While tar sands and fracking have been cited frequently for their climate and environmental impacts, a new report puts the spotlight on how two unconventional coal technologies are “a leap in the wrong direction” as they “damage and delay the transition to a low carbon world.”
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Released Monday by Friends of the Earth International (FOEI), Fueling the Fire: The Chequered History of Underground Coal Gasification and Coal Chemicals Around the World uses case studies from Australia, China, South Africa, the U.S., and U.K. to show how these two technologies are bad news for the climate.
“If exploited these technologies could blow the global carbon budget, and in doing so spell certain catastrophe for our planet,” Jagoda Munić, chair of Friends of the Earth International, says in the report’s foreword.
“To invest in and open up a new frontier of fossil fuels at this critical stage in the fight against climate change is not just a crime against our planet, but a crime against humanity,” she adds.
Explaining Underground Coal Gasification (UCG), which FOEI says “threatens to be a major contributor to climate change,” the report states that it “is a technology that gasifies coal seams in situ underground, creating syngas (or synthesis gas)—mainly a mixture of hydrogen, methane, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide—to be used for either electricity production or industrial chemical processes.”
There is one commercial UCG plant in the world—in Uzbekistan—while “the last two decades have seen a surge of interest in UCG,” including test trials in the U.S. and Canada. It “has been advancing primarily in Australia, South Africa, China and Europe,” but already, the verdict on the technology is in, FOEI states:
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