Dispatches from the "Energy Transition:" Glencore, the Coal Mining Company Posts an $18.5B Profit.

[NNadir]

This bit comes from my news feed from Carbon News Brief, a UK news outlet discussing news related to climate change. The full article from Financial Times is behind a firewall, and I'm not going to pay to open it.

Here's what the Carbon News Brief email says:

In a frontpage story, the Financial Times reports that Glencore – the world’s largest mining company – has seen its profits more than double to a record in the first half of the year on the back of surging coal prices. The firm’s profits of $18.9bn for the first six months were up 119% from a year earlier, the paper says, beating its previous half-year record and coming in higher than expected. It notes that “a strong performance at its coal business, which Glencore has stuck with even as rivals retreat from the controversial fuel, accounted for almost half” of the profits. It adds: “The bumper profits will increase focus on its coal division, which generated earnings of $8.9bn, more than the whole company made in the first six months of last year.” Glencore said it would pay out an additional $4.5bn to shareholders, reports Reuters, “including a $1.45bn special dividend worth 11 cents per share, and a $3bn share buyback which it said was worth around 23 cents a share, taking 2022 payouts to $8.5bn in total”. The newswire notes that “Glencore, which plans to run down its thermal coal mines by the mid-2040s, produces more than 100m tonnes a year at mines in Colombia, Australia and South Africa”. Bloomberg adds that “Glencore’s bumper profits and returns set it aside from mining rivals, which have reported falling earnings and reduced payouts as commodities like iron ore and copper retreat”. The Times also has the story...

For many years around here, I've heard that so called "renewable energy" was driving the coal industry out of business. To the extent that this has some mote of truth, it is only because inherently unreliable energy, which may on occasion make reliable electricity worthless for short periods in which all electricity is essentially worthless impacts the economics of all reliable plants because of O&M costs, but in terms of environmental value, this is a nonsense statement. A dangerous fossil fuel power plant when operated intermittently is required to burn extra fossil fuels to restart after the wind blows for a few hours or because the sun is shining at noon. This is because of the obvious, but often overlooked fact that if a boiler cools, energy must be added back to it to make it re-boil, energy that is not recovered as electricity or as anything. It's pure waste and nothing but waste. This should be obvious to anyone who has ever worked a tea kettle, but somehow it isn't.

The reality is that the "renewable energy" fantasy has depended entirely on access to dangerous natural gas to hide its intrinsic unreliability - and in combined cycle plants the stopping and starting also wastes energy - and of course, all those steel wind turbine towers have depended on coal to make coke.

The constraints on gas supplies, now that Putin has used the money he earned from exporting gas to "renewable energy" anti-nuke governments to savagely attack an independent nation, has made the world "safe" for the coal industry and increasingly unsafe for living things.

I trust that you're having a pleasant weekend.