Coloured smoke billowed out of the 150-metre tall chimney of the Salmisaari coal-fired plant, open since 1984, as it was officially decommissioned, marking a new milestone in the Nordic country’s energy transition. Now, coal generation makes up less than 1% of Finland’s energy mix, down from 23% in 2003.

The Salmisaari farewell comes four years ahead of the country’s self-imposed deadline for eliminating coal-based energy production and heralds another trend. As coal has wound down, wind has powered up: wind energy now covers one-quarter of Finland’s electricity needs.

“Finland’s case confirms that accelerating the shift from coal to clean energy is in countries’ self-interest, as it increases energy security and fuels economic growth,” said Julia Skorupska, head of the secretariat of the Powering Past Coal Alliance (PPCA), an advocacy group. PPCA was created in 2017 by Canada and the United Kingdom with the goal of speeding the transition from coal to clean power around the world; it now has 180 members. Last year, in one of the fastest coal power phase-outs in the world, the United Kingdom closed its last coal power plant, in Nottinghamshire, making the British power system coal-free for the first time in almost 150 years.

Finland’s coal phase-out has been made possible by a combination of laws and investments, including €22.8 million earmarked toward “innovative energy technologies” in 2021. In 2019, the Finnish government announced it would ban coal-based energy by 2029, “sending a strong signal to utilities and investors,” according to the advocacy agency Beyond Fossil Fuels.

A recent report found that wind power is now “the biggest enabler of Finland’s economic growth,” accounting for 44% of all projected green industrial investment, or €26 billion.

“Wind alone has more than covered the gap left by coal and fossil gas, proving that renewable energy can be scaled fast, particularly when government policy creates the right conditions,” said Cyrille Cormier, deputy campaign director at Beyond Fossil Fuels, in a statement.

In a statement, Sari Multala, Finland’s minister of climate and the environment, lauded Helen Ltd., the owner of Salmisaari, for its “determination to end the energy use of coal” and noted the “far-sighted” wisdom of enshrining into law a coal phase-out that seemed ambitious at the time. “Imported fossil energy has been replaced with cleaner solutions that reduce climate emissions, while consumers benefit from lower energy prices,” Multala said.

Salmisaari was Helen’s last operating coal plant. Its closure means that the company’s carbon dioxide emissions will decrease by 50% compared to 2024. The move also means that the city of Helsinki’s emissions drop by 30%. In a statement, Helen said it will now produce heat with heat pumps while relying on wind, nuclear, hydro and solar power for electricity generation.

“Our success is an excellent indication that, at best, the clean transition, cost efficiency and Finland’s security of supply can go hand in hand,” Helen CEO Olli Sirkka said in a statement.

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For Pleasants County native Rick Miller, landing a job at Pleasants Power Station after several years as an industrial contractor was a pivotal moment. It tripled his income, didn’t require him to travel and allowed him to cut down on the gruelling hours he was previously working. “It was a very good job,” Miller says. “It changed my life, actually.” 

For decades, the imposing facility in Willow Island, West Virginia, alongside state Route 2 served as an economic powerhouse for the county, employing hundreds of workers from communities up and down the Ohio River Valley and providing millions in revenue to the county. 

But a few years ago, much like other coal-fired power plants across the country, Pleasants’ future was looking increasingly unstable. Ownership of the plant had changed several times, and there was a bankruptcy. After a tumultuous few years, Miller decided to retire in 2021 after 20 years at the plant – slightly earlier than he originally planned. The uncertainty of the plant’s future was one of the reasons he left.  “They were saying they were going to close, and then they were going to stay open,” he says. “It was taking its toll on me mentally.” 

As local and state officials scrambled to prevent Pleasants being shut down for good, Omnis Energy, a company relatively new to West Virginia, pitched them on a new chapter for the power station. The company’s plan promised “revolutionary” technology that would still make use of coal, produce a high-value mineral and generate greener electricity, as well as create new jobs and prevent the destruction of a plant that has been an essential part of this community for decades. 

Those promises are now backed with a $50-million, 1% loan from the state’s economic development agency. But the plant’s – and the community’s – future now rests on an unproven technology and a company juggling multiple projects in West Virginia, with a history of loan defaults by the parent company and its CEO, Simon Hodson. 

Earlier this year, a former senior employee sued the company, saying she confronted Hodson in August 2023 about his “ongoing efforts to defraud government officials for investment funds,” including the state of West Virginia and the U.S. Department of Energy.  A spokesperson for the company said, “Omnis categorically denies making any misrepresentations to federal or state officials.” The spokesperson also maintains that the technology has been tested and is commercially viable.

But in a small county where the local schools, services and larger economy are dependent on the facility’s jobs and tax revenue, the stakes for whether this project succeeds or fails are very high. “It would be devastating to lose those tax dollars,” says Sheri Fleegle, executive director of the Pleasants Community Foundation, adding that her organization depends on donations for its scholarships and to support local charities and institutions. “You lose those jobs, people aren’t able to make those kinds of contributions any longer,” she says. “It would be devastating for many, many things here in the community.”

The elephant in the living room

The power plant has a long history in Pleasants County, starting with its construction. 

Five months into her time at the weekly St. Marys Oracle newspaper in 1978, Fleegle was handed a camera and sent down the road to cover what was thought to be an explosion at a nearby chemical plant. Instead, she found the aftermath of one of the worst construction disasters in U.S. history. A cooling tower at the Pleasants Power Plant had collapsed mid-construction; 51 workers plunged to their deaths.

Like others in the small community, Fleegle knew several workers on the tower, including a former classmate. “I don’t know that there was anyone in this community that wasn’t in some way touched by that,” she says.

On the day the cooling tower collapsed, Miller’s uncle was working the crane. Retired Pleasants County teacher Cynthia Alkire had students with family working there. And county native Allen Thacker lost three of his former high school classmates. “It’s one of those things; it’s always been the elephant in the living room,” Thacker says. “Everybody has some association with it.”

That searing tragedy, along with the plant’s deep economic and emotional ties, was one reason county officials like Pleasants County Commissioner Jay Powell fought to save the plant, which provided electricity to 13 states on the Eastern Seaboard. “We owed it, not only to the community and the state and the East Coast but to those men that sacrificed what they did,” he says.

But the plant’s struggles continued, despite Governor Jim Justice signing a $12-million tax break for then-owners FirstEnergy in 2019. FirstEnergy was suing a coal company owned by Justice at the time, claiming it reneged on a $3.1-million deal.

In December 2022, Pleasants Power Station was sold to a company that intended to shut down and eventually demolish the plant. Undeterred, West Virginia lawmakers passed measures in 2023 requiring the state’s approval to decommission fossil-fuel power plants and strongly encouraging utility companies to buy Pleasants. At the time, the power plant employed more than 150 people and contributed $1.75 million in taxes to support the county and local schools.

Worry about the plant reverberated throughout the community, even prompting an employee-driven effort to prevent the facility from closing. Says Powell: “There were literally community prayer vigils.” 

So when word got out that Omnis wanted to keep the plant open – and promised to expand its workforce – it felt miraculous. “We recognize it’s something that could falter and this plant may not be there at some point, but right now, we believe it’s open because we experienced a miracle,” Powell says. “Not only to be open, but maybe for it to do something that no other plant’s done in the world. Only God can get credit for that.”

‘This state understands coal’

Late last summer, Governor Justice told attendees at the annual meeting of the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce that he was about to share something “un-flat-believable.” They were gathered at the Greenbrier Resort, which the governor owns.

Justice, a coal magnate whose own coal company has fallen on hard times, said a power plant was taking on “new life.” Projected on the screen behind him was Powell, standing near a cooling tower with steam rising into the sky. Powell told the crowd he had tears in his eyes that morning as he drove down Route 2 to the Pleasants Power Station. The coal plant had restarted.

Until that day, Pleasants had been mothballed for several months. While the power station was now back on, its new owners, Omnis Energy, had much bigger plans. “There’s no other company in the world that’s planning to do something like this,” Hodson, CEO of parent company Omnis Global Technologies, told the West Virginia Public Energy Authority during a presentation in September 2023.

