3. Coal

Key facts

• Coal provides nearly 60% of electricity and 25% of total energy in the United States today.

• There are 476 coal-fired power plants in the United States. Advocates propose about 150 more, some of which are in construction; others have been approved by the government.

• Coal use is increasing rapidly around the world and reaches a new record high each year in the United States.

• China is rapidly building more coal-fired power plants and may soon catch up with the United States in both the amount of electric power produced from coal and the amount of CO₂ released in the process.

• At current and projected rates of use, coal reserves will last another 150 to 300 years.

• Coal, along with nuclear power, is the dirtiest form of energy, and coal mining and burning have a long history of causing damage to the environment and to human health. Coal mining has destroyed towns, landscapes, mountaintops, rivers, and streams. Coal burning releases toxic elements such as lead, mercury, and arsenic and is a leading cause of air pollution and acid rain.

This coal comes with laundering instructions

Just before Christmas 2007, a consortium of some of the world’s major electric utilities and coal mining companies—American Electric Power, Peabody Energy, Rio Tinto Energy America, and Southern Company, along with Australian, British, and Chinese companies—announced that a new kind of coal-fired electric power plant would be built in Mattoon, Illinois, which would provide the cleanest power in the world. The planned new power plant was part of the U.S. federal FutureGen program, announced in 2003 by President George W. Bush. The claim was that its power generation would be clean because instead of burning coal directly, the energy in the coal would be converted to hydrogen gas, and the carbon dioxide released from the burning coal would be buried deep in the ground rather than released into the atmosphere. The Illinois plant was planned to generate 275 million watts and cost $1.4 billion; $1 billion of which would come from the federal government. It was supposed to begin operating in 2015.²

Transferring the energy in solid coal to a gas is not new—it was invented in the 18th century. In the early 1800s, before the invention of the electric light, coal gas fueled streetlamps in London (the first to have this kind of lighting) and Philadelphia (America’s first coal gas stree-tlights), Boston, Washington, D.C., and New York (Figure 3.1). At that time, street lighting from coal gas was new and considered a great advance. Coal gas began to light homes by 1830.³

Figure 3.1 A coal-gas streetlamp in 19th-century Washington, DC.¹ The crossbar just below the glass lamp is a place for the lamp lighter to rest his ladder. (Source: Library of Congress, the Brady Collection, LC-DIG-cwpb-03640)

Although coal gas technology has been around for almost two centuries, the FutureGen power plant in Illinois was to be new in two ways: It would be the first operational plant to bury carbon dioxide produced from burning coal, and it would combine this with the latest method to make coal gas, called an integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC). The IGCC method of coal gas production is used in only four power plants around the world: Puertollano, Spain; Buggenum, the Netherlands; Terre Haute, Indiana; and Polk County, Florida.⁴

“There is no project in the world that can move near-zero-emission power and CCS (carbon capture and storage) further or faster than FutureGen at Mattoon,” Senator Dale Righter, Republican of Illinois, said. “Today I could not be more proud.... I look forward to the next step where we make this promise of economic evolution a reality.” However, FutureGen’s electricity is estimated to cost three times as much as energy from a conventional coal-fired power plant. As we will see in later chapters, this raises the cost beyond electricity from wind power and approaches that from solar power.⁵

And will it work? And even if it does work, will it be worth $1 billion of the taxpayers’ money? And is it the best way to get cleaner, more secure, sustainable energy? This chapter can help you to make a decision about FutureGen and the future of coal in general.

What exactly is coal?

Coal is fossilized land plants that have been buried deep in the earth for millions of years. Although the intense heat and pressure at those depths have converted the vegetation into a hard, black material that is primarily pure carbon, you can still see the leaves and stems of plants in the fossils. Most coal was formed during the Carboniferous and Permian periods, 363–245 million years ago, and in the Cretaceous period, 146–45 million years ago, when wetlands were widespread.⁶ Dead vegetation that lay buried in large wetlands could not decay, because the water prevented oxygen in the air from reaching it.

