Concern over German climate goals as RWE starts work on controversial coal mine

Climate activists are staging a last-ditch attempt to stop RWE AG from demolishing an abandoned village in west Germany to access the lignite coal below.

RWE said Jan. 11 that the protest in Lützerath, on the border of the Garzweiler opencast coal mine, will have to cease as diggers begin to clear the area.

"The coal ... is needed to make optimal use of the lignite fleet during the energy crisis and thus save gas in electricity generation in Germany," the company, one of Europe's largest power producers, said in a statement.

The move is part of an agreement with the German government to increase the use of coal plants in west Germany to shore up energy supply and to bring forward their closure by eight years to 2030.

Lützerath has become a flash point in the climate debate in Germany and beyond, with hundreds of protesters reportedly at the scene and activists saying they are prepared to risk their lives to prevent excavation from starting. They argue that burning the coal would cause Germany to miss its targets under the Paris Agreement on climate change, which aims to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C.

RWE said it "regrets that the planned demolition process can only take place under substantial police protection and that opponents of the opencast mine are calling for illegal disruptions and also criminal acts."

The company added that accelerating Germany's coal phaseout will slash the volume of lignite extracted from the Garzweiler mine by about 50%, meaning that partially inhabited villages nearby would not be at risk for demolition.

Economics in question

Amid gas shortages caused by the cessation of Russian deliveries, Germany's government has returned some coal-fired power plants, as well as certain oil-fired plants, to the grid from reserve until the end of March 2024.

A November 2022 study from consultancy Aurora Energy Research found the move will lead to 61 million tonnes of additional CO2 emissions between 2022 and 2024.

For Economy and Climate Minister Robert Habeck — a member of the Greens in Germany's coalition government — this has meant balancing climate considerations with concerns over security of supply and citizens' cost of living.

"The government has understandably had to make tough decisions in the last year to keep coal plants online longer to combat the energy crisis. However, burning coal under Lützerath puts 1.5 degrees at risk," Ysanne Choksey, policy adviser at think tank E3G, said in a Jan. 11 email. "The decision lacks the economic and security of supply reasoning that would make such a potentially dangerous decision necessary."

An RWE spokesperson rejected the notion that the project could jeopardize the Paris goals, pointing to the Emissions Trading System, the EU's carbon market, as a regulator of total emissions. "If one company emits less, other companies can emit more elsewhere," the spokesperson said in an email Jan. 11.

It is unlikely that other industries will be able to reduce emissions sufficiently to balance out the impact of the new lignite mine, according to Claudia Kemfert, head of the energy, transportation and environment department at the German Institute of Economic Research. "The 1.5-degree C target is not achievable with the mining of Lützerath," Kemfert said in a statement.

In 2022, Germany's energy sector saw increased emissions despite a plunge in demand, due to the effect of more coal on the system.

Moving the closure timetable for lignite coal in west Germany forward from 2038 to 2030 does not make a difference to emissions in the 2030s, because lignite-firing will have become unprofitable by then anyway, Aurora researchers said.

"This is mainly due to the gradual normalization of gas prices and rising prices in Europe's emissions market," they added.

RWE and Norwegian oil giant Equinor ASA plan to replace lignite coal plants in west Germany with new gas turbines from 2030, with a view to running them on blue and ultimately green hydrogen.

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