[MUSIC] So coal is the most plentiful fossil fuel resource. It formed in non-marine environments, which generally would mean the middle of continents. There are enormous amounts of it, and these enormous amounts fall in the countries that have the largest land masses. If I show you a chart of who has the largest coal reserves, you can almost guess upfront, just by looking at a map of the countries on the earth. One of the largest area countries, Russia? Yeah, they got a lot of coal. Another one, North America, US, a lot of coal. China, another big chunk on the map, bunch of coal. Australia, whole continent, bunch of coal. Doesn't form dramatically in the tropical area, so we leave out most of Africa. But we go to the southern tip of Africa, middle of the continent, South Africa, bunch of coal. What about Europe? Central Europe, Germany, a bunch of coal, Poland, some coal. Serbia, a little more south, inland, of the Balkan area, a lot of coal. Here you can see the list of countries that actually have coal. India, another part of the Asian subcontinent, right? That was all continent, but it jammed its way up to make the Himalayas. Center of that area, a lot of coal. Notice that Ukraine and Kazakhstan are on here too. Should not be too surprising, that's part of the giant central Eurasia land mass. If I add up these reserves, you can see that the world total, compared to what we've been talking about with oil or natural gas, is much larger, and it's much spottier. Enormous number of countries have coasts, or had once have coasts, if we trace them back to geologic time. These list of nine countries represents 90% of the known coal resources on the planet, very unevenly distributed resource. So that's who has coal as reserves. What about who uses it? And, by the same token, who produces it? There's one country in the world that uses half of the coal of the entire planet, and that's China. We've noted that China has increased in its energy use. Surpassing the United States, as the single one country that produces and consumes the most energy. China does this through coal. Of their 115 quads used, around 80 of it Is from coal. And likewise, since they have a large reserve, they produce all that they use. This energy resource in China can grow, because their reserves are so massive. We go down the list, we can see the US is next. We produce even a bit more coal than we actually use, there are some exports of coal in the United States. Shortly after that is the second-most populous country in the world, India. Again, it has a large coal reserve. And coal is one of the key things that powers India, just like the key things that powers China. If you went back in history, you could say at the turn of the century, in the huge developmental area, both for Europe and for North America? Coal was also the energy resource at the time. Coal and massive expansion seemed to be able to go hand-in-hand. We come down the list, we see Russia. Again, Russia, they are mostly powered by natural gas, but they have their own coal reserves, and utilize them too. And then we'll get to countries like Japan, an extremely productive country, obviously uses quite a bit of energy. But has no inherent fossil fuel resources on their string of islands. The same way with South Korea, these countries need to import coal. Farther on the list and looking at the bold highlights, you can see who is exporting it to them. Indonesia, even though they don't have massive reserves, there are coal mines, and of course, Australia. Both these countries can supply their northern neighbors. Let's look at some of the more recent statistics in the United States, of flow of coal. Where do we get it from? You can get coal from two types of mining operations. Strip mines, where you basically take off the surface layer, and right below it, maybe 20 yards down, is coal. Take off the top of the mountain, underneath it is all coal, mine it all off. Strip mining has gotten a bad name, because at certain points in the country's history, there was no land restoration. So you would take off the topsoil, the living layer, the plants, the trees. Sell them, throw them away, put it somewhere else. Strip out all the coal, and once the coal is gone, the company would leave. Now that's a barren landscape, there's no dirt for trees to grow on. There's just some rock with coal stubble left. Today, regulations say that all that topsoil you took off, you gotta put back. And not only do you have to put it back, you gotta plant stuff on it, too. So strip mining is not as dirty a word as it used to be, and it's a much safer way to get at the coal reserves. You're not the miner underground, you're sitting in a big giant tractor or some type of excavator, digging it out. But there is much of a coal reserve, where the coal is actually under the ground. In the old days, this was always something like the Seven Dwarves, right? You're going to have your pickaxe, and you pick at the wall, and you shovel up the chunks of coal. It goes into a little rail car, that you push or pull up to the surface. There is certainly is still some coal mining across the world that happens that way. But modern coal mining allows a single person to create so much more coal, because of the use of machines. Here's some illustrations of machines that just go up and down, back and forth, creating their own tunnel as they go, basically. Gobbling up the coal, shuttling it through the device, sending it up through some conveyor system up to the top, or elevator system. Manned by one of two people, inside this machine that's basically wedged into the rock seam itself. It creates its own tunnel, sort of like a worm going through, where it eats the dirt, passes it back out the other side, leaving a little worm tunnel as it goes through. That's modern coal mining. Dangerous, still, because you are very far underground. You're also relying on air, which you need. You have pockets of methane that can be very dangerous, driving out the air. Not only for explosions, but a variety of types of cave-ins could occur. Another danger of coal mining, and that's from the air that you're breathing. Coal dust can cause black lung disease, very serious ailment that only affects coal miners. And still affects maybe an order of a hundred people per year, in in the United states, die from it. Universally, these people were coal miners and probably had a long history of mining coal through their lives. Today's regulations and safety standards monitor air