There are four kinds of coal, depending on how long the plant material has been underground, at how high a temperature, and under how much pressure. Anthracite (hard coal) is the hardest and best coal fuel because it is 86% to 98% carbon and has the fewest impurities. Bituminous (soft coal) is the most abundant but is softer than anthracite, has a lot of impurities, and is only 69% to 86% carbon. Subbituminous (medium-soft coal) is even softer and has more water and impurities. Lignite (brown coal) is the worst stuff, very soft, 70% water, and less than 30% carbon. Of the four, anthracite, the cleanest and with the least water, is the best for home heating. The others are used primarily to produce electricity, and bituminous coal is also used to make coke, which in turn is used with iron to make steel.⁷

It is estimated that the Earth contains approximately 1 trillion tons of coal. The energy stored in this is somewhere between 4.76 and 7.64 million billion kilowatt-hours, a number hard to imagine. Here’s a try: Hoover Dam, as mentioned earlier, generates 4 billion kilowatt-hours a year, so the world’s total coal reserve contains the amount of energy that would be generated by 1 to 2 million Hoover Dams running at full capacity for one year, or, if you prefer, 1 Hoover Dam running for 1 to 2 million years, or about 100 Hoover Dams running for 10,000 years—about the length of time that human civilization has existed on Earth. No matter how you look at it, there is a lot of energy stored in coal, thanks to woody plants that over hundreds of millions of years did not decay but just lay quietly, buried and stored.

Like oil and natural gas, coal is distributed unevenly around the world, but coal is found in more locations than the other fossil fuels—70 nations have recoverable coal, but 10 nations currently produce 95% of the world’s coal (Figure 3.2).

Figure 3.2 Although there is a lot of coal around the world, these ten nations mine most of it.

The United States has a lot of coal—it is the second-largest producer, behind only China in its mining. Coal in the United States is concentrated in the central and southern Appalachian Mountains of the East and in the western Great Plains, with some in the Midwest (Figure 3.3).

Figure 3.3 Where coal is mined in the United States. Percentages are changes in production from 2005 to 2006. U.S. total production is approximately 1,170 million short tons. (Source: Energy Information Administration, Quarterly Coal Report, October-December 2008, DOE/EIA-0121)⁸

How much coal does the world use?

Coal was important to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, providing abundant energy in the 19th century but also causing great human misery and environmental degradation. Because we don’t use it much anymore to heat our homes, and given that the picturesque coal-fired steam engines are long gone, you may think people are using less and less coal. But although it may not be very visible, worldwide use of coal is actually growing faster than the use of the other fossil fuels, increasing 9% between 2006 and 2007, and 92% in the last 25 years.⁹ The amount of coal mined in the United States is also increasing, reaching record levels in each year of the 21st century.¹⁰

People of the world currently use 3.4 billion tons of coal a year, which provides 25% of the world’s total energy use and 40% of the electricity. Coal is the major fuel used to produce electricity. (Petroleum, you recall, leads in transportation and natural gas in home heating and manufacturing.) The United States gets about half of its electricity from coal, and some nations depend even more heavily on coal for electricity production. For example, Poland and South Africa get 93% of their electricity from coal, China 78%, Israel 71%, and India 69%.

The United States, India, and China are expected to be the dominant users of energy in the next decades, and since these three depend heavily on coal for electricity, it’s going to be difficult to wean them off it.

Coal is also essential to making steel, because it is the carbon in coal that turns iron into much harder steel. But only 2% of the coal used in the United States goes into steel production; 92% is used to produce electricity, and almost all the remaining 6% is used in other industrial processes. Today Americans use only a small fraction—one-tenth of one percent—for home heating. This is a big change from a century or so ago, when many homes in the United States (and in Europe as well) were heated with coal.¹¹ But the dirtiness of coal—its heavy, toxic smoke spewing from chimneys and leaving black dust over everything, as well as large quantities of ash that had to be shoveled out and disposed of—led people to speedily abandon it for home heating as soon as oil and then natural gas became readily available.

Are we going to run out of coal?

Eventually, yes, but since there’s more of it, coal won’t disappear as fast as oil and gas will. At current rates of use, coal should last between 150 and 300 years.¹² But the key question is not the total amount in the ground, but the amount that can be recovered economically and energetically. As we mentioned earlier, economically recoverable means that a mining company can sell the coal it obtains for more than it cost to mine it. Energetically recoverable means that the amount of energy in coal at the point of use is greater than the energy expended to obtain it and transport it to that location, including the energy costs of all indirect activities, such as pollution control resulting from mining, other production costs, and transportation.