Omnis’s plan was to keep the plant running as-is for two years while his company built new “quantum reformers” to produce hydrogen and graphite from coal. Omnis then would convert the existing plant to burn hydrogen, emissions-free.

Eventually, Pleasants would produce millions of tons of graphite a year and more than enough hydrogen to power electricity generation at the plant’s full capacity, keeping the power flowing across West Virginia, the mid-Atlantic and parts of the Midwest.

The company would sell the graphite – a mineral used in a variety of products, including electric vehicle batteries – and any extra hydrogen. And to do it, Omnis planned to use a lot of coal – not burning it, but in Hodson’s words “ripping it apart” – using a process called pyrolysis. 

Hodson said the plant anticipated buying eight to 10 million tons of coal a year to convert into hydrogen and graphite, about two to three times more than the power plant regularly uses. A recent presentation by the company indicates it now intends to use a mix of coal and methane, as Omnis was “encouraged to use a blend of hydrocarbons at this particular plant,” a representative said. 

Originally based in California, Omnis Global and its subsidiaries have taken to West Virginia quickly. In the span of a year and a half, Omnis has announced plans for a $60-million project to extract rare-earth elements from coal waste in Wyoming County and a building-material construction factory in Bluefield, both in West Virginia, as well as the Pleasants project. Justice, who appeared at every announcement, declined to comment for this story. 

“I’m a newcomer; I don’t speak the language of West Virginia yet,” Hodson said last September, adding that he chose the Mountain State for his expansion plans because “this state understands coal.”

A new way to produce graphite, but questions remain

Omnis’s plan for the Pleasants plant arguably hits all the notes for West Virginia officials: a reliable use of the state’s coal in perpetuity, a way for West Virginia to diversify its energy production and a feel-good story about saving and repurposing a power plant deeply embedded in its community. 

But there’s a dearth of public information about how the technology actually works and its level of success in producing hydrogen or graphite. Paul Rodden, a hydrogen consultant, said of the Omnis proposal in a June 2023 episode of The Hydrogen Podcast, “It’s worth speculation as to why we haven’t heard of any trial or demo applications before this.”

Omnis says its process subjects coal and gas to extremely high temperatures in the absence of oxygen – nearly half the temperature of the surface of the sun – breaking it down into hydrogen and graphite through pyrolysis. 

While pyrolysis is very common – it’s the same process that makes charcoal – doing so at such temperatures for so long is likely to contribute to extreme wear and tear of equipment and impurities in the graphite, says Nicole Labbe, a chemical engineer and associate professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder. “There’s not a lot of materials that can withstand 2,000-degree-Celsius temperatures over long periods of time,” she says. “Could this be sustained, or is this going to be a frequently shut down, replaced-parts type of situation?” 

Labbe, who regularly reviews technology proposals submitted to federal government agencies, says that Omnis’s publicly available information is intriguing but that it lacks key data to fully assess its technology, with “wildly optimistic” projections of hydrogen and graphite production. 

“There’s a lot of big unknowns,” she says.

She points to a different company, spun out of research at Rice University, that produces graphene – an incredibly strong carbon material that can be produced from graphite – using high-temperature pyrolysis. Unlike Omnis, that company has published data on the results. 

Representatives for the company say that “Omnis is unaware of any experts that have reviewed their technology that are skeptical.” In a statement, they said a commercial version of the reformers has been operating for more than seven years at the Pennsylvania waste coal plant that Omnis now owns. But that facility burned down in May. The state fire marshal was unable to determine a cause except to say that it was not suspicious. Representatives for Omnis said the subsidiary intends to rebuild that plant.

And while the company unveiled a pilot project at the West Virginia site in September, many questions remain – including questions about the technology. 

During a tour at the Pleasants Power Plant of the pilot project on September 9, Omnis Energy president Rich Hulme told WTAP that the company had been running tests for six weeks, in part to find “the balance between cooling and heating source to make sure the device itself doesn’t melt.” When asked about the progress in producing graphite, Hulme said, “The graphite is still being produced. We’re still developing that particular part of the process.”

In a recent presentation, Omnis said that at full capacity the plant would produce three million tons of graphite a year – down from six million in Hodson’s earlier estimation – because the company no longer plans to exclusively use coal.

Still, the total current worldwide demand for both mined and synthetic graphite is just 3.8 million tons. Demand is expected to grow alongside electric vehicles and semiconductors; a recent projection suggests a total global market of just over seven million tons a year by 2035.

If those projections and Omnis’s are both correct, the company would supply the vast majority of all the graphite used in the world.

Hulme also told the Parkersburg-based TV station that the company will produce hydrogen at a cost of $100 a ton compared to an industry goal of $2,000 — “one-20th the cost of what the rest of the industry is trying to achieve in their production of hydrogen.”

Hodson, Omnis targeted in lawsuits

There are other reasons to be skeptical of Omnis’s promises to Pleasants County.

The same day Justice was celebrating the new start for Pleasants at the Greenbrier Resort, Omnis’s vice president of government relations confronted Hodson there, accusing him of lying to government officials. 

In a federal lawsuit filed in Pennsylvania, Michelle Christian, who joined Omnis as vice president of government relations in 2020, said she began questioning Hodson about his various companies because “certain things did not make sense financially.” Christian also alleged she was subjected to gender and religious discrimination by Hodson and other executives who are members of the Mormon Church.

In what was described in the suit as an hours-long conversation, Christian said she told Hodson “she would not lie on his behalf.” Less than two weeks later, she was out at the company. (The two sides dispute whether she quit or was fired.) Christian, whose case is ongoing, declined to comment. 

Omnis described Christian’s accusations as “unfounded and defamatory” and noted that the company is pursuing a separate case against her over a disputed laptop. In her lawsuit, Christian said it is her personal computer, not company property.

Over the past seven years, Hodson and an Omnis subsidiary also have been sued for nonpayment of loans.

In 2017, Hendricks Resources Limited sued Omnis Mineral Technologies after it defaulted on two loans signed by Hodson worth $3 million.

The second lawsuit was filed by Shannon Sorensen in Santa Barbara, California. Court documents say she loaned Hodson about $3 million between 2012 and 2015. By 2021, with interest, Hodson owed Sorensen just under $5 million, the complaint said. When he failed to pay, Sorensen sued. 

During settlement discussions in 2022, Hodson’s lawyers said he was on the verge of closing on $500 million in investments for “a venture in West Virginia” and would soon pay Sorensen back, according to documents filed by her lawyers. Several months later, Sorensen’s legal team discovered that Hodson had made a nearly half-million-dollar loan to the re-election campaign of Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton during the same time he failed to pay the initial settlement. 

Both lawsuits were settled for undisclosed amounts. A written statement from a spokesperson for Omnis described Sorensen as a “long-term, close family friend to the Hodsons” and said the case was “fully settled to Mrs. Sorensen’s satisfaction” and paid by Hodson with personal funds. In regards to the Paxton loan, Hodson was “happy to provide temporary assistance,” and the loan was paid back in full. Lawyers for Sorensen declined to comment.

A state loan stamp of approval

If West Virginia officials knew any of this, it did not prevent them from loaning Omnis $50 million for the Pleasants project. The West Virginia Economic Development Authority Board approved the loan in November 2023 during a special session, outside of its regular monthly meeting. 

The state agreed to lend Omnis the money, with the company matching the $50-million investment, to buy land adjacent to the current plant, build the first demonstration facility for graphite and hydrogen production, and upgrade infrastructure to ship coal in and graphite out, according to records obtained under a public records request. 

The agreement also said the company would pursue an $800-million loan from the Department of Energy for clean energy projects. The Wall Street Journal reported in July that the company was not invited to apply to that program because it lacked enough demonstration hours of the technology. Representatives for Omnis said, “The technology has been tested and proven. The DOE just requires additional operation hours to meet their funding criteria.”

Powell and the local St. Marys Oracle newspaper reported that DOE officials had visited the site in August, but requests to DOE to verify that visit were not returned.

How did the WVEDA board decide Omnis was a good investment? Requests for comment to the board’s chair and vice chair about how much the state investigated Omnis and its technology were referred to the office of executive director Kris Warner. A public records request to WVEDA for additional documentation and correspondence related to the loan was largely denied. In a phone interview, Warner did not answer questions about the level of scrutiny the agency applied to Omnis.

