposing to Conn each individual house to an old Coal Mine via a heat pump surely that can't be practical no it's not and that's why you use District heating as already mentioned most houses in the UK are heated by individual gas boilers but this isn't the only way to heat residential buildings in District heating you have one large source of heat that you then pipe via very insulated pipes into lots of houses that heat can come from a variety of sources in leads for example a district heating project is supplied using waste heat from an incinerator elsewhere they're supplied by waste heat from power plants Wastewater plants Central gas boilers or geothermal sources all lower carbon in many cases much lower carbon especially where it's waste heat or geothermal than burning natural gas in individual homes yet here in the UK just 2% of Residential Heating demand is supplied by District heating networks and I always assumed this was because people in the UK tend to live in low ish density suburbs or even rural areas and not predominantly in large high-rise buildings I thought the population density just made the maths not work out but the UK government estimates that the minimum heat density required for district heating to be profitable is about 3 megaw per square kilm now if you assume that a typical house has a 30 KW boiler that's roughly what we have in this house then that implies a housing density of houses per square km for district heating to be worthwhile but what does that look like this behind me is mury Park a recent Housing Development on the outskirts of bath it has a housing density representative of a typical English suburb 700 homes spread over 19 hectares looking well mostly like that now if you crunch the numbers that gives you a density of 36 houses per hectare or insensible units 3,600 100 houses per square kilometer in other words even if you hared the heating requirements for these houses this neighborhood is still more than 10 times denser than that required for profitable District heating the population density is not the problem in the UK other places have made this work Copenhagen is almost entirely served by District heating 65% of all houses across Denmar are in fact 40% of Polish households use District heating 93% of all housing in Iceland is supplied by District Heating though they have something of an unfair Advantage most of it is convection-based geothermal here in the UK the coal Authority owns all old coal mines and is responsible for managing them and their environmental impacts and in 2020 they released this interactive map showing where these mines were in my small part of Southwest England there are over a hundred such coal mines but that's peanuts compared to South Wales North Wales the Lesser North the North and the extreme North 25% of all UK Residential Properties sit on top of an old Coal Field and the coal Authority believes there is enough geothermal energy available to heat all of them in geothermal District heating networks and this isn't some pie in the sky idea places have already done this hin in the Netherlands is the poster child for such a project but in the UK Gates head CM garden village and hebburn have all installed such District heating projects the west of England combined Authority is currently investing1 A5 million pound in investigating this option and the UK government is is currently engaged in a consultation in 28 towns and cities to see where District heating networks including geothermal District heating networks can be delivered here in the UK and in other places with a Heritage of coal mining there is an opportunity to decarbonize our heating systems by utilizing District heating networks powered by the geothermal heat of flooded coal mines there's a certain Beauty to it repurposing the now abandoned infrastructure of the dirtiest of fuels to provide the cleanest of heating and consider what Member of Parliament Owen Thompson said about all of this in a 2020 parliamentary debate the transition from Deep mining a high carbon activity was economically unjust for our coal communities closing down not only the pits but the local economies with enormous and long- Lasting negative social impacts the move to a lowc carbon economy could be a just one if we choose to harness geothermal energy from the mine water that has flooded pits such as bston Glenn and to tackle the industrial Legacy that has left the surrounding communities behind we can tackle the food and fuel Poverty of our coal communities by tapping into this Rich new source of energy by installing District heating schemes in new and existing housing and by supporting local food production using heat to grow vegetables okay great why aren't we doing it then well two reasons firstly as was already mentioned the finger thing means the taxes while they're incredibly cheap to run The Upfront cost of building a geothermal heating Network can be very large l so if you don't need to drill deep into the Earth or at all in the case of Mines but you do still have to invest significantly in building the heating Network components and that can translate to higher energy bills for customers though it doesn't have to with appropriate government financial support to its credit the UK government that's a phrase I don't say very often has pivoted its financial support of heating networks originally they provided financial support to new District heating networks that used gas boilers to provide both heat and electricity combined heat and power but they don't do that anymore they are pretty explicitly targeting waste heat networks and geothermal heat networks but fundamentally financial support only matters if somebody conceives of and organizes a heating Network in the first place and that's the second problem because to date for a new District heating Network to come into being a local company or more likely the local Authority meaning county or