Split lignite & coal

[corradio]

"I provided some feedback via webform. Was 1) GB coal data seemed high and 2) Lignite/coal should be split in DE/PL as quite a diff" Posted on Twitter at https://twitter.com/alistairmcgirr/status/808322720492560384

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Related issues:

• Poland #162

[ThierryOllivero]

1) According to Energy UK, 22% of yearly Electricity generation comes from Coal :

http://www.energy-uk.org.uk/energy-industry/electricity-generation.html

At the time of my analysis (Dec. 12 at 19.45), 18% of Electricity Generation was coming from coal. At midnight last night, the ratio was 8%.

So I believe our data are correct and consistent. The UK smartly uses their capacity: Maximum of Renewables, then maximum of Nuclear, after that, they balance gas and coal, with coal between 500 kWh to 8 MWh during the day.

To be honest, the value of Coal today (Dec 12) is quite high compared to the previous day (max 4 on Dec 11, 6 on Dec 9).

Still, I trust Ofgem to send the right information to ENTSO-E, the UK subject can be temporarily closed.

2) The most recent IPCC report do not separate lignite and other coals. When going back to old IPCC such as http://www.ipcc-nggip.iges.or.jp/public/gp/bgp/2_1_CO2_Stationary_Combustion.pdf , we find that Lignite emits 3,5 % more than Anthracite. On other documents such as https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=73&t=11, we find that lignite emits 5% less than Anthracite.

In the end, it seems like all kind of coals emits more or less (in a 5% range) CO2eq per unit of energy, therefore there is no need to split between all subcategories of coal.

T.

[corradio]

Thank you @ThierryOllivero !

[brunolajoie]

Hello @ThierryOllivero @corradio , I don't have the figures with me, but I think Lignite emits much more than anthracite. The figure you provided were in CO2 emission per thermal energy of combustion. What matters for us is CO2 emissions per electricity output. Yet lignite power plant burn at lower temperature and are less efficient than anthracite. Plus, the mining process is more CO2 intensive, hence an additional burden on Lifecycle emissions I would guess. I suggest to keep Lignite vs anthracite as an open point of improvement, albeit of low-priority.

[alixunderplatz]

Hello @brunolajoie @ThierryOllivero @corradio , I'd like to encourage the idea of splitting hard coal and lignite emissions.

Actually here is my issue: I think IPCC actually is nowhere near a "neutral" institution. The authors of the study dealing with the specific emissions are credible and reputable researchers in the field of environmental and climate issues, alright. But, in my(!) opinion, behind the scenes there are many governmental fossile fuels/coal-hardliners and people who try to defend their countries high emissions and industry's wealth, of course. Every decision has to be agreed upon and have the congress' blessing, I guess. Just think of the fact that the congress consists of members of the governments of 195 countries, some of them don't care about climate change as much as others do. I had friends working on one of the events who told me about controversial discussions and compromises that had to be made to statisfy "everyones" opinions and demands. A part of it is not about stopping climate change, but statisfying and securing the financial wealth of industrial nations. I don't doubt the published numbers, anyways, since they are definitely credible for many power plants and their specific emissions.

But I came to the conclusion that their specific emission data for coal, especially when looking at many of Europes old coal plants, is rather too low and IPCC's emission numbers shouldn't be used as a reference at all. And guess what: the word "lignite" or "brown coal" does not even appear once in their report WHAT A JOKE, imho!!! Especially since there are some European authors who should be aware of what is going on here with lignite emissions. Therefore their chart "Emissions of selected electricity supply technologies" should have included lignite, too!

As mentioned above, lignite causes way more emissions than hard coal. Mainly these emissions depend on the state of the art of the coal power plants.

Old hard coal power plants (e.g. in Poland) can reach CO2-values around 900 to 1000 g/kWh whereas recent units tend to emit 800 to 900 g/kWh. I'm not sure whether this is including SOx and other climate-relevant gasses already or CO2 only. Emissions mainly depend on coal quality (bad quality = higher emissions), power plant efficiency and use of thermal energy for district heating (which actually lowers the emissions for electricity, but not total emissions). 820 g/kWh CO2eq used by IPCC is fairly optimistic, and on the lower end, anyways.

