Rushing to Burn Coal

Coal producers know that their dirty fuel's days are numbered. If concerns about global warming - burning coal pumps more carbon into the atmosphere per unit of energy generated than does either oil or natural gas - don't lead to coal's phaseout, then the rapidly dropping prices of solar and wind-generated electricity will make coal obsolete sooner or later.

Colombia's El Cerrejon coal mine,
near the Venezuelan border, owned 
by BHP Billiton, Anglo American 
and Glencore, also produces about 33 
million tons of coal annually. 

That's why coal producers, including Colombia's Drummond, face an economic reality. If they don't sell their coal soon, they might have to leave it in the ground.

So Drummond - and undoubtedly other producers - are planning to accelerate their coal mining, long term environmental impacts be damned.

Drummond produced about 33 million tons of Colombian coal last year, and plans to raise annual production to 35 million tons with hopes to one day reach 40 million tons. At that rate, perhaps, it can exhaust its Colombian reserves before before coal sunsets.

According to the great majority of the world's scientists - as well as basic common sense - pumping huge quantities of carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere is altering the planet's climate in fundamental ways. However, Drummond doesn't seem concerned - I didn't see a mention of climate change on the company's website - and neither does the El Tiempo newspaper, despite all its protestations about  environmental problems, headlined its interview with Drummond's Colombian CEO 'That's how things are done' and didn't mention global warming. And neither does the Colombian government, which claims to aspire to sustainable development while overseeing unrestrained resource extraction.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Colombia's Climate Contradictions

Congested cars on Calle 26 pump carbon dioxide into the air. Colombians buy more than 20,000 new cars per month.

Donald Trump has taken a wrecking ball to international cooperation, to the United States' image and to the planet's future by withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate accord.

However, judging by the climate policies of the rest of the world, including Colombia, which is supposedly sticking with the accord, the agreement is headed for failure, anyway.

Colombia seems like a good example of this:

The country signed the Paris agreement, but has proceeded to enthusiastically dig as many fossil fuels

Colombian oil production, in red, and consumption, in black.
(Chart: Wikipedia.)

out of the ground as possible. Colombia's production of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, is still growing fast, and oil production may level off only because they can't find more of it.

Ecopetrol's Reficar Cartagena refinery complex,
recently expanded.

The country also made a major long-term investment in the fossil fuels industry by modernizing Ecopetrol's Reficar refinery in Cartagena, a project which went $6 billion over budget, spurring corruption investigations.

Meanwhile, Colombian car ownership is booming, and deforestation rages on.

Still, Colombia is doing well compared to many other oil producers, particularly its neighbors Ecuador and Venezuela, both of which subsidize the price of gasoline and other energy forms, essentially paying people to waste energy. Venezuelan car owners pay only about one U.S. penny per liter to fill their tanks, but that hasn't stopped Caracas from signing the Paris agreement or lecturing developed countries about their environmental policies. Nor do other oil producers, such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iran, see any contradiction between signing the Paris agreement and producing oil and subsidizing its consumption.

Colombia also subsidizes its gasoline, though much less than does Venezuela.

Colombia is also said to be one of the world's most vulnerable nations to climate change.

World car sales are rising, and almost all of them burn fossil fuels.
(Chart: Andemos)

Needless to say, the world would be better off in many ways, besides in climate change terms, if it cut back on fossil fuel consumption: the air would be cleaner, cities would be quieter and more liveable, and people would likely get more exercise, from walking and bicycling. And fewer forests would be cleared.

Trump has squandered the U.S.'s leadership and moral standing as well as the planet's environmental future in return for a few votes and donations from fossil fuel producers. But at least give him credit for honesty. Trump withdrew from the climate agreement, instead of leaving the U.S. on the list while pursuing environmentally poisonous policies.

However, the danger now is that the rest of the world will use Trump as a convenient whipping boy, and an excuse not to act themselves.

Higher and higher: Colombian coal production. Coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel,
and Colobmia is producing more and more of it.
(Chart: Wikipedia)

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Dirty Business: Corporations and Violence in Colombia

Rail cars carrying Colombian coal toward the sea.
(Photo: Colabradio)

Drummond coal company's Colombian operations are in hot water, once again. A recent report by the European NGO Pax Christi claims that Drummond and a second coal exporter, Prodeco, paid money to right-wing paramilitary groups which murdered thousands of people and drove tens of thousands off of their land.

Both Drummond, which is based in Alabama, U.S.A., and the Swiss-owned Prodeco, deny paying money to or collaborating with the paramilitaries. Drummond points out that several paramilitary leaders who accuse the company have changed their stories and even received payments from an attorney suing the companies.

