Let's keep our coal and burn it cleanly

The price of oil has fallen below $100 a barrel; not long ago it was close to $150, but unfortunately the value of our dollar against the ‘greenback' has dropped significantly as well.

Petrol prices will remain at an historic high for a long time yet, perhaps forever. More importantly, supplies and prices remain highly vulnerable to political and environmental instabilities and probably will do so until reserves eventually run out.

In a recent blog, I suggested that New Zealand could be largely self-sufficient in motor fuel and that one of the keys lay in our own backyard, in the lignite fields of Southland and Central Otago.

In the short term, more careful use of fuel through more walking and cycling, less vehicle trips altogether and more use of electrically powered public transport will help greatly. Similarly, in the longer term, electric, hybrid or hydrogen vehicles will prove to be a viable, if expensive, solution.

Non-food biofuels also have a role and can be carbon neutral to boot, for those who still think that is important.

Many future solutions need electricity, either directly, or, as with hydrogen, as part of the manufacturing process. How we generate future secure electricity is probably the most pressing long-term problem facing the country. Certainly, there is no room for fashionable ideology or political whim; we have to get this right.

Electricity demand is rising; the widespread adoption of heat pumps is but one of many contributing factors, as traditional home heating is legislated against or as people turn to the convenience of electricity.

Personally, having lived through London's bitterly cold 1960s and the attendant power strikes, I'm never going to be without a year or so's dry wood ever again.

As with motor fuel, there are short-term and longer-term options for power. New Zealand is singularly fortunate in the extent to which we can generate from renewable sources, primarily hydro, but also geothermal reserves.

Wind farms are beginning to proliferate; a wind and hydro combination could easily power the South Island in the long term, especially if the resources were managed for security of supply rather than share-holder returns. Theoretically, a low emission coal station at Bluff could return the whole Manapouri output to the national grid and there would be no need for wind farms in the south at all.

While the Deep South can provide a significant contribution to national demand, this does not solve the whole problem.

The demand is principally in the North Island and primarily in the Auckland region; the generating resources are not and, while we can, and do, send power northwards, there is a significant and hugely wasteful transmission loss. In the future, and especially with electricity-derived motor fuel, that imbalance of demand will continue. So what is the solution?

Without doubt, the solution does not lie in damming more and more, ever smaller river systems, or in controlling every last inch of the Clutha and Waitaki. Or in covering the south with wind farms, actually. The solution has to be in generation where the demand is; in other words, installing significant capacity in the upper North Island.

I have no doubt that, given their geology, Northerners will see a significant expansion of geothermal power, but that will not easily fill the demand gap. I am equally sure that we could do a lot more than we do with solar heating and with home mounted wind turbines, right across the country.

The systems whereby capacity can be drawn from the grid or else fed back in deserve the highest priority. I loved watching my Norwegian friends' meter running backwards!

Such point of consumption generation has hardly been looked at so far. There is still a long way to go with insulated, energy efficient building. In the longer run, tidal power and other technologies will emerge as reliable and economically viable options.

None are likely to be complete solutions. In the end, for the medium to long term, there are two basic options; nuclear generation and coal.

There are problems and advantages with both. Nuclear is an option, but we would still have to buy fuel, in an increasingly competitive market as the more pragmatic countries, such as France, Japan and Britain, build up their capacity.

Waste is not so great a problem either, as more and more will be re-processed in breeder reactors; it is unlikely to need to be stored here, but there will be a need for secure transport. Personally, I have some difficulty in finding a wholly stable site for a nuclear plant that I could live close to with confidence. For me, seismic uncertainty is the big killer for nuclear, not to mention cost.

In my mind, clean coal is the obvious answer. New Zealand has many centuries worth of good quality coal and a lot more of useable quality.

Much of it, in the Waikato, is easy to extract and close to the point of demand. If carbon emission is a problem for you (it's not for me, because I really don't believe it's that simple) then the good news is that modern technology - from Germany, for example - can produce almost carbon free energy, at a cost, but certainly cheaper than the nuclear option for this country. If government's conscience is still uneasy about the clean burning of coal, then here is a suggestion.

If global warming (oops, sorry, its getting cooler, so we're now on to ‘climate change') is a primary concern, then here is my suggestion. I suggest that the two million tons or so of coal that we export each year be retained in this country and burned cleanly and that we forgo the plastic novelties, trinkets and cheap underpants that we presently get in return.

Then we help the planet by burning coal more cleanly than it currently is when we send it overseas; we can keep our consciences pure by not going nuclear; we can make ourselves free of overseas energy reliance and we can obviate the need to dam any more southern rivers or stick windmills all over our upland landscapes.

And we can retain something similar to our present standard of living for the sustainable long term and that, I suspect, is at heart what many watermelon ‘environmentalists' are trying to prevent.