Lignite units usually reach values above 950 to 1200 g/kWh, even most modern units still emit 900 g/kWh (BoA Neurath, Germany, 2012). Since lignite makes up a large part of the generation in some European countries, it really makes a difference for total emissions. There are many studies and presentations providing data, such as: https://www.vdi.de/fileadmin/vdi_de/redakteur_dateien/geu_dateien/FB4-Internetseiten/CO2-Emissionen%20der%20Stromerzeugung_01.pdf (first column Gesamt = total) or http://www.gkpge.pl/media/pdf/PGE_BIG_BOOK_FINAL_v2.pdf page 23 or this one from 2007 http://assets.panda.org/downloads/european_dirty_thirty_may_2007.pdf

To make a long story short: I suggest using something like at least 1000 g/kWh for lignite units (optimistic enough) and at least 850 to 900 g/kWh for hard coal power plants We should try to create a collection of values of many different sources and calculate means.

Thank you for taking and dedicating your time to read this and to create this wonderful map, of course! ;-) Kind regards, Alex

Edit: I've just found a thriving discussion that was going on here in the past in #288 where the independency and reliability of the IPCC source was discussed. Another user pointed out some issues with IPCC values, in that case related to nuclear energy CO2 emissions. Yeah, sometimes it is really, really hard to find reliable sources that gather knowledge from other sources and present it in a really transparent way, I totally agree with the final conclusion that was made. In the case of hard coal and lignite emissions, however, I think uncertainties for the magnitude of their specific emissions are way lower and kind of "measurable".

[superlonglong]

@corradio This should be reopened. @ThierryOllivero There is FAR greater variation than 5%, more in the order of +/-30%

But more importantly, if we are trying to educate the masses on carbon output, we should at least attempt to make it accurate.

We dont, and probably will never have live metering of co2 output. Or even co2e output.

but this

http://www.cleanenergyregulator.gov.au/NGER/National%20greenhouse%20and%20energy%20reporting%20data/electricity-sector-emissions-and-generation-data/electricity-sector-emissions-and-generation-data-2015-16

Shows the co2e output for each power generator in australia, and also the power output. Dividing the annual co2e by the annual output we can get an approximation for the live co2e output. Its not perfect, but much better than lying to people that a nation burning brown coal at +1300g/kwh is actually better than one burning black coal at ~800g/kwh simply because we have lacked the effort to calculate this.

The data page i attached also has xlsx and csv downloads available.

As the output of each generator has to be calculated to provide electricity output anyway, the additional calculation of electricity output * conversion efficiency isn't a huge ask

[corradio]

@brunolajoie and I discussed this and we believe we should keep the frontend as it is, but update the backend to be able to more accurately calculate emissions from coal. We could show the lignite/hard coal breakdown in the tooltip, and have a variable carbon intensity of coal based on this dynamic breakdown.

[HansHyde]

@corradio

Can you link #915 to here instead of closing it? Sorry, I did not see the discussion.

But one point I will add - a NG combustion turbine can have as high as 1000-1200 g CO2eq per kWHr. This is not even referenced in the above charts under the high. The US has on the order of 150,000 MW of installed CT.

[corradio]

@HansHyde it's better to close issues in order not to have duplicates. If you look above you will see that we still keep the reference and are able to open it:

[HansHyde]

Attaching an Excel file "CO2 Emissions per Country - Compared to GDP & Population". On the main worksheet scroll down (rows 202 & 219) to look at comparisons of "Select Economies".

Reality is power generation represents on a global average 30% of a country's overall CO2 emissions. This is why electrification of transportation & industrial processes is so important, as 70% of emissions are not accounted for in the electric sector.

Here is a wake up call - Alberta, Canada only has about 5 GW of installed electric generation. Even if it burned only oil for electric generation (like Saudi Arabia), this would account for only a small portion of its CO2 emissions.

If Alberta, Canada was a country... https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6342388568429862912

It's carbon emissions per capita are the highest in the world, because of oil sands processing - not accounted for within Electric Generation. It will soon reach 300 MMT CO2, Germany total is "only" around 800 MMT. 40% from the electric sector, as Germany is very "electrified" = 320 MMT CO2, 60% from coal/lignite = 192 MMT CO2 Germany is in no way as "gross" an offender as made out to be in perspective considering Germany is the no. 4 economy by GDP in the world and Alberta would rank no. 47.