Nevertheless, charges that they used violence to repress workers have dogged many corporations

A protester accuses Drummond Coal Co.
of working with paramilitary death squads.
The company denies any links
to the paramilitaries.
(Photo: Southern Studies) 

foreign operating in Colombia.

Undoubtedly, the most infamous case involved the United Fruit Company (predecessor of Chiquita Corp.), which in 1928 faced strikes by banana plantation workers protesting exploitative work conditions. The workers went on strike, and in December 1928 soldiers massacred an unknown number of strike leaders gathered in the town plaza of Ciénaga. That massacre became a key episode in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' and launched populist leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitan to fame.

Some historians believe that the Colombian military acted murderously because it believed that if it did not United States Marines stationed off of the coast would invade Colombia in defense of the banana company.

An oil pipeline bombed by the ELN guerrillas.
Photo: (El Colombiano)

In 2007, Chiquita Corp. confessed to the U.S. government that it had made multi-million dollar payments first to leftist guerrillas and later to paramilitaries which controlled the region around its Colombian plantations. Chiquita paid a $25 million fine to the U.S. government, but nothing to the victims in Colombia.

Chiquita claims it had no choice but to pay off the armed groups in order to protect its employees from kidnapping or murder. But Chiquita, like the other companies, did have an alternative - to pull out of Colombia rather than finance violent organizations which were terrorizing and murdering civilians.

A present-day Colombian banana plantation worker.
(Photo: Al Jazeera)

During the late 1990s, U.S.-based Occidental Petroleum found itself in a similar situation around its Caño Limon oil pipeline in Arauca Department, where guerrillas had bombed the pipeline and threatened employees. Occidental responded by hiring AirScan, a private security company, which used its own surveillance aircraft to supply the Colombian military with locations of guerrilla fighters. In 1998, using AirScan-supplied coordinates, the Colombian military dropped a cluster bomb on the small town of Santo Domingo, killing 17 civilians, including 7 children. Survivors of the attack sued Occidental, but have lost. In December 2012, the Inter-American Human Rights Court condemned the Colombian government for the bombing, which the government had alleged was caused by a guerrilla truck bomb.

The Santo Domingo episode also implicated the United States government, which had provided more than $100 million in military protection to Occidental.

The leaders of the banana workers' strike.
(Photo: Wikipedia)

It strains credulity to believe that any company doing business in a region terrorized by leftist guerrillas - who attack foreign corporations for both nationalistic motives and financial ones - would not collude in some way with the right-wing paramilitaries which protect businesses by fighting those guerrillas.

Recent violence committed in Santander Department by ELN guerrillas exemplifies that situation. The guerrilla group, which is 'celebrating' its 50th birthday, has bombed a pipeline and an oil workers' encampment and sowed the region with land mines.

"The military in Colombia was very ineffective at guerrilla warfare," Terry Collingsworth, the U.S. attorney who is suing Drummond as well as other large corporations, said recently in an interview with Alternativa Latina Radio. "The (paramilitaries) were very adept at guerrilla warfare....They were largely successful; they drove the FARC way into the mountains and protected areas where there were coal mines and bananas."

"We believe...that virtually every major company that was operating in these guerrilla areas of Colombia actually was a partner with this terrorist organization," added Collingsworth.

But almost all large companies have denied collaborating with illegal groups, and lawsuits against them have consistently failed.

Cases such as those against Occidental, Chiquita and Drummond suffered a blow recently when a U.S. Supreme Court ruling narrowed the jurisdiction of the Alien Tort Statute, which has been used to sue U.S. companies for alleged crimes committed outside the U.S.

The results of court cases aside, Pax Christi is not the first European NGO to criticize foreign coal operations in Colombia. A 2013 report by urgewald & FIAN called 'Bitter Coal - a Dossier on Germany's coal imports,' observed that "Germany's use of hard coal is on the rise. Although 75% of "our" hard coal is imported, the origin of this coal and the associated impacts do not figure in decisions on the construction of new coal-fired power plants and play almost no role in the debate on Germany's energy policies."

Almost one-third of Germany's coal imports come from Colombia.

The report's English-language summary goes on to list human and environmental harm including forced displacement, chronic poverty and malnutrition and the possible rerouting of a river for the El Cerrejon coal mine. The report did not mention climate change, air pollution or the contamination of seawater when coal is loaded onto ships for export.

"Paramilitary forces waged a reign of terror in the main coal mining provinces La Guajira and Cesar over many years. Although the situation has improved since the official demobilisation of the paramiltary, human rights abuses and repression are still rampant in these regions."