Mining coal

Mining coal is one of the major ways that people move the surface of the Earth. Of the 8 billion tons of stone, rock, gravel, sand, and soil that people move each year in the United States, 15% (1.1 billion tons) is from mining coal. That’s almost as much as from farming (16%) and about one-third the amount that U.S. rivers move naturally (not counting the amount of material rivers remove because of erosion from agriculture).¹³ Much of the rest (3 billion tons, almost half of all the earth-moving that Americans do) is due to road building.¹⁴

Strip mining

There are two kinds of coal mining: strip mining (also called surface mining) and underground mining. Strip mining provides more than half the coal in the United States and has been especially damaging to land, rivers, and ecosystems.¹⁵ In the Appalachians alone, coal strip mining has destroyed more than 1,500 square miles—an area as big as Rhode Island—including 500 mountains and 1,000 miles of rivers and streams.¹⁶

A classic book about the effects of coal mining in the Appalachian Mountains is Night Comes to the Cumberlands, by Harry Caudill.¹⁷ He tells the story of the poor Appalachian Kentucky farmers who owned the land in the Appalachian hills and mountains but were often unaware that they owned only the surface rights, not the mineral rights. (In the United States, rarely if ever does land ownership include owning the mineral rights. I learned this the hard way when I bought a house in Santa Barbara, once a major oil field, and attempted to buy the mineral rights. Try as I might, I was not able to purchase them, nor even to learn who actually owned them.)

Strip mining came to the Cumberland Mountains big-time in the 1950s. Previously, this mining method had been limited to comparatively flat lands to the west. But with the end of World War II, big machines—bulldozers and other earth movers—made it possible to strip the mountains.

The coal mining companies let the mountain landowners pay property taxes until the companies were ready to mine the coal. Then they would arrive with their big machines and knock down whatever was in the way, including houses. Legally, the mining companies “...could build roads wherever they desired, even through lawns and fertile vegetable gardens,” Caudill writes. “They could sluice poisonous water from the pits onto crop lands. With impunity they could hurl out from their washeries clouds of coal grit which settled on fields of corn, alfalfa and clover and rendered them worthless as fodder. Fumes from burning slate dumps peeled paint from houses, but the companies were absolved from damages.”¹⁸ The story Caudill tells is one of the saddest in American environmental history. He writes:

The cumulative effects of the wrecking of a coal-filled mountain stagger the imagination. Let us suppose the ridge contains three seams of coal, and that the company first strip-mines the bottommost seam. A few years later it returns to a higher seam midway up the mountain and cuts high walls of fifty or sixty feet in its sides. Then to crown its enterprise its shovels and bulldozers slice off the top of the mountain to recover all of the highest seam. Within a dozen years it has dug millions of tons of coal and made a profit of millions of dollars. But in the process it has totally transformed one of earth’s terrain features. A relatively stable mountain, whose soil and water were to a high degree protected by grass and trees, has been reduced to a colossal rubble heap.¹⁹

As Caudill makes clear, strip mining completed the deforestation that had started with small-time logging in the late 19th century. It also removed the soil, thereby increasing sediment transport downstream. Sulfur in the coal—an impurity—acidified water draining out of a mine, denuding the land and destroying wildlife and fish populations, habitats, and ecosystems downstream.

The most damaging variation on strip mining is mountaintop removal (Figure 3.4): The tops of mountains are cut away, the coal is removed, and the waste is pushed into the valleys. This is obviously highly destructive, increasing the chance of floods and bringing toxic mine waste to the surface.

Figure 3.4 Mountaintop removal at the Martiki mine in Martin County, Kentucky. One such strip-mined area covers 7,000 acres. (Photo by Vivian Stockman / www.ohvec.org. Flyover courtesy SouthWings.org.)