This is 4x the US per capita, and 8x Germany per capita.

Global GDP Carbon Intensity.xlsx

[corradio]

@HansHyde good point. When we're able to split coal/lignite as state as stated in a previous comment (https://github.com/tmrowco/electricitymap/issues/162#issuecomment-351720378) we will be able to do the same with gas.

[jarek]

Hello,

will we be doing a lignite/hard coal split for electricity generation data, or is this going to be more easily handled as part of #738?

[brunolajoie]

It's much better to do it at the source (splitting it in the consumption mix) than by refining GHG intensity factors.

[corradio]

To answer your question @jarek, no we're not planning to do a lignite hard coal split in the immediate future. Reason is that most data sources don't have that granularity, and also that it would mean separating the frontend logic (which would only look at coal) vs the backend logic (which would have two categories for coal). The added complexity does not have a value high enough to justify prioritising it higher unfortunately. Although it's better to do the split at the source, currently the only way is to do it as a GHG intensity factor.

[alixunderplatz]

The GHG intensity factor will distort the carbon inteisity for zones using both: lignite (running constantly as baseload) and hard coal (used to cover medium load during the day).

Do you have any GHG intensity factor in mind? The max value of IPCC of 910 g/kWh still seems a bit low. It's rather between 1,000 and 1,200 g/kWh.

The fixed factor will work in AUS-VIC (no hard coal): http://opennem.org.au/#/regions/vic

As far as I remember, the Balkan states have a bunch of PPs running on lignite without hard coal, too. (Will check it on ENTSO-E.) Maybe some states in India, too.

[corradio]

I think a yearly weighted average should suffice and can easily be defended, but I think it is discussed in #738

[alixunderplatz]

This yearly average mix results in a lot of research work to collect and validate figures for each zone.

@corradio I think splitting it in the consumption mix is the favourable option. One wouldn't expect it, but we do know many of the generation figures for lignite.

Here is a list of the biggest lignite miners of the world. Source of the data is a spreadsheet related to a report of the German Mining Institution (BGR) for 2016. Luckily, lignite is not really exported, so it is used for electricity generation in the mining zone (or for chemistry purposes), so other zones' generation from coal is exclusively from hard coal.

Blue ones are the countries, where we do have seperate data for lignite and hard coal. The grey ones are also on the map but lack the split.

[alixunderplatz]

Throw back monday: I remember seeing and browsing through the electricitymap for the first time back in Feb 2017, and this was literally the very first question that came to my mind: "Why isn't there a split of lignite and hard coal? The differences and the impact on the CO2 intensity are huge...gotta write a comment."

Having learned over time that LCA emissions and IPCC figures (which don't seperate hard coal from lignite) are considered, I could understand to some point, why you wouldn't split it based on the given arguments and comments.

But looking at it again with the given facts from above, it's about time to do this.

• Lignite is the fossil fuel with the worst ongoing climate (CO2), health (SOx, NOx, dust, Hg, U, As, heavy metals in the exhaust gasses), nature (surface mining, mining waste, ground water removal) impacts, considering the output of electricity vs. the input of fuel.
• The GHG intensity is about 25% worse than the recent figure used for coal. Even the non-LCA-emission values are worse than the IPCC figures for coal.
• Lignite combustion needs to be stopped completely as soon as possible to reduce the impact on global warming.

Please, guys, for the sake of the climate and our Mother Earth, make this happen soon. I know it's easy to be writing comments without having to deal with any of the programming stuff behind the scenes. I think the impact it will have on the "audience" and followers of electricitymap will be quite huge. You have the right tool and the power (no electricity pun intended) to highlight this issue in terms of climate impact, so people will be able to apply pressure on their governments even more.

[corradio]

I do agree with you Alex, however, we have to prioritise a bit on our end as we have very limited resources. The problem is that the split affects quite a lot of things from a backend perspective. First step would actually be to figure out what would be affected by this change.

