Archive for September 2009
“Fired up by cleaner coal”
That’s the Weekender’s headline for an article I wrote a couple of weeks ago on underground coal gasification. (My headline was “Old energy’s last gasp?”)
ESKOM is very comfortable with generating power from coal, but like many of the world’s utilities, the parastatal is under ever- increasing pressure to use less coal and reduce its enormous contribution to global warming.
One of Eskom’s latest efforts to make coal cleaner is a pilot project for underground coal gasification (UCG) adjacent to the gigantic Majuba power station near Volksrust in Mpumalanga.
The idea behind UCG is that instead of first mining coal, processing it, then burning it to produce heat and electricity, you set it alight underground to produce a stream of gas that can be burned to produce electricity.
The Weekender’s website carries the full article, which as it has been edited is a little less sceptical than the version I filed. My concern is that Eskom will use successful UCG as yet another strategy to postpone serious investments in renewables.
Getting the asteroid onto page one
Alarmed that the urgency of the climate change crisis has not yet dawned on South African editors, this August I partnered with the Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership, Project 90 by 2030 and the Goedgedacht Forum for Social Reflection, as well as leading South African science writer Leonie Joubert and the environmental writer Monica Graaff, to hold an Editors’ Briefing on Climate Change.
We particularly wished to emphasise the importance of the imminent COP15 talks in Copenhagen in December. There, of course, we very much hope that South Africa will contribute to the world negotiating a visionary extension to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, one that will turn us away from runaway climate change.
We ran the event at the Hyatt, in Rosebank, Johannesburg, on August 6. I had raised money from the Danish government to fund it. Our contributors included:
- Ed Milliband, UK secretary for energy and climate change (in person)
- James Smith, chairman, Shell UK and member of the Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change (via video link)
- Dr Bob Scholes (CSIR) and Dr Guy Midgley (SANBI), co-authors of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 4th Report of 2007
- Tasneem Essop and Richard Worthington, climate specialists with Read the rest of this entry »