But Omnis was clearly well-known to state officials. Warner mentioned in a public presentation in September 2023 that he enjoyed seeing the Omnis office “out in Santa Barbara.” Warner told Floodlight and Mountain State Spotlight he had stopped by the office as a private citizen to see its construction materials technology while visiting family in California. 

Weeks after the Omnis state loan was finalized, Warner filed to run for West Virginia secretary of state. Conservative Policy Action, a super PAC funded in part by contributions from a top Omnis investor and its chief financial officer, spent nearly two-thirds of its money – more than $218,000 – to support Warner or oppose other candidates, according to Federal Election Commission data. 

In July, the super PAC’s chairman, Mark Scott, resigned his position as West Virginia’s administration secretary following concerns about potential conflicts of interest with his government position. That funding is now the subject of an election complaint filed by one of Warner’s primary opponents, Ken Reed. 

Warner rejected any suggestion of conflict of interest, telling Floodlight and Mountain State Spotlight that loan decisions are made by the WVEDA board or the governor. “I don’t approve loans,” he said. 

Uncertain future for Omnis businesses in West Virginia

Meanwhile, Omnis’s other projects in West Virginia are running behind schedule.

Construction on the building-material construction factory is underway in Bluefield, but Jonathan Hodson, the CEO of the building company and the son of Omnis CEO Simon Hodson, told a local news station that weather and supply chain issues had pushed back the opening, originally scheduled for late 2023. The company now expects to start hiring by early 2025.

In Wyoming County, very little appears to have happened in the nearly two years since the initial announcement of the coal-waste project. The Wyoming County Economic Development Agency is “actively working with [Omnis] to see if they need any assistance along the way,” says executive director Christy Laxton. She could only confirm the company hadn’t publicly announced a location, citing a nondisclosure agreement the county EDA had signed.

In Pleasants County, some skepticism around Omnis’s promises has seeped in, but many in the community remain cautiously optimistic. Omnis is required to pay back the state loan for the Pleasants project by May 2026. “I think everybody’s hopeful. And that’s what I am,” retired teacher Cynthia Alkire says. “Now, am I 100% sure that that’s going to work? No, but I don’t think anybody can be 100% sure.”

It’s possible this project will work as promised; taking risks on unproven technology is what allows us to advance, says Labbe, the chemical engineer in Colorado. But with the hopes of an entire community riding on a single project, it opens the door to “maybe not look at things as closely as you should,” Labbe says. “It doesn’t mean that that’s what’s happening here.”

Right now, there is no other plan for the power station.

If the project fails, Fleegle says, “There would be a lot of belt-tightening. Hopefully, we don’t have to address that.” 

This article was originally published by Floodlight, a non-profit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. WTAP reporter Chase Campbell contributed to this report. Mountain State Spotlight is a West Virginia-based non-profit newsroom producing accountability journalism from around the state.

Taylor Kate Brown is an independent journalist focused on local climate-change-action stories. Sarah Elbeshbishi is Mountain State Spotlight’s environment and energy reporter.

The post Doubts hang over ‘miracle’ coal-plant conversion in West Virginia appeared first on Corporate Knights.

But conservation and financial experts say that conditions of the approval are inadequate to protect the Elk Valley in the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia, where the company’s mining operations have for decades released high levels of the mineral selenium from waste rock into local waterways, harming fish populations and raising human health concerns.

“Teck is walking away from an unprecedented environmental disaster, with a windfall of billions of dollars,” says Casey Brennan, conservation director with the B.C. environmental group Wildsight. He says the company has been let off the hook for this water pollution by the decision last week by Innovation Minister François-Philippe Champagne to permit the takeover by Glencore. “It’s a pretty sweet win for Teck to be able to get this approval out of the minister like this with some very limited language that has very unclear legal implications.”

Simon Nicholas, steel industry analyst for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (a global network of energy transition analysts), says it will be difficult for the government to hold Glencore accountable for Teck’s environmental record with its plan to transfer control of the mines to a new coal company. “It’s hard to see this as progress given that Glencore’s intention is to spin off its coal operations,” Nicholas says.

The new company – focusing solely on coal production, in contrast with both Teck and Glencore, which are large diversified mining and metals companies – will face big risks as the world moves away from coal-based steel and power production, raising the possibility it could go out of business before the cleanup costs are met. “There ought to be concerns about whether the new entity will be able to afford long-term rehabilitation,” Nicholas says.

Teck is walking away from an unprecedented environmental disaster, with a windfall of billions of dollars.

– Casey Brennan, Wildsight

The federal approval, announced late last Thursday during a week with major summer holidays in Canada and the United States, was the last hurdle for Glencore and Teck to finalize the deal, expected to close July 11.

Under the approval, Glencore has committed to paying $350 million in rehabilitation and closure activities over five years to reduce selenium pollution in the Elk Valley watershed.

Teck has spent $1.4 billion since 2014 and will spend up to $250 million this year on water treatment. It has also posted a reclamation bond of $1.9 billion with the Government of British Columbia to pay for future environmental liabilities.

According to the B.C. government, Teck’s water treatment facilities are removing only a small fraction of the selenium in the Elk River, especially when spring and summer rains wash large amounts of the mineral into waterways from the man-made mountains of waste rock at the company’s open-pit coal mines. This means that despite Teck’s spending more than $1 billion on water treatment, selenium levels remain more than 200 times higher than what’s considered safe for aquatic life.

Cleanup estimated at $6.4 billion

A consultant commissioned by Wildsight (a conservation organization working extensively in B.C.’s interior) recently estimated the cost of cleaning up the pollution at $6.4 billion, which is almost as high as the total value of the takeover deal at US$6.9 billion.

In his statement announcing approval of the deal, Champagne said Glencore will maintain responsibility for payment of any environmental obligations through to 2050, including if the company is sold to another party. “Glencore’s commitment will result in generational assurance of sound environmental stewardship of the asset, regardless of future ownership,” Champagne said.

Glencore released a list of commitments it is making as conditions of the approval, including promises to maintain Canadian office and staff, donate to community organizations, honour existing agreements between Teck and Indigenous Nations, work with local Indigenous Nations, and increase Indigenous benefits.

The company also pledges to cover Elk Valley environmental obligations over the course of its ownership and potentially beyond. Glencore is committing to obtain prior approval from the minister on a mechanism to cover its obligations if the company is sold, or to continue to stand behind such obligations itself until 2050.

But these assurances don’t satisfy Wildsight, which would have preferred to see upfront reclamation bonds posted in addition to the existing $1.9-billion bond to the provincial B.C. government. “We will continue to press for greater levels of bonding, at least three times higher than what the provincial government is pulling out,” Brennan says. “It really is the only assurance at any level that things will be done and managed properly.”

Brennan says that a decision by the International Joint Commission to investigate pollution in the Elk River watershed could create pressure for a faster cleanup. The issue has become a problem for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and U.S. President Joe Biden because of objections from the Ktunaxa Nation, an Indigenous community on both sides of the border.

Last week’s decision also contains some stringent guidance on foreign takeovers of critical-minerals businesses, but this was unrelated to the Elk Valley takeover since steelmaking coal is not considered a critical mineral under the new federal rules.

The sale of the Elk Valley mines to Glencore will permit Teck to focus on its copper and critical-minerals businesses which are in high demand with the climate transition, as well as buy back US$2 billion of its own shares. “The large majority of its funds from the sale will be used to buy back shares in order to maximize returns to shareholders and will do nothing for local communities and contaminated waters that they’re leaving behind after billion-dollar profits,” Brennan says.

Eugene Ellmen writes on sustainable business and finance. He is a former executive director of the Canadian Social Investment Organization (now the Responsible Investment Association).

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But that didn’t happen, thanks to the advocacy of Murrawah Maroochy Johnson, a 29-year-old Wirdi woman of the Birri Gubba Nation, who led a lawsuit against the coal company in 2021, and won.