It would also be nice to be able to attract some funding in order to do such improvements. That would give us a bit more room to breathe.

On Mon, Mar 26, 2018 at 2:24 PM, Alex notifications@github.com wrote:

Throw back monday: I remember seeing and browsing through the electricitymap for the first time back in Feb 2017, and this was literally the very first question that came to my mind: "Why isn't there a split of lignite and hard coal? The differences and the impact on the CO2 intensity are huge...gotta write a comment."

Having learned over time that LCA emissions and IPCC figures (which don't seperate hard coal from lignite) are considered, I could understand to some point, why you wouldn't split it based on the given arguments and comments.

But looking at it again with the given facts from above, it's about time to do this.

• Lignite is the fossil fuel with the worst ongoing climate (CO2), health (SOx, NOx, dust, Hg, U, As, heavy metals in the exhaust gasses), nature (surface mining, mining waste, ground water removal) impacts, considering the output of electricity vs. the input of fuel.
• The GHG intensity is about 25% worse than the recent figure used for coal. Even the non-LCA-emission values are worse than the IPCC figures for coal.
• Lignite combustion needs to be stopped completely as soon as possible to reduce the impact on global warming.

Please, guys, for the sake of the climate and our Mother Earth, make this happen soon. I know it's easy to be writing comments without having to deal with any of the programming stuff behind the scenes. I think the impact it will have on the "audience" and followers of electricitymap will be quite huge. You have the right tool and the power (no electricity pun intended) to highlight this issue in terms of climate impact, so people will be able to apply pressure on their governments even more.

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[AurelWu]

I also think it's a rather important distinction as the emission values are rather different and using a fixed and global value of 820g for all coal plants distorts the real picture quite a bit in lignite heavy countries. As the backend is not opensource and the parsers (or at least some, didn't check all) already fetch the different types individually before aggregating them, I am not sure how to contribute though.

I also think it would be even better to not just adjust the emission factor of "coal" in the frontend per country, but actually show it as 2 distinct generation types, as they really are just the same in name only.

[alixunderplatz]

@corradio @brunolajoie One closed issue that I still have in mind regarding coal in general is #1146

There was a detailed comment that the GHG emissions from coal in general are higher. The IPCC "world average" for coal is a bit over 1000 g/kWh instead of 820 g/kWh (pulverized coal and probably mostly newer, efficient hard coal plants). For some reason, "Coal PC" with 820 g/kWh made it to that one graph in the other IPCC report, from where the 820 g/kWh on the map originate.

I still think the question should be raised again whether coal must be rated with higher GHG emissions.

[jarek]

the parsers (or at least some, didn't check all) already fetch the different types individually before aggregating them, I am not sure how to contribute though.

In my experience, many sources (North America particularly) don't specify the type of coal at all, and report only "coal". Tracking down whether lignite or bituminous or anthracite is used in a given region is often possible, but at that point we're running pretty close to issue #738 anyway.

[alixunderplatz]

The most significant countries on the electricitymap with an undistinguishable coal split are Russia, the USA, India and Canada.

Germany as largest lignite miner generated 135 TWh in 2016 from 171.5 Mt lignite, so around 0.78 TWh/Mt. The average generating power was 15.4 GW.

Assuming a similar use of lignite for electricity generation, we get the following energy & average power: Russia - 58 TWh, average power 6.6 GW - mainly located in RU-2 USA - 52 TWh, average power 5.9 GW, mainly in Texas and North Dakota (SPP?) India - 45.6 TWh, average power 4.1 GW Canada - 7.1 TWh, average power 0.8 GW

Compared to the total power generation in these three countries, bituminous coal/hard coal definitely is the main fuel and the bias between the emissions of hard coal vs. lignite is comparatively low in these regions, in my opinion.

If you really want to get into the details for these, it should be sufficient to locate the lignite resources first, because lignite is usually burned very close to its originating mine.

This map could be very helpful (choose state and region and desired power plants/resources): http://globalenergyobservatory.org/constructNetworkIndex.php

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Canada:

relevant states:

Alberta Sundance Power Station sub-bituminous coal, surface mining

Genesee Generating Station sub-bituminous coal, surface mining

Keephills Generating Station sub-bituminous coal, surface mining

Sheerness Generating Station sub-bituminous coal, surface mining

[Battle River Generating Station] sub-bituminous coal

Yukon according to the data on the map, there is hydro generation only.