There's a second level of moral issues here. Some of the European nations, particularly Germany, which issue reports denouncing abuses by coal companies in Colombian have been shutting down their nuclear reactors for supposed environmental motives. Nuclear energy, however, produces miniscule amounts of pollution compared to coal and, while there probably are human rights abuses associated with uranium mines, I haven't heard of them.

As I see it, the European nations are exchanging the exaggerated dangers of nuclear energy for the very real dangers and damages of coal.


By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Drummond Gets Fined - But It's All Fine

Coal pollution in Santa Marta Bay.

The Ministry of the Environment hit Drummond with a heavy fine - by Colombian standards - for spilling some 500 tons of coal off of barge into Santa Marta Bay in January and delaying reporting it. The company is also required, among other things, to clean the bay's floor of coal and pay for a public environmental education campaign.

The fine of 6.97 billion pesos, or about $3.6 million, is a lot of money to you or me, but amounts to about 0.12% of Drummond's 2012 revenue of around $3 billion. I suspect that Drummond has insurance and that these are just routine operating expenses for the multinational.

Drummond says that the accident "could have happened to anyone" and that only a coal slurry was dumped into the water to prevent an even worse disaster.

And the coal business is profitable enough that, despite the potential for more fines, Drummond, plans to continue loading coal the dangerous, dirty and old fashioned way off of Santa Marta. Six years ago, the ministry gave coal companies until Jan. 1, 2014 to build safer direct-loading coal terminals and eliminate those dirty barges. Other coal companies have made the change, but Drummond apparently found it cheaper - even with the fines - and easier to continue using dirty barges than to meet the deadline. The company now says it will build a new loading system by next March.

In announcing the fine, Minister of the Environment Luz Helena Sarmiento emphasized that nobody, but nobody, gets away with violating those tough Colombian environmental laws.

"In Colombia, it won't continue happening that nothing is done to those who don't comply with the law," she said. "There will be daily sanctions, no matter which company it is, nor the resources it has."

Related posts:

Colombia "On the Verge of an Environmental Disaster."

Colombia's Real Coal Crisis

Drummond Coal's Cynical Strategy

But I guess the minister's strong words don't apply to air pollution violations.

Where are those 'daily sanctions' when we need them?

So, when will something happen to this bus that's not complying with the law?

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Drummond Coal's Cynical Strategy

Coal or just dirty water? A crane dumps material
from a Drummond coal barge into the sea. 

Between the night of Jan. 12 and the morning of the 13th a barge used by Drummond coal started to sink, causing the company to allegedly dumped 500 or more tons of coal into the sea near Santa Marta.

But instead of leading to stricter environmental governance, Drummond's aggressive legal response could hobble Colombian environmental law enforcement.

The spill might never have been revealed at all, if not for the president of the Association of Sick Workers of the Drummond Port (Asotredp), an ex-Drummond employee, who publicized photos of the dumping and alleged that Drummond had dumped coal into the sea several times previously after ignoring the Port captain's orders to cease loading during bad weather.

After the January episode came to light, environmental authorities responded with fury.responded with fury.

"Drummond did not adecuately activate a contingency plan, according to what is established in the management plan, since it did not inform local authorities of the emergency in an opportune and effective manner," said Luz Helena Sarmiento, director of the National Environmental Licenses Agency (ANLA).

Minister of the Environment Juan Gabriel Uribe said that Drummond could be fined almost 3 billion pesos - $1.5 million dollars - and that the company had compounded its violation by delaying reporting the spill.

"They had three days to report what happened, and they violated that term," Uribe said.

Drummond asserted that it had dumped only water mixed with coal into the sea, that it had had had no obligation to report the incident to the ANLA, and that the rest of the coal had actually been transferred to another barge - altho authorities questioned that claim.

Despite the companies' assertions, authorities temporarily suspended its right to ship coal.

One might expect that, in such a situation, Drummond would swallow its medicine and work with environmental authorities to clean up its act and help improve environmental practices - but it doesn't look that way. Instead, on its website the company whines that it "feels like a victim themselves" (sic). And, El Espectador reports, Drummond is using a legal strategy that could permanently hobble environmental law and authorities trying to regulate mining.

On the one hand, according to El Espectador, Drummond has filed a tutela - a legal complaint - claiming that it is not the ANLA but the Maritime Directorate which should be investigating and sanctioning these sorts of environmental violations. That would drastically reduce the possible fines and roll back environmental norms by a decade. And, how many people believe that a Maritime agency would be a vigorous environmental watchdog?

Drummond also filed three other legal complaints accusing the ANLA of violating Drummond's rights and of bias against the company.