The case was groundbreaking in many ways, but perhaps most strikingly, Johnson’s work helped set a new legal precedent that pushed members of the court to travel to where First Nations people lived in order to hear their testimonies and perspectives, instead of expecting Indigenous people to travel long distances to settler courts. The lawsuit was also the first to successfully use Queensland’s new human rights law to challenge coal mining, arguing that greenhouse gas emissions from the Waratah coal mine would harm Indigenous Peoples and their cultural traditions. Because of the litigation, the mine’s permit was denied in 2022, and its appeal failed last year.

Because of her work, Johnson is now among several of this year’s winners of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize honouring global grassroots environmental activism.

The last few years have been transformative for Johnson, who is the mother of a toddler and expecting her second baby in a few weeks. Grist spoke with her to learn about what motivates her, how she views the climate crisis, and what other young Indigenous activists can learn from her work.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You have been working on behalf of your people since you were 19 years old. What drives you to do this work? 

It’s definitely not a choice. First contact here was just 235 years ago. At that point, terra nullius was declared, which said that the land belonged to nobody, which essentially means that the first interaction with colonizing invading powers was one of dehumanization. They saw us here, but to say that the land belonged to no one really says that we are subhuman. They deemed us of a status where we couldn’t own our own land even though they saw us here inhabiting our own lands, living and thriving. And so there’s a long legacy of resistance in first-contact frontier wars but also through advocacy over the generations. I’m just a young person who gets to inherit that great legacy.

I was raised by very strong parents. My father, my grandfather, my great grandparents, were all resistance fighters. There’s a lot of responsibility that comes with inheriting that legacy and feeling like you need to do your part. But also, I feel like it’s not a choice because at the end of the day, what’s real is our people, our law, our custom – no matter the colonial apparatus attempts to disappear us, dilute us, absorb us into homogenous Australian mainstream and complete the assimilation process. To me, that’s continued injustice that our people face. And every First Nations person, I feel, every Indigenous person, has an obligation to resist that as well. Because at the end of the day, we First Nations people here in Australia, we are the oldest continuous living culture on the planet, and what comes with that is the fact that we have the oldest living creation stories, we have the oldest living law and custom. That in and of itself is so significant that we can’t just allow it to be washed away. I think that there has to be a continued active effort, by my generation and all future generations, to maintain our ways.

For us, colonial, Western, white contact is just such a small blip in time for how long our people have been here and how long we’ve maintained our ways and law and custom and culture. We have to collectively acknowledge that we have a duty of care and responsibility to maintain the way of our people. I’m really proud of being able to inherit that and also having a responsibility to protect and maintain it.

Can you tell me about your perspective on climate change? 

It’s always called human-induced climate change, but I think that that term doesn’t allow for colonial powers to be held accountable, or big polluters. I think it’s actually more accurate to say that it’s colonial-induced climate change, because it’s actually the process of colonization violently extracting and exploiting the resources of Indigenous nations, people’s land, especially in the Global South, that’s resulted in the crisis of climate change that we face today.

I see climate change not just as a crisis, but also an opportunity. In one sense, if what remains of our cultural knowledge is so intimately dependent on our land, and having access to our lands and waters, then climate change is a huge threat. For example, in the Torres Strait and throughout the Pacific, what do you actually do when your country, your homelands, your territory disappears because of the impacts of climate change? What does that mean for our identity that actually derives from being the people of that unique country and that unique place? Climate change could really signal finality of our diverse and distinct and unique cultural identities as Indigenous and First Nations people in the sense that land may become so changed or so disappeared that our people are no longer able to resonate or recognize or identify with it anymore or learn from it anymore. So that’s really scary.

But I think the other side is an opportunity because climate change creates a sense of urgency. It’s that sense of urgency that is going to be pushing our peoples to work collectively as Indigenous and First Nations people around the world, to highlight the importance of the shift required to address climate change, but also to recentre our traditional systems of caring for country and sustainability and living in harmony with the land as a solution to climate change – really combat this normalization of colonial history and the global system and power systems as unquestionable.

That reminds me of how, on the video announcing your Goldman Prize, you mentioned that “there’s a lot to be learned from our ways of being.” Can you expand on that idea? 

We’re at this moment where we can really take the best of our traditional ways of being and really use that to influence the decisions that we make about our future. What real climate justice is, to me, is really drawing on the greatest strengths that we have in terms of our traditional law and custom, using that as a guidance system in terms of the decisions we make about what the future looks like.

If you’re going to shift the entire global economy and global structure of how business is done, then you want to be talking to the experts. So you want to be talking to First Nations people and knowledge holders. I think climate change will ultimately lead those who are committed to the current system to be forced to be exposed to the reality that a lot of First Nations people have been living with for a long time: that this current global system doesn’t work for us. In the context of capitalism, it’s designed to work against us and facilitate outcomes for very few.

Climate change is here because of the current global systems, and that means that, eventually, the system will become obsolete. It already is when it comes to the survival of humanity. I think that ultimately people will come to see that the system doesn’t work for them. It’s never been designed to work for the masses.

So, I really see a huge shift toward leadership from First Nations people. Indigenous, or non-Indigenous, people – this is my hope here in Australia – start to act in accordance with traditional principles of caring for country law and custom and really reestablishing old ways, governing ways, of these lands. I think that’s the only way to really address climate change. And maybe I’ve got a huge imagination, but I see it as part of my responsibility to work as hard as I can toward that goal of creating that reality, one in which a modern society essentially adheres to First Nations law and custom in a modern context.

You’ve talked a lot about the importance of drawing from traditional knowledge. When I think about what it means to be Indigenous, I think about both the knowledge we have and also the challenge in bringing that forward because of how colonialism has eroded our ties to both culture and land. What would you say to Indigenous people who care about land and culture but are feeling disconnected from both? How do they find their way back? 

This is one that I actually really struggle with sometimes because in the Australian context here, we had the Stolen Generation, when Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their parents and indoctrinated. So you have whole generations that have been dispossessed of their cultural inheritance, of their families, and also their peoples have been dispossessed of future generations as well. The colonial process was a finely tuned machine by the time it came through the South Pacific and Australia. In one sense, we’re fortunate that it was only just over 230 years ago first contact happened, but at the same time, this colonial apparatus was so finely tuned that they didn’t need as long to do as much damage as they’ve been able to do.

Being in a settler colony, we’re dealing with mass incarceration, mass suicide rates, and the disappearing of our people. It feels like it’s hard to catch up. We can’t take a break or catch our breath because we’re dealing with the very real, frontier issues of losing our people. But at the same time, what’s required for healing and to actually rebuild our cultural strength is time. And actually being able to take the time to be on country, to sit with country, to learn, and to reconnect.

It’s this really delicate tug of war that all First Peoples who have been subject to colonialism have to face, and we have to sort of grapple with on a daily basis: What do we put our energy into? Am I fighting forced child removals and assimilation on the daily? Am I fighting the education system? Am I doing land and country work and going through the legal system? Or am I just sort of operating as an individual, sovereign person, under our own law and custom and that’s how I resist and maintain my strength? It’s so vast in terms of how we have to split ourselves up in a way to deal with the issues at hand, which essentially is the disappearance of our people, but also our way of life and custom.

At the end of the day, for me, I just have to take heed from my ancestors and my own people that we’ve seen the end of the world before. My great grandparents and their generation saw the end of their world already, and they’ve been fighting. They were in the physical frontier on the front line and survived that, and saw everything that they knew to be ripped away from them. So I have to just acknowledge that I’m very lucky to be born in the generation I’m born in, with so much more opportunity. But at the same time, there is that huge gap in familiarity with culture and our ways.

Before your successful litigation against the Warratah mine, you fought against the Carmichael mine, filing lawsuit after lawsuit. But the mine still opened in 2021 and is now in operation. How do you handle such setbacks, and the grief of climate trauma and colonialism? What would you say to other Indigenous activists who are dealing with similar challenges? 

Being a young person, going through that, it’s really hard. You’re up against the actual powers that be of the colonial apparatus: the state government, the federal government, the mining lobby itself, and this idea that our traditional lands should be destroyed for extraction and exploitation for the benefit of everybody else. For the benefit of the state in terms of royalties, and for the benefit of the rest of settler Australia, where we, the people and our lands, are the collateral damage. And so for a long time I was very heartbroken, very depressed. For a long time I didn’t know what my next steps were.

