The Ongoing Energy Revolution in the U.S.
Over the past decade, power generation in the U.S. has been turned on its head... Coal is mainly used as an energy source because it’s cheap and reliable. But the coal industry has a big problem... Natural gas is nearly as abundant and as cheap as coal. And it is much cleaner. Thanks to advances in the technology used for fracking and directional drilling, we’ve gained access to a huge amount of natural gas reserves that were trapped in shale formations throughout the country.
Calculating Worldwide Coal Demand Now, consider that worldwide coal-fired electricity generation totals about 2,000 gigawatts (GW). A gigawatt hour (GWh) is what the industry uses to measure electric power produced in one hour. As a reference, New York City uses about five GWs of power, so we can say it consumes five GWhs over the course of an hour. Of the 2,000 GWs running throughout the world, China uses 47%, the U.S. uses 15%, and India accounts for 11%. Now, to put this into perspective, 250,000 tons of coal is burned per hour to sustain the 2,000 GW around the world. Multiply that by 24 hours in a day and 365 days per year, and you can see where this is going... That’s a lot of demand.
In the following chart, you can see that the percentage of U.S. electricity fueled by coal plunged from more than 35% in late 2014 to less than 25% in late 2015. Meanwhile, natural gas-powered electricity jumped from less than 30% to nearly 40% in that span.
152
Made with FlippingBook - Online Brochure Maker