The lesson here, if Drummond's strategy succeeds: Don't mess with Drummond, or else your environmental laws will be weakened and your environmental agencies handicapped by charges of unfairness. Colombia's already weak environmental enforcement system could be permanently handicapped further.

Of course, many mining and other companies would smile at that prospect.



By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Colombia's Real Coal Crisis

A crane dumps coal into Colombian coastal waters.
(Photo: NTN24)

As everybody who follows the news knows, environmental authorities have revoked Drummond Corp.'s export license, after it reportedly dumped tons of coal into a bay. And Colombia's largest mine, El Cerrejon, has suspended operations because of a strike, while a third mine is also not operating because of pay disputes. Altogether, about 85% of Colombia's coal production is shut down. The production stoppages in Colombia, the world's fourth-largest coal producer, have hiked world coal prices.

But, while Drummond and El Cerrejon will eventually restart operations, their troubles are symptoms of profounder problems in an industry which Pres. Juan Manuel Santos has called one of the 'locomotives' of the economy. Cheap natural gas produced thru fracking has reduced coal's share of the market, slumping its price and generating employer-union tensions. And, if the world someday gets serious about addressing global warming, coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, is certain to suffer.

Coal also damages the environment on a smaller scale. El Cerrejon, for example, has expansion plans which include rerouting La Guajira's only river.

Rail cars carrying coal. In many areas, residents complain that
these coal shipments cover communities with coal dust.

And, like many of Colombia's big resource industries, the coal industry has become entangled by accusations of human rights violations. Drummond, in particular, is fighting lawsuits alleging that the company had links to right-wing paramilitary groups, which assassinated union leaders. The company denies the accusations. Last year, a one-time Colombian paramilitary leader testified that Drummond had paid the paramilitaries millions of dollars to assassinate union leaders, according to news reports.

Coal, along with oil and natural gas production, is also distorting Colombia's economy, according to a recent OECD report. That could continue over-valuing the Colombian peso, suffocating the manufacturing sector. And, in a longer view, by continuing to produce fossil fuels, Colombia is contributing to global warming, which may very well devastate the country's environment and economy in future decades.

Is Colombia's dependence on coal and other fossil fuels inherently disfunctional or something which the country can exploit constructively?

Perhaps only time - and Colombian authorities - will tell.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

No Nukes is...more coal, and more deaths in Colombia

Colombian coal country. A legacy of Japan's disaster?

In the wake of Japan's ongoing nuclear disaster, many nations are putting the brakes on new nuclear power. But nuclear's gotten bad P.R. Besides three notorious disasters: Three Mile Island, which killed nobody, Chernobyl, which is still killing people, but was a badly-designed reactor whose accident was handled terribly, and now the Japan disaster, whose impact hopefully will be limited - nuclear has produced lots of power with relatively little impact. 

In the U.S., more than 100 nuclear reactors provide 20 percent of the country's electricity, without causing deforestation, mining disasters air pollution, global warming or any of the long train of natural disasters and human tragedies which fossil fuels have brought us.

Nukes didn't kill these guys.
(Photo: America Economia)

Here's a sampling of what a single Google search about coal turned up:

Colombia coal mine blast kills 20 - 17 Jun 2010
Colombian Coal Mine Blast Kills at Least 18 - NYTimes.com - 26 Jan 2011
Colombian Coal mine blast kill at least 5  - 24 Nov 2010
21 workers killed in Colombian mine blast - Nearly 100 coal miners were killed in work-related accidents across Colombia in 2010, 


And that's just in Colombia, and only the disasters which made the international news. I bet that right now someone's dying in a Colombian coal mine, and others are dying of coal dust-related diseases. And, all over the world, people are dying of coal pollution - 30,000 per year in the U.S. alone, according to one study. And, less nuclear energy will mean more deaths from coal: you can bet your life, and death, on that!

And that's without mentioning the coming impacts from global warming. 


But the tragedies caused by fossil fuels are so numerous and frequent that we barely notice them anymore. 


The Deepwater Horizon explosion killed 11 men and injured 17 others, as well as devastating the Gulf and innumerable other lives. The Japanese nuclear disaster hasn't killed anybody...but I don't hear many people calling for an end to oil production.


Well-meaning dreamers talk about large-scale wind, solar and wave-power projects. All of those would be wonderful, but they aren't coming soon enough to head of serious climate change. Nuclear power is the only source of proven, carbon-free power we have, and we'd better keep using it, or we'll regret it. 


Nuclear power makes little sense for Colombia, which has plentiful hydroelectric power and also a terrorism problem. But Colombia is paying the price for the rest of the world's reliance on fossil fuels, especially coal. 