But the reality is that I feel very much so guarded by my ancestors and all our people. I had time to mourn and get back on my feet before the opportunity to join the Youth Verdict case against the Waratah coal mine came along.

All I can say is we kept going. We’re fighting for our people, every single day. And something that I was always reminded of along the way was that even though it might not be the silver bullet that makes significant change, it’s still important that we create our own legacy of resistance and that we do our best every day to maintain what we hold dear.

We’ve got to do the work because we’ve got to do the work. It stands on its own and it’s our obligation as traditional custodians every day to do the work of maintaining and protecting country. We put on the record that we don’t consent, this isn’t free, prior and informed consent as we are entitled under the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. And every step of the way, just maintaining that resistance, even if it’s just telling our story and challenging the prevailing, dominant, colonial narrative, I think is important to do every single day.

So in terms of advice, I think it’s to keep going. Take a break when you need to. And have a cry, because I cried for, like, eight years straight, but I think just knowing what some of my own people have been through and the horrors that they had to deal with, it’s the responsibility that we inherit to maintain the fight and continue on as best we can.

We might not be able to solve everything in one or two generations. But again, we’re the oldest living culture on the face of the earth. So, in that respect, we’ve been here the longest and, as long as my generation and our future generations maintain our own identities, cultural identities, and resistance as best as we can, we’ll be here long into the future as well.

This article originally appeared in Grist. Read the original story here. 

The post ‘Keep going’: How an Indigenous woman fought a coal mine and won appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Power sector emissions were down a whopping 19% in 2023 compared to 2022, according to a recent report by Ember, an independent energy think tank. 

“The EU’s power sector is in the middle of a monumental shift,” says Sarah Brown, Ember’s Europe program director. She explains that fossil fuels are playing a smaller role than ever as a system with wind and solar as its backbone comes into view.  

Coal dropped 26% in 2023, continuing its long-term decline, and another 20% of coal plants in the EU are expected to close this year and next. And perhaps surprisingly to forecasters, gas did not replace coal in the grid. Gas generation also saw a significant decline of 15%, the fourth consecutive year of decline. That led wind power, which grew by 13%, to overtake gas generation as the second-largest source of electricity in the EU. Combined, solar and wind generated 27% of Europe’s electricity in 2023, up from 23% in 2022. 

And despite rumours to the contrary, “The energy crisis and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine did not lead to coal and gas resurgence – far from it,” Brown says. 

There were other factors involved in muscling out coal and gas from the grid. Both hydro and nuclear generation bounced back to varying degrees after a difficult 2022. Hydropower generators had a terrible 2022 because of drought conditions, though the sector rebounded in 2023 (up 15%) to about average production levels for the last 20 years. 

Nuclear also had an awful year in 2022 as a series of mechanical failures transformed France into Europe’s largest electricity importer rather than its traditional role as Europe’s largest exporter of electricity. But 2023 saw more consistent operations, and generation inched up by 1.5%. Even at these lower levels, nuclear remains the single largest source of electricity in Europe, providing 22.9% of total generation (for comparison, nuclear energy makes up about 15% of Canada’s electricity). 

Conservation was also a significant piece of the puzzle. Total electricity use fell in the EU by 3.4% compared to the previous year. That trend is not expected to continue as Europeans increasingly shift to electric vehicles and heat pumps, driving up electricity demand overall. 

For renewables to expand market share at the expense of fossil fuels and reduce power emissions, they will need to grow faster than new demand is added. The current plan is to double wind and solar’s share of a much larger pie by 2030 – hitting 55% of electrical generation. 

Solar’s future in Europe seems very bright as cost reductions and high electricity prices have made it extremely attractive for homeowners. Solar grew by 17% in 2023 and 29% during the energy crisis of 2022. Additional measures are being put in place to maintain that growth. New building regulations for the 27-country bloc will ensure that all new buildings and existing public buildings have solar panels installed on them by the end of the decade, while most non-domestic buildings, such as warehouses, stores and factories, undergoing a renovation that requires a permit will also have to install solar panels. 

To speed things up even further, the EU is also creating “renewable acceleration areas” where permitting for renewables can be fast-tracked. This is especially helpful for the wind industry, which has faced considerable struggles with years-long permitting processes. Investments in offshore wind energy topped €30 billion in 2023 after a disastrous 2022 saw investment bottom out at just €400 million. 

“As wind and solar grow, gas will be next to enter terminal decline,” Brown says. 

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“Allowing Glencore to take control of Teck’s coal mines could be disastrous,” said Randal Macnair, a conservation coordinator for the B.C. environmental group Wildsight, in a post on the group’s website. 

Wildsight pointed to Glencore’s history as the former owner of the Anaconda Aluminum Company in Montana, now costing the U.S. government tens of millions of dollars in cleanup costs. “Money for cleanup must be a top priority before any transfer of ownership takes place,” Macnair said. “Adequate funds must be held to cover the costs of reclamation as well as water quality environmental remediation so Canadian taxpayers aren’t left holding the bill.” 

Wildsight said the deal should not be approved until there is a review by the International Joint Commission (IJC), the binational agency established by the Canadian and U.S. governments to resolve trans-border water issues. 

The group was commenting on last week’s announcement of a US$8.9-billion takeover offer from Glencore – along with partners Nippon Steel of Japan and POSCO steel of South Korea – for the coal operations of Canada’s largest diversified mining company. If approved by the federal government, the deal would give Glencore control of Teck subsidiary Elk Valley Resources, which operates four sprawling open-pit coal mines in the Elk Valley of southeastern B.C. The remaining assets – primarily copper and zinc – will remain with Teck. 

A Glencore spokesperson declined to comment on Wildsight’s suggestion that the takeover should be delayed until the IJC reviews water quality issues. They pointed to a list of commitments made by the company at last week’s announcement, in particular that it will increase research and development activities in Canada by 50% to $150 million, “including on innovation in relation to water quality treatment technologies.” 

The company also says it will maintain a Canadian head office in Vancouver, provide no net reduction in jobs, boost capital expenditures by $2 billion over three years, and increase sponsorship, community and charitable programs. The spokesperson said that Glencore is working cooperatively with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the state of Montana and the local community to restore the Anaconda site, which has operated since the 1950s and was acquired by Glencore in 1999. “Glencore will continue to ensure that [the site] has the resources it needs to meet its obligations.”  

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said the government will “follow our regulatory processes carefully” in an upcoming review of the Teck takeover under the Investment Canada Act, adding that key factors will be jobs, a Canadian headquarters, environmental concerns and the rights of Indigenous people. Freeland also pledged to consult with the B.C. government on the review.  

Teck a global coal supplier  

Teck’s Elk Valley coal mines are the second-largest suppliers of steelmaking coal (also called metallurgical coal) in the seaborne market (coal exported by ships from the producing to the consuming country). In 2022, the company sold 22 million tonnes of coal to steelmakers in China, India and other Asian countries. 

The mines are a major economic driver in southeastern B.C., with 4,000 people employed directly by Teck and an estimated 30,000 jobs indirectly supported by the company. 

The federal government is reviewing the takeover because the Investment Canada Act mandates Ottawa to review significant foreign acquisitions of Canadian companies, and to reject them if they don’t provide “net benefit” to Canada or if they pose national security concerns. Governments have used this power sparingly in the past. The courts have recently challenged Ottawa’s authority to regulate in environmental areas that are also in provincial jurisdiction. This is one of the reasons Freeland signalled that Ottawa will consult with B.C. 

Nevertheless, environmental issues are expected to dominate the year-long review, partly because of the extensive environmental damage that has already occurred in the region, but also because of an agreement reached by President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau earlier this year to address cross-border water pollution from the mines. 

Significant water-pollution problems have plagued Teck since it acquired its first coal mine in the region more than 30 years ago. The key issue is with selenium, a naturally occurring substance, which runs off the massive rock formations dug out by the company to access the coal beneath. High levels of selenium cause fish to have reproductive problems and physical deformations, leading to a drop in numbers. 