quality, provide filtration units. And try to ensure that the generation of the people working in the mines today will not be dying from black lung disease after their retirements. Still, though, mining and working with fossil fuels is a dirty business. Coal in particular, is filled with so many things, other than just carbon bonds, that the burning of it can give you a very distinctive smell. There's often the sulfur and other compounds. And can give you a very distinctive haze in the air, because the smoke that goes up will have some of these unburned hydrocarbons in it. Let alone the sulfur dioxide and the nitrous dioxide that's present. So if we go back to the flow of coal for a moment, in the US. Coal is used almost 100% for making electricity. And in these centralized uses of coal, you can do things to try to capture all of the ash that makes this fine, hazy smoke. You can do things that capture the sulfur dioxide, to prevent the acid rain. Even things, perhaps, to capture the nitrous oxides that are made. And there are standards for clean air, in the United States, that power plants must meet. And often, a large part of the investment making the plant goes into the investment to make the pollution controls for that plant. The countries that have coal clearly will use this resource, after all, it's indigenous to their own country. And when they have the resource and they use the resource, it means coal will be certainly used widely. The challenge to make coal clean is one that's one predominantly of economics. In a country like the United States, where coal is actually dropping from year to year. We can ensure that the places we do use it, almost exclusively in our electric power plants, can add all the pollution controls needed to give us, quote, clean coal. There's another way to make coal clean. This is a fascinating method called integrated gasification combined cycle, I-G-C-C. So, what is it? We're going to take coal, and we're going to turn it into burnable gases. Now, this process takes energy. A shift reaction will basically shift the oxygen from water, H2O, over to the carbon. You start with carbon and water, you shift the O to the carbon, you have carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Carbon monoxide and hydrogen will both burn. You can burn them with air, you make CO2 and water vapor. So the step by which you turn the carbon, the coal, into burnable gases, that step is called gasification. It takes energy, particular, it takes steam. You can do it somewhere that's different, you can burn something to make your steam, and you could do this. But the smartest way is to do it in a combined cycle. So let's just follow this through for a minute. Somehow we have steam, I'll get to where we got that, we've got steam. Put the steam in with the coal, you gasify it. Now I've got a bunch of gaseous products. All of the solid resources turn into a gaseous resource. It's not natural gas, it's not methane, there's some methane in there. The sulfur, I've turned it into hydrogen sulfide, H2S. The heavier products, things like mercury, the heavy rocks, the ash stuff? Actually, I haven't turned that into a gas at all, because it doesn't burn, and that's wonderful. Here, even before I've gotten my energy content out of this, just by adding this hot steam and some pressure to this. I've separated the burnable parts of the coal from the non-burnable parts. So I don't have to recapture it out of the smokestack. I've got it sitting there in solid form, which I can then bury. And take those ash products and put it back in the mine where it came from, including things like mercury. The sulfur has turned into a gas, but it's the gas hydrogen sulfide. Hydrogen sulfide can be removed fairly easily, through chemical means, from this gas stream. Much easier than removing sulfur dioxide. Sulfur dioxide is an extremely stable molecule, just like carbon dioxide is. Hydrogen sulfide, I can pull out. So now I've got burnable gases, carbon monoxide, hydrogen, probably some other gaseous hydrocarbons. And this goes into the same type of turbine that I'd use if I was putting methane in. So I add some air, and I take this, and I burn it, like in a jet engine. And this exhaust gas, this hot moving exhaust gas from this product spins a turbine, and that turbine makes electricity. So I've taken coal and I've run a gas turbine from it. The thing is, that I have not recovered all of the energy by doing this. I still have these hot gases that get to the end of this product, now they're combustion gases, hopefully water vapor and CO2. But they're not all the way back down to air temperature. So I cool the turbine, and I cool these gases with water. Basically, I make steam. I take the hot gases, I've already produced electricity once through my gas turbine. Now I'm going to produce electricity by making steam from the rest of the heat content. That steam can now turn a turbine, and that turbine can spin a second generator. But where did I get the steam up front? Well, I don't run that second generator full out. I don't get every last bit of energy of that steam into that process to turn into electricity. I divert some of that steam back to my original step, to turn the coal into this burnable gas. Is this process as efficient as, just say, a natural gas combined cycle? No, the natural gas combined cycle might be 40% efficient, maybe a little more. Burning just coal in a steam cycle, that might be 33% efficient. This integrated gasification combined cycle is somewhere in between. We get the benefit of having both a gas turbine system, and a steam turbine system. But we do need to use some of that energy to turn the coal into gas in the first place. The big advantage of this system, as opposed to just burning the coal, is that pollution control becomes much easier. It's actually integrated into the plant. The solids, we remove before we burn them. And the sulfur we can remove as a gas product, not as an exhaust product at the end of the line. So are we building a lot of these integrated gasification combined cycles? No, just straight-up burning methane, which we now have bountiful supplies of, has been the way we've been making electric plants. But this has been done, pilot plants have been shown, some plants exist today. So it shows that it can be done, at a point where perhaps natural gas has become a more scarce resource, but you have coal. You will always have coal, we have so much coal. That's what you need to know about coal. [MUSIC]