city council would have to come up with the idea then approach the government for funding then develop the project themselves and for starters I don't think very many local authorities know that geothermal heating networks are an option and because local authorities don't have very much power are very underfunded spending 75% of their budgets on adult social care alone and don't have much experience owning or developing utilities it's not realistic to expect them to develop these large GE thermal District heating projects especially not in the numbers necessary to get us to Net Zero though for the record if you live in the UK consider contacting your local Authority and asking if they're looking at District Heating and if you live somewhere covered by the coal Authority maybe ask them if there's a mine near you that would be appropriate for such a project and if one's being developed really though what we need is more effective top-down government policy which is slowly being brought in and that needs to include ambitious targets and Technical and finan financial support and as I say this seems to be happening to quote a 2022 parliamentary briefing paper there is consensus among geothermal stakeholder groups that a route to Market is needed for the geothermal sector to develop in the UK building such a market framework for the different geothermal Technologies could be achieved by adopting strategies similar to those provided to other renewable Technologies as evidenced by other sectors in the UK like offshore wind long-term government support that includes ambitious targets and subsidies could contribute to rapid cost reductions for geothermal energy systems if we can pull this off coal mining might get a shot at Redemption not by mining more coal God no but much like turning swords into plow shares we could turn the prime movers of climate destabilization into a key part of how we fix the problem and stabilize the climate taking our problematic past and turning it into a hopeful future that's for the mindes As for the call itself good evening sir would you please leave without a fuss right now okay echo echo huh these are M sure are echoey huh 57 companies linked to 80% of greenhouse gas emissions since 2016 Saudi aramco gas prom and coal India were the biggest emitters crucial to hold individual companies to account wait a minute 54% of the news coverage of this has been from left leaning news outlets 42% from Centrist news outlets and just 4% from the right and more than half of the news coverage is from media conglomerates I can analyze how this story was reported thanks to this video sponsor ground news a website and app designed by a NASA engineer to give you a datadriven perspective on the news you consume each story on ground news has a visual breakdown of who is covering it how they are framing the story based on their political leaning and how factual that coverage is based on ratings from three Independent News monitoring organizations as someone who covers the climate it is incredibly interesting to see how different news outlets cover the same story like this 57 top emitters report but also how they cover other new stories the US election for example in coverage of Trump's first day in court in his hush money trial left leaning sources emphasize the events in the courtroom while right leaning sources emphasize the historic nature of the trial taking place it's very easy to get into an echo chamber online and entirely miss new stories that your typical new sources just haven't covered fortunately though that's something that ground news's blind spot feature allows you to circumvent highlighting new stories that left or right leaning sources just haven't covered I also really rate the my news bias feature which allows you to see where you specifically get your news from left or right leading sources and how that's changed over time but also how locally biased you are in where you Source your news and who owns the companies that you get your news from you'd be surprised how many owned by the same conglomerate given the echo chamber nature of the social internet I think ground news is a really valuable perhaps even essential tool for navigating the news landscape if you would like to use their tools to become a more rounded media literate person who engages with the news then head to ground. news/ Simon Clark where you can get yourself a 40% discount on a vantage subscription that URL again is ground. news/ Simon Clark which is linked down in the description thanks so much soup Emporium for coming on my channel I've been a fan of soup's work for a really long time and so this was a joy to work with him if you liked his segment in this video then definitely check out his channel and also check out the video that I appeared on on his Channel about The Simpsons Hit and Run and here's a deal for you just try watching it until I appear if you don't fancy watching it beyond that fair enough this video was made possible thanks to the generous support of my patrons over on patreon.com Ox Fizz if you would like to get early access to videos exclusive content every month and vote in a video topic a month then you can sign up at the link in the description and maybe even become one of these lovely names on screen my executive producer Henry caval and Steven Spielberg patrons thank you all so much thank you so much for watching the video please do share this one with people who you think should also learn about this technology and if you enjoyed it please do pop it a like if you'd like to watch something next here's two videos I prepared earlier and that just leaves me to say thank you again for watching I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Simon Clark

Views: 111,987

Keywords: drsimonclark, dr simon clark, simonoxfphys, simonoxphys

Id: YOTKn1zsc8o

Length: 31min 28sec (1888 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 30 2024