Calcite, which also occurs naturally, is also a problem since it can cement rocks together in stream beds, harming fish and other habitats. “Fish populations have collapsed, municipal and other drinking water wells have been contaminated, and streambeds have been cemented with calcite with no end in sight,” Macnair said.  

Cleanup could be in the billions 

He said Teck has already spent more than $1 billion on water treatment that handles only a small portion of the company’s water pollution. The cost to clean up and treat the water flowing into the Elk River “could easily be more than the $8.9 billion purchase price and will certainly be many multiples of the $150 million commitment to water quality Glencore has announced as part of the deal,” he said. 

In Biden’s visit to Ottawa in March, he and Trudeau agreed in principle to address pollution in the Elk-Kootenay watershed by summer 2023, which has come and gone with no agreement. Subsequently, the Ktunaxa Nation in B.C. and the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of Montana proposed that the U.S. and Canadian governments refer the issue to the IJC, a request that has the backing of the U.S. State Department but is opposed by Canada. 

In May, the IJC wrote to Trudeau and Biden saying the matter is becoming urgent. The standard for safe amounts of selenium approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is 0.8 micrograms per litre of water, compared with measurements of 9.46 micrograms per litre in the Elk River in Canada, 4.99 in the trans-border Lake Koocanusa and 1.4 in the Kootenai River in Montana. 

The IJC also said the U.S. government is considering a unilateral request to refer the matter to the commission, which it would act on, but “it is in the best interests of all concerned” if both the Canadian and U.S. governments jointly refer the matter to it. 

Last month, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes in Montana set a deadline of November – this month – for a meeting of the U.S. and Canadian governments and the Ktunaxa Nation in Canada to discuss the selenium pollution issue. 

Another potential environmental issue for the federal review is the overall carbon emissions from the coal produced at the mines. According to Teck’s most recent sustainability report, the company emitted 2.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in Scope 1 (direct operating) emissions in 2022. The report also states that in 2021, 29% of these emissions were from methane (a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide that is responsible for roughly 30% of global warming since pre-industrial times). Coal mines are heavy emitters of fugitive methane as coal seams are exposed to the atmosphere. 

In addition to Scope 1 emissions, Scope 3 (end-use) emissions by the company’s steelmaker customers were far higher, at 65 million tonnes. In information released about the deal, the company didn’t cite any plans to deal with the Scope 3 releases, saying only that it will pledge to become net-zero in all three scopes by 2050. Given that it doesn’t control how its coal is consumed by its customers, there’s no clear net-zero path to Scope 3 emissions.  

So while Teck may benefit by ridding itself of coal assets that have fallen out of favour with wary investors so that it can focus on the climate-friendly critical minerals business, the hidden cost of its operations may continue through heavy carbon emissions and polluted waterways under its new owner. That is, unless governments, environmentalists and Indigenous Peoples intervene.    

Eugene Ellmen is a former executive director of the Canadian Social Investment Organization (now Responsible Investment Association). He writes on sustainable business and finance. 

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With a takeover lurking in the wings, the company must now figure out how to transition out of its 20-million-tonnes-a-year coal business. 

The proposed takeover of Vancouver-based Teck, a company recognized as a sustainability leader, by Swiss mining giant Glencore PLC, a company saddled with a history of human rights, bribery and environmental problems, has attracted the attention of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The government is looking at the deal “very, very carefully,” he told Bloomberg last week.  

“We have high and stringent expectations, not just on environmental issues but on partnership with Indigenous Peoples,” he said. 

At stake in the takeover battle is control of Teck’s copper and other mineral operations that are critical for the global climate transition. Demand for copper, essential for electricity-based infrastructure such as wind turbines, solar panels and power grids, is expected to skyrocket in the shift away from fossil fuels. 

But Teck’s board rebuffed Glencore’s US$23-billion merger offer and pledged to move forward with a previously announced plan to split the company into two separate entities, one focused on its critical mineral assets and the other on its steelmaking coal field in Elk Valley, B.C. The move would have insulated Teck from the negative environmental effects of its coal arm while still allowing it to reap millions in revenue to finance expansion of its green metals business.  

Ultimately, Teck failed to receive enough shareholder support for the split in a vote last week and withdrew its proposal. Glencore then said it would be willing to consider a better takeover offer, threatening to make a hostile bid direct to investors if the board refused to negotiate.  

For now, the dispute rests with the Teck board. 

Coal mines a big CO2 emitter

The biggest issue Teck will have to grapple with, regardless of whether it stays independent of Glencore, is the future of its coalfield in the Rocky Mountains of southeastern B.C. The field is made up of four sprawling open-pit mines producing metallurgical coal, which is used to make steel. 

The coal mines make Teck the second-largest ship-based exporter of metallurgical coal in the world. In 2022, Teck produced 21.5 million tonnes of coal, generating more than $10 billion of the company’s $17.3 billion in revenue. The majority of the coal is shipped from B.C. ports to steel companies in China, India and other Asian countries.  

According to Teck’s sustainability report, the Elk Valley operations emitted 2.85 million tonnes of greenhouse gas in 2022 in direct (Scope 1 and 2) emissions (0.4% of all reported emissions in Canada). When it’s burned to make steel, the total lifecycle emissions from Teck’s coal add up to 65 million tonnes per year — the equivalent of a tenth of Canada’s total emissions. (Most of these emissions don’t officially count against Canada’s greenhouse gas inventory – under international accounting rules, they count in the countries where the coal is consumed.)

 In addition to their heavy CO2 footprint, the Elk Valley mines are under provincial orders to manage the tough environmental problem of selenium leaching into local waterways. High levels of selenium, a naturally occurring substance, have damaged fish populations by lowering their reproductive success. Selenium levels are elevated by rain and snow runoff from large piles of rock moved from mountaintops at the open-pit mines, which makes the substance difficult to control. 

Teck recently spent $1.2 billion to remove selenium from its runoff, but heavy levels remain in the region’s waterways. According to an investigation by The Narwhal, there are no viable ways to stop selenium from leaching into local waters. 

In the vote last week, Teck received more than 50% support for its proposal to split the coal and critical minerals assets, but it failed to receive the necessary votes for it to be approved. (The move required the support of two-thirds of Class A and B shareholders.) 

Under the proposed arrangement (which has now been withdrawn), the coal assets would have been turned over to a new company, Elk Valley Resources, which would have paid Teck 90% of its cash flow for up to 11 years. Under the deal, Teck would no longer be responsible for the company’s CO2 and selenium emissions, and yet it would still benefit by taking on billions of dollars in Elk Valley revenue, which would be invested in Teck’s remaining copper and critical mineral operations. 

Why investors rejected Teck Resource’s proposal

Writing before last week’s vote, Globe and Mail columnist Eric Reguly didn’t mince words, calling the proposal to split the company blatant greenwashing. 

“Teck unveiled a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too deal that makes a mockery of the environmental, social and corporate governance [ESG] strategy that had been pushing the resource industry to get rid of its dirtiest products,” he wrote. 

Teck recognizes that investors are turning away from coal because of its climate impact. Thermal coal – the kind mined by Glencore – used for electricity generation is the main culprit, but metallurgical coal is also targeted, albeit to a lesser extent, as the global steel industry begins to embrace green steelmaking. 

U.S. steelmakers already primarily use scrap rather than iron for their feedstock, which avoids the need to use coal. In Canada, Algoma and ArcelorMittal Dofasco are phasing out their coal-burning blast furnaces, while many European producers are going a step further and switching to emission-free hydrogen-based production. 

So where does this leave Teck? 

George Cheveley, portfolio manager at London-based asset manager Ninety One, told Reuters that Teck needs to develop a clear transition plan for Elk Valley. “This needs to be a credible plan as well and, whilst it can be longer term, it needs to demonstrate how they can support decarbonization.” 

The failure of the plan to divide the company may open the door to Glencore’s takeover, but it’s also clear that the government – which holds the power to reject takeover deals under the Investment Canada Act – is looking for strong environmental and Indigenous community benefits. Teck is the major employer in the Elk Valley region, with thousands of people on its direct payroll and thousands of spinoff jobs dependent on its mines. It also provides major benefits to the Ktunaxa Nation, which has an impact management agreement with Teck, one of the most comprehensive Indigenous benefit agreements in Canada.  

