Meeting growing global energy demand, particularly in developing countries, will ensure coal’s continued existence as a vital fuel.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), world energy demand will grow by two-thirds over the next thirty years, a third of which will be in China and India alone. At present, the average citizen of these countries uses just one seventh as much energy as the average OECD citizen.

While critics of coal use push for the use of renewables, the IEA forecasts that they will still account for less than 5% of world electricity supply by 2030. Coal will thus remain central, not least because it is abundantly available, affordable, reliable and easy and safe to transport. Today coal produces 39% of the world’s electricity and 70% of the world’s steel.

According to the IEA: “World reserves of coal are enormous and, compared with oil and natural gas, widely dispersed… The world’s proven reserve base represents about 200 years of production at current rates.”

But the challenge for coal is to continue reducing its greenhouse gas and other emissions.

Further technical solutions include improved combustion efficiency and reduced emissions, coal gasification, new approaches to carbon capture and storage, and the production of hydrogen from coal, which will play a part in the transition to a hydrogen-based energy future. The ultimate goal is near complete elimination of emissions, according to the report.

It is believed that if the thermal efficiency of existing coal-fired power plant worldwide were brought up to current German levels of efficiency, the resulting reductions in global CO2 emissions would exceed that represented by the Kyoto Protocol’s first targets.

There are very large potential benefits from the transfer of modern combustion techniques from developed to developing countries.

According to the report, projects such as the recently announced FutureGen project in the United States are especially important in helping to show that near zero from coal is not just a distant vision

At the core of FutureGen is a proposal to build a US$1 billion IGCC and CO2 capture and storage demonstration plant, capable of producing electricity at no more than 10% above the cost of high-tech conventional coal plant. If this can be delivered, it will put affordable ultra-low emissions coal-based power within reach.

Coal, via gasification technology, has the potential to become a mainstay of a future ‘hydrogen economy'. It is an abundant potential source of the huge quantities of manufactured hydrogen that would be required for the widespread application of emissions-free hydrogen based energy systems.