Sergey Savchuk
It is not known for certain how the most famous Swedish environmental activist reacted to this news, but the Western media regretfully state that the cost of coal on European markets has set another record.
On the stock exchanges of Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Antwerpgenerating companies unconditionally pay $ 137 per metric ton of fuel, which literally yesterday the entire progressive and decarbonized world promised to send to the dustbin of history. The market renaissance of coal has taken place due to record prices for natural gas, which forced operators sitting on hunger rations to start purchasing. The situation is so difficult that there are already open talks about the need to cancel the program for phasing out coal generation. For example, the British company Drax, which owns one of the last coal-fired power plants in the country, has already announced that it is ready to postpone the decommissioning of the thermal power plant if it is necessary to ensure the kingdom’s energy security. This statement has absolutely real grounds : as it turned out, London since the middle of summer it has been secretly covering all the additional costs of coal miners associated with the production of electricity.
The situation is gradually deteriorating, and European analysts attribute this to underfilled underground gas storage facilities, the inability to dramatically increase coal supplies from Australia, South Africa and Colombia, as well as scanty coal supplies from Russia. The latter, by the way, happened exactly at the request of the collective Europe. Since 1990, the European Union has reduced the consumption of hard coal from 400 million tons to 150, and lignite from 700 to 250 million.
The irony is that the faster and more significant the decline in coal consumption in a given country, the more electricity prices have risen there today. The most striking example is Germany. The country where the Ruhr Basin is located with the richest reserves of brown coal has reduced its consumption over the past four years by almost a third, from 170 million tons to 120. And today, when the date of certification of Nord Stream 2 is not even clear, and gas prices firmly entrenched near the $ 800 mark, national operators are already confidently saying that next year the cost of a megawatt-hour will be no less than 100 euros.
The current chaos in the energy market, galloping prices for generation and the forced return to operation of black gold seem incredible and unpredictable only at first glance.
The fact is that defamation of coal and deprivation of its dominant position in the market did not begin yesterday or even 20 years ago. At the turn of the 60s and 70s of the last century, an oil cartel called the Seven Sisters was formed in the Western world. It included companies, from the shell of which modern giants later hatched, entangling the whole world with tentacles of oil pipelines and sometimes even dictating will to individual countries. These are British Petroleum, Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell and ExxonMobil, which have absorbed seven of their ancestors.
These same ancestors 60 years ago launched the most real – and the first mass – persecution of coal, the fuel that became the basis of the industrial revolution, pulled out two world wars and laid the foundations for the current world prosperity.
Oil, which in those years was on the sidelines, was declared a new energy messiah, capable of overturning the foundations of energy and satisfying all the needs of a rapidly developing civilization.
As a result of the most opaque machinations, the leading coal companies were out of the race for market dominance. Someone suddenly sold their assets to the oil industry and later went bankrupt, somewhere the owners unexpectedly took their own lives – and already in the 1980s, oil became the new blood of the world economy.
It’s funny in its own way that new cartels, only green ones, have pulled off the same technique in our time. Exactly according to the same patterns, with the maximum hysterical pumping through the media, the world was shown a new savior of humanity and the ozone layer – renewable sources. Any attempts to convey to the broad masses the obvious fact that renewable energy sources are only taking their first steps and cannot become a full-fledged alternative to hydrocarbons were drowned in an indignant ocean of voices, articles and one-sided studies. If we rewind the memory tape a little back, we will see that the world, which had just adapted to oil and gas, with the advent of renewable energy began to get feverish even with the smallest deviations from temperature and climatic norms, which led to rolling blackouts in entire regions – for example, in the southern United States this winter. And this summer.
This year has reminded all lovers to follow fashion trends that the laws of physics are unshakable and that our ancestors were no more stupid than we are. Solar panels and wind turbines only work if the weather conditions are right, oil and gas constantly leapfrog the exchanges and require expensive pipelines, storage facilities and huge chemical plants. And as soon as all these difficulties create another global problem, good old coal is pulled onto the stage, which lies quietly in stacks in mine yards and ports, travels to anywhere in the world in the most ordinary bulk hold and burns the same way in a home village stove, in furnaces of power plants or steel furnaces.
It is customary to scold Russia for the fact that it usually lags behind world trends, but in this case, one can only rejoice at it.
Environmentalists and lobbyists for alternative energy have recently been amused by the news that China will stop funding the construction of new coal-fired power plants abroad. All this is so – with the only proviso that inside the country, Beijing does not even think to turn off coal generation.
According to plans for the next five-year plan, the PRC will build forty-three new coal-fired thermal power plants and eighteen blast furnaces of the latest generation. At the same time, let us remind you that China consumes 4.98 billion tons of coal per year, and the total capacity of profile facilities is an unimaginable 1,080 gigawatts.
This is more than all Russian nuclear power plants, hydroelectric power plants and other plants combined. Coal production in the PRC is gradually declining, relations with Australia are at the point of the historic bottom – and all this opens up a huge window of opportunity for Russia.
It is pleasant to realize that the country’s leadership understands this as well.
A month ago, work began on the joining of the problematic eastern branch of the Baikal-Amur Mainline between the settlements of Ulak and Fevralsk. The main and only executor of the work was the Ministry of Defense of Russia and the railway troops. Initially, it was planned that the modernization of the 340-kilometer section will be completed in 2024, but quite soon the Deputy Minister of Defense of Russia, General of the Army Dmitry Bulgakov, said that the army would cope a year faster.
On September 3, on the sidelines of the Eastern Economic Forum, Vladimir Putin informed the general public that the Kremlin had already formed a list of settlements along the BAM that would be renovated, just like it was done in the capital.
That is, we can already speak as a fait accompli that Russia is turning to the east and it is the Asia-Pacific markets that will become the platform where Kuzbass coal will go as part of the industry development program.
However, Europe can also remember the laws of physics, economics and balance its own generation. A coal terminal is under construction in Ust-Luga, and the miners of Kemerovo are happy to increase production. It remains only to wait for the next herald of the new energy revolution to appear on the stage, as has already happened twice over the past century.