The major challenge that Teck now faces is how to transition out of its Elk Valley mines while also maintaining support for its local communities. It’s in uncharted territory. Phasing out an operation responsible for the bulk of a company’s profit is something that no management group wants to contemplate. 

In spite of its climate and environmental problems, Teck is considered an ESG leader in the mining industry in part because of its transparency. Now it faces the greatest ESG challenge of all – shifting from a coal company to a business focused on the climate transition. 

Eugene Ellmen is a former executive director of the Canadian Social Investment Organization (now Responsible Investment Association). He writes on sustainable business and finance. 

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But hopeful signs of change are emerging there on a local level, encapsulated in a January decision by Warsaw’s city council to endorse the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, an emerging global campaign that describes itself as “an international mechanism to manage a fast and fair transition away from coal, oil and natural gas.” Warsaw is the first city in central Europe to make such a move.

So far, more than 80 cities and subnational governments have endorsed the treaty. Along with the nation-states of Vanuatu and Tuvalu, the World Health Organization and the European Parliament are officially urging governments to endorse it. California is the latest consider the treaty.

The proposed treaty would align fossil fuel production with the Paris Agreement goal to limit global warming to 1.5°C using three mechanisms: ending the expansion of fossil fuel production, phasing out fossil fuels, and ensuring a “just” global transition that takes account of each country’s ability to replace fossil fuels with renewables.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has raised new hurdles in Poland’s already sluggish efforts to lower its dependence on fossil fuels but has also created an incentive to move faster. Natural gas was poised to play a key role in weaning Poland off coal, providing a lower-emissions “bridge” from coal to renewable sources. However, much of the gas would have come from Russia, and those plans are now in disarray, since Russia stopped exporting to Poland last year.

“In the conditions of economic recession and growing energy poverty, there is a risk that the energy transition may be slower or even stops altogether,” Ernst & Young warned in a recent report on Poland’s energy sector, estimating that the transformation could now cost €135 billion by 2030, equal to about a quarter of total GDP. The estimate includes measures to soften the blow for coal producers.

Nonetheless, progress is being made. Poland has become one of Europe’s fastest-growing solar energy markets, with capacity soaring from 200 megawatts in 2018 to about 10 gigawatts. It also plans to build 5.9 gigawatts of wind capacity in the Baltic Sea by 2030, rising to 11 by 2040.

Michael Poland, an Australia-based climate justice activist who directs the non-proliferation treaty campaign, says that “we applaud the valiant efforts of generations of Polish climate activists [who] demonstrated that climate progress is attainable through collective action.”

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No longer. In an era of increased electrification and decarbonization, electric utilities are playing a decisive role in shaping the clean economy of tomorrow. Enel, Europe’s largest utility and the second-largest power company in the world, is leading the charge when it comes to slashing carbon emissions, as its top ranking on the Corporate Knights Carbon Reduction 20 list suggests.   

Established in 1962 as Italy’s National Electricity Board (Ente nazionale per l’energia elettrica) and privatized in 1992, Enel now operates in more than 30 countries, running the largest electrical distribution network in the world. It is the main power provider in several countries, including Italy, Spain and Chile. In the last decade, the utility has pursued what Salvatore Bernabei, the CEO of the company’s renewable subsidiary Enel Green Power, calls a “consistent plan of closure,” shuttering most of its coal plants and replacing them with a lot of wind and solar (and a little geothermal and natural gas), thereby reducing its total greenhouse gas emissions by more than 73 million tonnes – a larger reduction than any other company in the world. Kudos aside, Enel is still the fourth-largest producer of carbon emissions in Europe. But its reduction in the last decade is exceptional, as is its revenue growth over the same period – an increase of 38% to €115 billion in 2022 – which has moved it into turf otherwise occupied by the oil giants and allowed it to call itself, in a snub at those, a “renewable supermajor.”   

Bernabei, an engineering manager by training, ascended Enel’s ranks in positions across Europe and South America before being named head of Enel Green Power in 2020. He attributes Enel’s successful decarbonization journey to a combination of enlightened leadership and economic common sense.  

“It was very pragmatic and needed,” he says on a call from Enel’s headquarters in Rome, citing 2013 as a turning point when, for the first time, Enel bid on renewables – wind, solar and hydro – rather than coal at auctions for baseload power capacity in Chile. “The Chileans thought we were joking,” he says. It was no joke; renewables were finally cost-competitive with coal. “Coal just didn’t make economic sense anymore,” Bernabei says.  

Affirming this view was Enel’s new CEO, Francesco Starace. A nuclear engineer who started his career developing oil-fired generation plants for global power giants, Starace announced bold plans when he took the helm at Enel in 2014. The utility would be leaving the business of large-scale centralized power generation: closing all its coal plants by 2027 and tripling its renewable energy capacity by 2030. Ninety percent of the €17 billion Enel planned to invest in growth between 2016 and 2019 would go toward renewables and grid modernization.   

Enel’s new direction went over well in climate action circles. Greenpeace, which had been targeting Enel’s Italian coal plants for years – blockading them, spray-painting their chimneys – changed its tune entirely. In 2015, Giuseppe Onufrio, executive director of Greenpeace Italy, lauded the company’s new business model and projected that Enel was on track to become the “first truly green energy giant.”  

Closing coal plants makes sense in an era of climate change, but that doesn’t make it easy. According to Bernabei, less than ten of the 50 coal plants that Enel was running in 2016 are still in operation. Some closures have involved major write-downs. But Bernabei says that persuading Enel’s shareholders – the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance is the main one, at 24% – of the necessity of closures hasn’t been difficult, as the economic arguments are “obvious.” Far more challenging has been selling these closures to local communities that fear for their livelihoods, and systems operators and engineers who, as he puts it, “are much happier managing three coal plants than 3,000 photovoltaic installations.”  

Nonetheless, Enel has remained steadfast in its closure schedule – and its commitment to address social impacts by retraining employees to work in the renewables sector. Bernabei says that typically, at the time of closure, half of the plant employees are reaching retirement age and the other half can be reskilled to work in renewables or industries associated with them, like electric mobility.  

Enel is determined to demonstrate that the end of coal represents other beginnings.  In September, the company completed closure of its last coal plant in Chile, Bocamina II, the first power company in the country to exit coal entirely. In the years leading up to its decommissioning, Enel signed contracts with local cement companies, agreeing to supply them with the plant’s gypsum and ash by-products, reducing both plant waste and the emissions generated in the procurement of those materials. The former coal plant site has been renaturalized and is home to an outdoor art gallery featuring wall murals by local artists. 

Bernabei acknowledges that Enel’s retreat from coal has been facilitated by the fact that most of its operations are in countries where coal is being imported, not mined, and that the challenge is much greater in countries with major coal industries, like Germany. Regardless, he’s adamant that coal’s days are numbered: “Either you shout about it or you just do it,” he says.   

But twice in recent years, Enel has opted to sell rather than decommission coal operations – at Reftinskaya in Russia in 2019 (Russia’s largest thermal power plant) and Novaky and Vojany in Slovakia in 2016 – eliminating their emissions from its own but not the global balance sheet. And as Russia strangles its supply of natural gas to Europe, Enel says it’s keeping some coal plants running to “provide energy security in this emergency phase.”   

Furthermore, critics point out that 30% of Enel’s total capacity is still derived from natural gas. At the Fusina power station in Italy, coal is being replaced by natural gas. And in light of Russia’s recent pipeline closures, Enel is considering reviving its Porto Empedocle LNG terminal project in Sicily though it reiterates that its overall strategy does not include LNG-related activities. The most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change affirms the critical importance of reducing, not augmenting, fossil fuel installations, which, by definition, lock in emissions in the medium-term.

But with its plans to phase out natural gas by 2040, Enel is still ahead of most. Bernabei considers coal and gas necessary and legitimate backup options that, over time, will be rendered superfluous by a combination of market forces and improvements in storage technology.  

