Pub. 4 2014 Issue 1

16 AT THE CENTER OF UTAH INDUSTRY If it Can’t Be Grown, It has to Be Mined! I magine what life would be like if you didn’t have electricity — ever. Even worse, imagine trying to cook if you didn’t have cooking fuel that was clean. In 2035, the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates there will be a billion people without any electricity, and 2.7 billion who don’t have clean cooking fuels. What’s a clean cooking fuel? It’s a little easier to define if you know what an unclean cooking fuel is: fuel such as wood and dung, both of which can cause serious household pollution and respiratory problems. Can you imagine keeping things sanitary if you are burning dung in order to cook your food? Energy makes it possible to provide people with both sanitation and medical care. It powers business and industry, and it makes it possible for people to have secure jobs. Without reliable energy, we are lef t with ex treme poverty without any hope of change or improvement. That’s not a world in which anyone wants to live. You probably think that’s not a world you’ll ever have to experience, either, but our world has never been so interconnected, and our study of history tells us that circumstances on this earth can change quickly. The U.S. is not immune from experiencing an energy crunch. Every nation in the world is hungry for energy, and as someone once said, there are only two kinds of people in the world: the quick and the underfed. When it comes to energy, nobody wants to be in the category of being underfed because nobody wants to deal with all the consequences it would bring. People need food and shelter, but they also need energy. So do businesses and industries, which are large consumers of electricity. In 2008, 42 percent of electricity was used by industry. That is why energy access throughout the world is crucial: it improves quality of life, and it makes it possible to think about ending extreme poverty forever. What happens if we don’t act? By 2030, 1.5 million people may die prematurely because they don’t have basic sanitation, or can’t get adequate medical care. And poverty will continue to limit people all over the world, placing them in a hopeless situation that won’t change until their access to energy, and everything associated with that energy, improves. Now is the time to build the necessary worldwide infrastructure so that people will have the energy they need to live, be healthy, and get an education. The need is so great that we are going to need every source of energy we have, using whatever will be most effective for a particular circumstance. We aren’t going to have the luxury of saying that one technology is good and another is bad. We need to take advantage of all available forms of energy generation – a true “all-of-the-above” approach. Specifically, that means we are going to need to continue using coal, and lots of it. The IEA, in fact, thinks that more than 50 percent of on-grid additions will have to be provided by coal. Worldwide in 2009, coal provided more electrical power from power plants than any other form of fuel: 41 percent compared with gas (21 percent), hydro (16 percent), nuclear (13 percent), oil (5 percent) and renewables (3 percent). Is it important to continue working to make coal as efficient and environmentally friendly as possible? Of course it is. The good news is that engineers and scientists are making, and will continue to make, huge strides when it comes to making coal use cleaner and better than it has ever been. ELECTRICITY AND COAL