By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

A Renewable Colombia?

The Jepirachi windfarm on the La Guajira peninsula

Colombia's record-breaking flooding coincided with the Cancun conference on global warming, providing a great excuse to talk about Colombia's potential as a renewable energy producer.

Two long coasts mean wave, tidal current and possibly even wind energy, lots of sunlight (although lots of clouds), lots of biomass and even volcanic activity, Colombia has little excuse not to exploit its huge renewable energy potential.


A recent report by Colombia's Ministry of Mines and Energy and the Inter-American Development Bank found that Colombia had potential for more than 46 gigawatts of renewable energy generation, including 25 GW of small hydroelectric projects and 21 GW of windpower, as well as solar, biomass and geothermal. (How much is a gigawatt? Enough to power 750,000 homes in the U.S., and many more in Colombia.) Right now, Colombia produces a tiny 1.5% of its energy from renewable sources and hopes to expand that only to 3.5% by 2015 and 6.5% by 2020. (The Colombian government defines only small hydro projects as 'renewable,' while in fact 80% of its electrical generating capacity is hydropower.)

There's lots of good reasons why Colombia could be a pioneer in renewable energy, use it to replace fossil fuels and provide reliable power to remote regions where the power grid doesn't reach. Colombia could even start exporting renewable energy technology. South Africa appears to be doing that. It's also in Colombia's interests: government officials have blamed this year's disastrous floods on global warming, and warming is predicted to melt Colombia's glaciers and destroy much of its wetlands.

The development bank report recommended that Colombia institute policies to promote renewable energy generation, such as guaranteeing markets and stable prices.

Instead, however, Colombia is going full bore for old-fashioned fossil fuel exploitation, meaning oil, natural gas and coal. Fossil fuels are not only terrible for the environment; in the long term, they could undermine the nation's economy, institutionalizing corruption, economic instability and even authoritarianism, as has happened in many big petroleum exporters, including neighboring Venezuela.

A concrete example: the other day I talked to a Mexican textile trader who used to import cloth from Colombia. But Colombia's peso has risen so much that it's cheaper to import from India and China. (Why Mexico can't competitively make its own textiles is another issue.) The peso's rise is in great degree due to investment in the fossil fuel extraction sector. So, the jobs-scarce fossil fuel industry is hurting the jobs-instensive textiles industry. Not only that, but resource extraction industries are also notorious for generating corruption and financing outlaw organizations. A case in point is Occidental Petroleum's Caño Limon pipeline near the Venezuelan border, which used to be bombed regularly by the ELN guerrillas whenever they weren't satisfied with their protection payments. More oil, coal and natural gas exports might just make Colombia into another Venezuela, which exports petroleum and imports everything else.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogota Bike Tours

Coal is Clean?

Clean?

This outfit's  name (Colombian Clean Power) and goal (to sell coal) speaks for themselves. Their goal appears to be to mine coal, which is about the dirtiest, most CO2-intensive fossil fuel known. And they've got the nerve to call themselves 'clean coal.'

Coal - unfortunately - is very abundant and cheap. Tragically, nobody, no place on Earth exploits it in a clean way. Why do these people imagine that they'll be any different?

The best thing one can say for them, as you can see on their website, is that they're not at all ambitious environmentally-speaking.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Colombia's Carbonized Future

Historically, Colombia hasn't pumped a tremendous amount of carbon into our atmosphere - two of the nation's traditional exports, coffee and emeralds, are relatively benign. Recently, Yale and Columbia universities even ranked Colombia tenth in the world for environmental sustainability. In 2007, Colombia's carbon output was only 1.4 tons per-capita, much less than Ecuador's 2.4 tons and only a fraction of Venezuela's 2006 output of 6.4 tons.

But, thanks to increased security across the country, Colombia plans to dramatically increase its coal and petroleum production over the next few years. And, even if Colombia exports nearly all of that oil and coal, just the getting it out of the ground will mean lots of destroyed jungle - and even more when campesinos use those oil company-built roads and pipeline routes to invade and deforest more areas.

Once Colombia's oil and coal money start flowing, will politicians yield to short-term temptation and buy votes by subsidizing gasoline prices, as Ecuador and Venezuela have done, with disastrous environmental and social effects? Or, will it store the money away, as Norway has done, and use it to finance long-term needs like education, infrastructure and environmental protection, which really build a country?

Colombia will also have to take care to avoid the pernicous effects of raw material exports on its economy and delicate democracy. To see the alternative, all Colombians need to do is look east, where oil-rich Venezuela suffers high poverty and inflation and is sliding deeper and deeper into authoritarianism.

Written by Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours and Rentals