A green lab for a gas-free future  

Italy’s sun-kissed Mediterranean island of Sardinia serves as an example of just how quickly this can happen. Since the Italian government’s 2017 announcement of a nation-wide phase-out of coal by 2025, Enel had been planning to replace its coal plant on Sardinia with a gas-powered one. But on closer examination, it became clear that by linking Sardinia to the Italian mainland by cable – a process currently underway with the construction of a “Tyrrhenian Link” that will connect Sicily and Sardinia to the national grid – and boosting the island’s production of solar, wind and hydroelectric power, the gas phase could be skipped and the transition to renewables achieved right away. Bernabei says that by 2027, Sardinia will be powered by wind, sun and water alone.   

It makes for excellent marketing – the popular tourist destination can now boast sustainability on top of its legendary Costa Smeralda – and thousands of new jobs in the electrification sector. It also makes for a better bottom line. Bernabei says that from the utility’s standpoint, renewables plus storage is now a cheaper solution on Sardinia than gas and that this argument will soon pertain in more contexts as technologies, particularly in gravitational and thermal storage, improve.  

While Sardinia is exceptional in its abundance of wind and solar power, these are the energy sources that Enel is relying on most heavily in the decarbonization of its network. Hydro and nuclear power are, in Bernabei’s words, “not expedient,” both involving massive investment over long periods of time, unlike solar and wind, whose plants are smaller and can be built on more flexible business plans. Furthermore, Europe is running out of locations for new hydro installations.   

Of Enel’s total power production, renewables now make up 49%, up from 24% a decade ago; over the same period, the portion derived from wind has risen significantly, from 3% to 17%. In 2021 alone, Enel built some 70 renewable power plants, mainly wind and solar, and most in Latin and North America, as well as battery energy storage systems in the United States. Enel expects its total portfolio to be more than 85% renewable by 2030 and at net-zero, for both direct and indirect emissions, by 2040.   

That’s 10 years earlier than the goal Enel set for itself in 2015, when it signed on to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, but Starace, the company’s CEO, is confident that it’s achievable. Soft-spoken and known for his love of poetry, Starace points to the impact of COVID-19 as evidence of how quickly the world can change. During the pandemic, Enel saw industrial and commercial demand for electricity plummet, while domestic demand increased slightly; the result was a dramatic drop in conventional generation and a surge in renewables, proving, for Starace, that electric systems are flexible and ready to adapt. “We accomplished our 2030 goals in a few days,” he told business podcaster Charles Trevail in an interview last May. “We’re never ready to change,” he mused, “but changing continuously. COVID proved that point spectacularly.”  

Enel’s courage in its own convictions has translated into investor confidence. In July 2021, the company launched the largest-ever issue of sustainability-linked bonds, an instrument whose cost financing is raised if the company fails to meet stated objectives. In this case, the $4-billion issue was linked to Enel’s ambition to reduce its direct greenhouse gas emissions to 80% of 2017 levels by 2030. It received $12 billion in orders. Overall, the company says that its decarbonization drive has reduced the cost of its debt, reduced its risk, and the portion of shares held by ESG investors has almost tripled, from 6% in 2014 to 15% of the company’s float in 2021. They’ve also expanded their base of sustainability-focused institutional shareholders from 134 to 252.  

Overall, Starace believes that the journey to net-zero can be accomplished largely with existent technologies and that what’s missing – primarily better storage systems – is on the way. Having built Europe’s first fully digital grid, in Italy, with a smart-meter rollout that began in 2001, Enel continues to invest heavily in grid digitization: optimizing the dispatch and bidirectional flow of electricity as more distributed renewable energy is fed into the system. It recently launched Gridspertise, a company that shares Enel’s digital technologies and innovations with other grid operators, in a bid to promote grid modernization across the board.   

Asked why it took the energy sector so long to get on board, Starace says that visionary thinking yields results only if the economics work; it took time for competitive technologies to break through.  

Of course, there will be setbacks, like Russia’s throttling of natural gas exports to Europe, but there Starace sees silver linings. Finally, the folly of Europe’s dependence on Russia has become clear, and Europeans will be forced to learn some important lessons in energy conservation. “Gas was supposed to be a bridge,” he told Trevail in the May podcast, “and now the bridge is collapsing.”  

For Starace, the future is looking good. While the first phase of the transition to renewables has been driven largely by regulators and the market, he believes the next phase will put customers in the driver’s seat. They will be the ones to choose the heat pump or the electric car. In doing so, they will go from being consumers to being producers of heat and electricity.  

Dismissing industry dinosaurs who consider this democratization a threat, Starace is convinced that once consumers become producers, they’ll be more invested in electrification and want more of it. On the Monopoly boards of the low-carbon future, everyone will want to land on Electric Company.  

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One encouraging outcome of the UN climate summit in November was a clear recognition that the days of coal-fired power are numbered. The Glasgow Climate Pact that came out of the summit is the first multilateral climate agreement that explicitly notes the need to move away from the black rock that still generates about 36% of the world’s electricity.

Even so, the pact leaves much to be desired. The final wording was watered down in the face of fierce lobbying by big coal producers and consumers, notably India and China. Signatories committed in the end only to “phase down” rather than “phase out” the use of coal. Given such foot-dragging, the spotlight now falls on who is willing – or not – to back up the Glasgow agreement’s words with action. To their credit, the U.S., the E.U. and, most recently, China have pledged to cut public financing of new coal projects in other countries. That commitment sends a powerful signal to banks that coal has become a risky investment.

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has launched a plan to speed up the closure of coal-fired power plants in the region, starting with Indonesia and the Philippines. Under an initiative known as the Energy Transition Mechanism, the bank would help finance public–private partnerships to buy the generating stations. The ADB support would shorten the time that owners need to recoup their investment and depreciation costs, enabling them to decommission plants five to 10 years earlier than their normal lifespan.

Coal currently generates two-thirds of Indonesia’s electricity and 57% of power in the Philippines. The two countries, joined by Vietnam, aim to retire half their coal-power capacity over the next 10 to 15 years. The ADB estimates that would cut 200 million tons of CO2 a year, equal to taking 61 million cars off the road.

Several dozen NGOs across the region described the plan as “a step in the right direction,” but they also expressed strong misgivings. Among them: fears that the buyout mechanism will incentivize operators of older coal-fired plants to extend their planned lifespan and the lack of any assurance that retired coal capacity will be replaced by renewable energy. Time will tell whether these concerns are justified. In the meantime, the ADB deserves marks for putting its money where its mouth is.

Zero: Croatia Airlines

In fairness, we should probably cut some slack to a small company struggling to keep its business aloft in tough times. Yet we would be remiss not to draw attention to Croatia Airlines’ dismal emissions performance at a time when the aviation industry is under growing scrutiny for its role in global warming.

The Zagreb-based carrier, which operates just 13 planes, ranks dead last in the Airline Sustainability Benchmarking Report, published in October by the Centre for Aviation (CAPA), which conducts market research for the aviation and travel industry. Croatia Airlines reported CO2 emissions of 122 tonnes per million passenger kilometres, more than double top-ranked Wizz Air, a low-cost airline based in neighbouring Hungary.

Other poor performers among the 52 carriers surveyed are Turkish Airlines, Japan Airlines and British Airways, while Wizz Air is closely followed at the top of the list by Shanghai-based Juneyao Airlines, Ireland’s Ryanair and Norwegian Air Shuttle. Air Canada ranks 15th. The findings are based on 2019 data – in other words, prior to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Aircraft generate about 3% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. However, “flight shaming” has become a popular tactic among environmental activists thanks to air travel’s high profile and its frequent association with the higher per-capita carbon emissions of the rich and famous.

Robin Hayes, chief executive of JetBlue Airways, has warned that it is only a matter of time before Americans find more environmentally friendly alternatives to flying. “This issue presents a clear and present danger if we don’t get on top of it,” he told analysts in early 2020.

The age of an airline’s fleet can make a big difference to its emissions performance. The Croatians rank 229th out of 258 carriers operating Airbus A320 aircraft and 111th out of 122 operators of Airbus A319s, according to EX-YU Aviation News. The airline ordered four newer – and cleaner — Airbus A320neo models in 2015 but has recently been in talks to cancel the deal because of financial strains.

Fingers crossed that the airline – and other carriers – will soon find more fuel-efficient planes – and more eco-friendly fuel – at a price they and their passengers can afford.

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