The World Coal Association has launched the 'Warsaw Communiqué', a call to action to support the use and deployment of more efficient coal technologies to tackle climate change. Developed in co-operation with the Polish ministry of Economy, the Warsaw Communiqué has been endorsed by Janusz Piechocinski, Poland's deputy prime minister, and outlines pragmatic solutions that are intended to address environmental challenges while allowing coal to continue playing its role as an affordable, abundant source of energy.
The Communiqué includes a three-step call to action:
1. The immediate use of high-efficiency low-emissions coal combustion technologies, wherever it is economic and technically feasible at existing and new power plants, as an immediate step in lowering greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants around the world and a necessary milestone towards the deployment of carbon capture utilisation and storage technologies once demonstrated and commercialised.
2. A call to governments to set an ambitious pathway to move the global average efficiency of coal-fired power generation plants to current state of the art levels and to support R&D efforts to further improve the efficiency of coal combustion technologies.
3. A call to development banks to support developing countries in accessing clean coal technologies, including high-efficiency low-emissions coal combustion technologies.
Milton Catelin, chief executive of the WCA, has called for urgent action to support and deploy technologies that help to meet the climate challenge, saying: "There are existing technologies that allow coal to be used while minimising climate impacts. These high-efficiency low-emissions coal combustion technologies can lower greenhouse gas emissions immediately, highlighting the importance of deploying them as widely and as quickly as possible. If new coal-fired generating capacity added between 2000 and 2011 had used advanced coal technologies, cumulative emissions of CO2 over that period would have been reduced by almost 2 Gigatonnes - three times the expected effect of the Kyoto Protocol."
"There is a misconception that the use of coal is incompatible with meeting the challenge of climate change. This is simply not true. With the support of industry, governments, development banks and the international community, coal can continue to play its role in delivering on economic development goals, affordable energy and industrial growth while managing the expectations of people worldwide on climate change and other environmental challenges."
The WCA are now calling for as many interested stakeholders as possible to sign the Warsaw Communiqué in the run up to the International Coal & Climate Summit in Warsaw on18-19 November.
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