Nuclear revival, clean coal point way to electric future

By Pat Reber Jun 30, 2006, 3:56 GMT

Washington - The mammoth share of the world's electricity - 40.1 per cent - is supplied by coal, but nuclear power is forging ahead as a fast-growing source of energy after two decades of stagnation, and natural gas is also climbing in use.

Still, about 11 per cent of the world's energy came from sources such as waste, combustibles like wood and renewable biomass in 2003, according to the World Coal Institute's review of all energy consumed in homes, factories and vehicles.

That figure has fuelled investigation into how to make the most use of plant life to produce electricity, cooking gas and other power - work that is increasingly important as the world's electricity hunger expected is to grow by 50 per cent by 2030, according to the US Energy Information Administration .

In Nepal, a Kyoto Protocol project is developing biogas as a commercially viable industry with the support of the World Bank, which is backing the greenhouse gas reduction programme.

'Co-firing' coal plants around the world are also increasingly burning plant waste to reduce carbon emissions.

But for all the new strides, coal is still king in powering the world's electric lights, heating homes and running its industrial production lines. It represents 68 per cent of the world's proven energy reserves, with a lifeline extending at least 100 years in many countries, according to a study by the US Department of Defence.

The supremacy of coal is also the reason why so much effort is going into cleaning up the dirty industry blamed for a good portion of carbon emissions connected to global warming.

With international backing from India, China, Australia and Britain, the United States is piloting the world's first coal-burning FutureGen plant - still on the drawing boards - that will store harmful carbon emissions under bedrock instead of spewing them into the air.

Poland, Europe's top producer of hard coal, has led the way among former communist countries in streamlining a once-bloated industry into a profit-producing and somewhat cleaner-burning enterprise, paring down the workforce from half a million to a mere 120,000 people since 1989.

Even green-conscious Germany plans to build eight coal-fired power stations by 2011, none of them particularly carbon-free - a 'disappointing track record,' Stephan Singer of the World Wide Fund for Nature in Brussels, was quoted as saying by The New York Times.

Reliance on coal, however, imparts more energy independence to a Europe newly nervous over Russia's leverage as the region's mammoth supplier of natural gas.

Natural gas is nonetheless increasingly attractive because it is widely found worldwide and only emits half the carbon dioxide of coal.

It currently supplies 19 per cent of the world's electricity, expected to rise to 22 percent in 2030, according to US government figures. International trade in supercooled liquid natural gas is growing, despite its hazardous possibilities.

On the nuclear power scene, Europe is planning to build at least half a dozen new plants over the coming decade, ending a near moratorium in many countries after the twin disasters of Chernobyl in 1986 and Three Mile Island in 1979.

That mirrors trends in the US, where 14 new plants are planned, and China, where nearly three dozen are set to be built in coming years.

France and Lithuania lead the world with more than 70 percent dependency on nuclear power, but Asia is not far behind - South Korea and Japan are up to 40-per-cent dependent, and India has an ambitious programme to increase its nuclear capacity 20-fold by 2030.

In total, nuclear energy amounts to just under 16 per cent of the world's electricity supply.

Despite its northerly latitude and cloudy skies, Germany leads the world in the amount of solar power produced with generous government subsidies for electricity fed from homes into the national grid.

The German company Solarworld, which manufactures solar cells, is now the world's third largest solar company after Japan's Hitachi and oil-multi BP.

Germany also leads the world in another small alternative power industry, wind power, where churning towers have an 18.43 gigawatt capacity, followed by Spain with 10 GW and the United States with 9.15 GW.

Hydroelectricity accounts for nearly 16 per cent of the world's power, but is not expected to increase because of the destruction new dams cause to communities and environments. Brazil, for example, which is 80 per cent reliant on hydroelectricity, was very vulnerable during recent drought periods.