Prospector News Publisher Michael Fox is joined by Benjamin Cox an Instructor for Executive Education for BRIMM. As an environmentalist Ben does NOT like the idea of Glencore and Teck, blending their coal divisions. It is taking assets with a footprint that we need and combining it with a legacy set of assets that closure costs will consume the economic value.
The earnings can’t be discounted as comparable, which is terrible for the Teck Shareholders.
Steel is a significant part of our intractable emissions.
Steel core emissions are from the blast furnace ~70%
There are two barriers to entry to entirely replacing blast furnaces at scale.
One technology still needs to arrive.
Two, the capital cost is ~5,000 per tonne of steel production for a complete steel plant, so the capital required for a new plant will be on the order of magnitude of $5-10 trillion USD.
So what is going to happen
Partial replacement, putting in some new technology for parts of the process Investment into technology – we could have a breakthrough; look at the sodium processing of Iron technology.
But current technology will be used for the foreseeable future.
Steaming coal
We have other ways to get power,
Solar is now cheaper than coal when the sun shines, which devalues the base value of coal production
The Wind is getting close, and we have even natural gas and pumped hydro; we have 100 solutions and are economically making coal base power uneconomic.
Coking coal is just not steaming coal, and we should segregate the assets for the future of our planet.
Blending coking coal assets, which will end up being a core bit of our carbon footprint we can’t replace quickly with steaming coal assets, is a net environmental liability If companies want to spin off steaming coal assets, go for it, but don’t make the environmental case that steaming is the same as coking coal.