Environmental Impact of The Coal Industry

The environmental impact of the coal industry includes the consideration of issues such as land use, waste management, and water and air pollution caused by the coal mining, processing and the use of its products. In addition to atmospheric pollution, coal burning produces hundreds of millions of tons of solid waste products annually, including fly ash, bottom ash, and flue-gas desulfurization sludge, that contain mercury, uranium, thorium, arsenic, and other heavy metals.

There are severe health effects caused by burning coal. According to the reports issued by the World Health Organization in 2008 and by environmental groups and 2004, coal particulates pollution are estimated to shorten approximately 1,000,000 lives annually worldwide, including nearly 24,000 lives a year in the United States. Coal mining generates significant additional independent adverse environmental health impacts, among them the polluted water flowing from mountaintop removal mining.

A major EU funded research study known as ExternE, or Externalities of Energy, undertaken over the period of 1995 to 2005 found that the cost of producing electricity from coal would double over its present value, if external costs such as damage to the environment and to human health, from the airborne particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, chromium VI and arsenic emissions produced by coal, were taken into account. It was estimated in the study that external, downstream, fossil fuel costs amount up to 1–2% of the EU’s entire Gross Domestic Product (GDP), with coal the main fossil fuel accountable for this, and this was before the external cost of global warming from these sources was even included. The study also found that the environmental and health costs of coal alone were €0.06/kWh, or 6 cents/kWh, with the energy sources of the lowest external costs associated with them being nuclear power €0.0019/kWh, and wind power at €0.0009/kWh.