A decision by the Egyptian government to begin importing coal has rattled environmentalists, who say it could spell disaster.
AP Photo/Khalil Hamra
CAIRO — Heba Nour peers up at the thick smog blanketing Cairo's midday sun, but if it's hard to see through the dirty black smoke that clogs the skyline now, she can only imagine how much worse it is about to get.
While the rest of the world is moving away from coal-powered factories, Egypt has decided to bet heavily on dirty fossil fuels to drive its economy, causing fear and consternation among environmentalists and Egyptians alike.
Two weeks ago, officials announced they would begin importing coal for use at cement factories and that they would consider the use of coal at power plants — making Egypt one of the few countries to go against the global trend and actively increase its use of coal.
"On the whole the world has been steadily moving away from coal," said Shravya Reddy, director of science and solutions at the Climate Reality Project in Washington, D.C. "The broader trend is that the world recognizes that coal is dirty."
Coal is the most polluting of all the fossil fuels, and the single largest contributor to man-made CO2 emissions, making coal also the single largest driver of climate change, according to Greenpeace. On a more local level, burning coal for energy uses up already-scarce water resources, pollutes the air, and wreaks havoc on the lives of locals.
"If it was bad, it's about to get horrible. Some people say unlivable," said Nour, a 22-year-old student of environmental science at Cairo University, who has had breathing problems for as long as she can remember. So has everyone in her family, who all live in the small Cairo suburb of Helwan. Nour doesn't think it's a coincidence that Helwan's busy industrial area is less than a half-mile from their home. The area boasts dozens of facilities, including a cement factory currently being converted to run on coal.
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A preliminary study by the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency seen by BuzzFeed estimated that once Egypt's cement factories begin using coal, the cost to Egypt's health industry would be roughly $3.2 billion per year. Most of that would be due to an increase of lung cancer and heart disease caused by air pollution from coal-run factories, which spew everything from arsenic to sulfur oxide into the air. Egypt's cement factories are almost all located along the Nile River, where they would pollute waters that are then used to irrigate agricultural fields.
Activists say Egypt's cement industry — dominated by foreign firms like Italcementi and Lafarge — has long benefited from cheap labor and government energy subsidies, which allow them to buy natural gas to power their factories at one-fourth of the price the public pays and get free raw materials through unlimited access to quarries.
"They are making a fortune," said Ahmed Droubi, the coordinator of the Egyptians Against Coal campaign. "The cement industry has to maintain their massive profit margins. They were looking for a way to save money, so they successfully pressured the government to import coal."
He said the companies had "no doubt" they would succeed in importing coal, and that some started converting their facilities to run coal as early as last year – so sure were they that their lobbying efforts would succeed.
One factory even started importing coal for its own use, months before the Egyptian government legalized coal usage.
Lafarge, a French company, is one of the leading producers of building materials in Egypt, and its cement factory near the northern coast is one of the largest in the country. It also played an active role lobbying the Egyptian government to allow the use of coal.
But activists said that even while lobbying efforts were ongoing, the company had arranged a private shipment of coal. Last November activists snapped photographs of a coal shipment that arrived for Lafarge in the port of Dekhela near the city of Alexandria – nearly six months before the Egyptian government voted to legalize the importation of coal.
Activists provided BuzzFeed with photos, on the condition they remain anonymous, showing both the shipment arriving and the coal being used inside the Lafarge factory.
