COAL mining and coal power plants are already a sunset industry sector affecting many nations reliant on coal production and coal power plants. While many alternatives are being peddled, the underlying capital investment to overhaul infrastructures as well as maintaining palatable economic situation for nations with high coal reliance is an uphill task.
In fact, back in 2011, we have objected the government’s move to increase coal energy use in our energy mix as the demand for coal has risen at that time due to high natural gas price and increase on new coal power plants’ up globally. Such increased reliance will not bode well for price stability and sustainability in the long run. These concerns that we have raised were not looked into seriously and few years after that, it started to give negative impacts to Malaysia in terms of cost and sustainability. The underlying issues for coal are generation efficiency and its high green house gas (GHG) emissions.
According to news reports, it is also reported that Indonesian coal mining sector under reported its coal mine methane (CMM) emissions in the overall emission data. Methane has about 30 times the global warming potential over 100 years. Peninsular Malaysia’s reliance on Indonesian coal for its energy mix has also risen from 50% to around 70%.
A lot of approaches were introduced by the coal sector especially power generation for the past few decades. This includes moving away from conventional power generation and increasing generation efficiency by deploying super critical and ultra super critical coal power plants that pushed generation efficiency above 50% which also means lower fuel cost and lesser pollution.
These growths in coal sector did not manage to portray a positive image and more ludicrous ideas were also floated. A decade ago, there was proposal from the government to use Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) and Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage (CCUS) to reduce coal power plants’ GHG emissions. We objected to this approach as there was nothing scientific about it and it was not an actual solution. In simple terms, CCS and CCUS is like storing GHG in used empty bottles and place them in boxes and hid away from people – where it is not solving any GHG emission or climate change problems. Hence, why should we pay high price for something that is not an actual solution?
Lately, with the Net Zero gung-ho, coal sector will face difficulties to get borrowing from financial market and eventually making it a sunset industry. At the same time, while there are not many options being put on the table for baseload replacement, many nations are still scrambling to manage the sudden shift away from coal to meet their development targets and protecting their economic interests.
Here in Malaysia, we still lack of proper roadmap to meet the baseload replacement and failed to address intermittency risk posed by renewable energy (RE). The RE sector is passing the intermittency risk management cost to tariff for consumers to shoulder.
Finding new technological solutions that are reliable is a vital move as global risks for energy resources, technology adoption as well as final energy utilisation are very fluid. We are lucky not to deploy CCS or CCUS for coal power plants a decade ago as the long term cost impacts of “a not real solution” will haunt us when we exit the coal power generation mix in coming decade.
Recently, there have been news reports on CCS and CCUS having a comeback mission to Malaysia. Science is very clear. CCS and CCUS are mainly storage and it does not solve the GHG emission or climate change problems. The fundamental question that we all must ponder is, if CCS and CCUS become a certified “not real solution” for climate change in near future like what happened to coal sector, who will bear the cost for wrong investments? Where do we draw the line?
This article was contributed by Piarapakaran S, president of the Association of Water and Energy Research Malaysia (Awer), a non-government organisation involved in research and development in the fields of water, energy and environment.