Nova Scotia has bituminous coal resources only

British Columbia we don't have its generation on the map, but it has no coal power plants and mostly bituminous coal mines (see http://globalenergyobservatory.org/constructNetworkIndex.php)

Saskatchewan we don't have it on the map, but it has only lignite resources and lignite power stations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_Dam_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poplar_River_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shand_Power_Station / http://globalenergyobservatory.org/geoid/5349

Link to map source

USA:

source: https://www.americangeosciences.org/critical-issues/faq/which-states-are-largest-producers-and-consumers-coal

relevant states: Texas we don't have it on the map, but according to the linked source, Texas is the largest miner of lignite in the US. (see map of lignite mines in TX)

North Dakota in the "SPP"-region of the map According to the source, North Dakota is the second largest supplier of lignite in the US. 80% of the lignite are used for electricity generation, the rest for synthetic fuels (insanity!) and fertilizer.

Other states of the USA don't seem to have significant lignite power plants/mining activities.

India:

The largest mine with around 30 Mt (of ~45Mt) belongs to [NLC India] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLC_India_Limited) and is located in Tamil Nadu (we don't have this state on the map), so the remaining generation from ~15 Mt lignite is around 1.3 GW ... really not that much. We could find out (I think I might have details on that this in some issue here, but I can't seem to find it ^^) EDIT: I found my comment in #1298 Three power plants running on lignite are located in Gujarat (1.04 GW), which is quite close to the remaining generation power mentioned above.

Russia:

As I said, the lignite mines and power plants are mostly located in RU-2 somewhere in the proximity of Lake Baikal. With some more research, we can find the most significant lignite mines and the attached power plants.

[Manu1400]

FYI, "Lignite" information for TR 🇹🇷 exists on https://ytbsbilgi.teias.gov.tr/ytbsbilgi/frm_istatistikler.jsf (ie: "LINYIT: 11%")

[Manu1400]

FYI, RWE give realtime data for lignite production in germany: https://www.rwe-production-data.com/en/LN/DE/graph/

[jarek]

FYI, "Lignite" information for TR tr exists on https://ytbsbilgi.teias.gov.tr/ytbsbilgi/frm_istatistikler.jsf (ie: "LINYIT: 11%")

In fact our parser knows this and explicitly adds up the different kinds of coal: https://github.com/tmrowco/electricitymap-contrib/blob/3b70964cb284503473929b440c5e5f1f7322ef59/parsers/TR.py#L27-L30

FYI, RWE give realtime data for lignite production in germany: https://www.rwe-production-data.com/en/LN/DE/graph/

RWE is only one of the energy companies in Germany. We currently use ENTSOE for Germany and the data there has the split between lignite and hard coal, and it reports more lignite generation than RWE: https://transparency.entsoe.eu/generation/r2/actualGenerationPerProductionType/show?name=&defaultValue=false&viewType=TABLE&areaType=BZN&atch=false&datepicker-day-offset-select-dv-date-from_input=D&dateTime.dateTime=31.07.2021+00:00|UTC|DAYTIMERANGE&dateTime.endDateTime=31.07.2021+00:00|UTC|DAYTIMERANGE&area.values=CTY|10Y1001A1001A83F!BZN|10Y1001A1001A82H&productionType.values=B01&productionType.values=B02&productionType.values=B03&productionType.values=B04&productionType.values=B05&productionType.values=B06&productionType.values=B07&productionType.values=B08&productionType.values=B09&productionType.values=B10&productionType.values=B11&productionType.values=B12&productionType.values=B13&productionType.values=B14&productionType.values=B20&productionType.values=B15&productionType.values=B16&productionType.values=B17&productionType.values=B18&productionType.values=B19&dateTime.timezone=UTC&dateTime.timezone_input=UTC

[Kongkille]

Thanks for all the insights in this thread. We will be revisiting emission factors and production modes when implementing regional emission factors (#738)

For now, I'll close this issue as there are no direct actions before the infrastructure is changed :)