In response to complaints, the federal government began to require that strip-mined land be restored and that mining companies build holding ponds to contain the acidified water. The results have been mixed at best. Relatively little land has been restored, and even what has been “restored” is little like what had been there before. Holding ponds fail—for example, an earth dam near Inez, Kentucky, gave way on October 11, 2000, releasing 250 million gallons of wastewater from coal mines, a spill larger than that of the Exxon Valdez. The release is said to have turned the river “an iridescent black” for 75 miles downstream and killed all aquatic life, including several hundred thousand fish, for more than 100 miles.²⁰ Kentucky has 58 such dams.

Surface-mining practices are supposed to have improved since the 1950s, and land is supposed to be restored. But a 2005 article in the Louisville, Kentucky, Courier Journal, written by a person who revisited old mining areas, said that the laws passed to “control the devastation of strip mining for coal . . . have been ineffective in controlling an industry that has gone wild since the energy shortage has driven the price of coal up to $100 a ton.”²¹ Other stories about strip mining include a description of one mine in Wyoming, abandoned about a half century ago and “restored,” that still has no vegetation.²²

Underground mining

We have focused so far on surface mining, but 40% of coal mining in the United States is underground, and of the 82,000 people who work in coal mining in the U.S., 53% are involved in underground mining versus 47% in surface mining.

Coal has been dug out of the ground and used as a fuel by people for thousands of years. In fact, some archaeological evidence suggests that coal was sought and used for heating perhaps more than 100,000 years ago. Coal mining appears to have been active in China for thousands of years, perhaps 10,000. In the Americas, the Aztecs were the first to use coal, both decoratively and as a fuel. European settlers began to mine coal in the mid-18th century. With the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and especially with James Watt’s invention of the steam engine, coal mining became a major activity, important for fueling the new industrial age.

At first, coal was obtained from places where it came to the surface or from shallow mines. Large-scale underground mining developed in the 19th century, and disasters—cave-ins and explosions—became part of it. The biggest coal mining disaster in Great Britain killed more than 400 miners. In the U.S., the worst was an explosion in a coal mine in Monongah, West Virginia, that killed 362 people. The collapse of part of a coal mine in Huntington, Utah, in August 2007, reminded people of the dangers of this work.

As tragic as these are, the larger-scale impacts on health and environment are worse. Underground mining, like surface mining, produces acid mine drainage. Sometimes land collapses above mines (this is called subsidence), and sometimes underground fires start in coal beds and persist for years over large areas. One of the most notorious started in 1961 in Centralia, Pennsylvania, with a trash fire that spread to coal seams and is still burning today (Figure 3.5). As a result, Centralia has become a ghost town.²³

Figure 3.5 A fire that started in 1961 in an underground coal bed in Centralia, Pennsylvania, still burns in this photograph taken in January 2008. (PA Department of Environmental Protection. Photos and commentary by Donald Davis, www.offroaders.com/album/centralia/photos36.htm)

Centralia’s fire isn’t the only one. An underground fire that started around 1915 on land owned by the Red Ash Coal Company in Laurel Run, Pennsylvania, has continued over the years. In the 1960s, homes, schools, and stores were abandoned, and the fire is still burning today.²⁴ A total of 45 mine fires continue to burn in Pennsylvania.²⁵

Underground coal fires are also a problem in China,²⁶ where such fires are estimated to release more greenhouse gases every year than all the cars in Germany, according to the International Institute for Geo-information, Science and Earth Observation (ITC), in the Netherlands.²⁷ Worldwide, according to Andrew Revkin of the New York Times, “Fires are burning in thousands of underground coal seams from Pennsylvania to Mongolia, releasing toxic gases, adding millions of tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and baking the earth until vegetation shrivels and the land sinks.”²⁸ The federal Office of Surface Mining says that the costs of such fires in the United States have reached nearly $1 billion.²⁹

A large-scale form of underground mining is longwall mining, in which a long wall—up to about 1,200 feet long—is mined as a single unit in one long slice by a machine called a shearer. The shearer has cutting drums and hydraulic rams run by electric motors and is somewhat analogous to the huge machines that dig tunnels. Longwall mining is efficient and safer for miners, but it can lead to serious subsidence of the land surface after the walls of coal have been removed.

Burning coal as fuel is a major source of air pollution

Coal is one of the leading causes of smog, acid rain, other toxic substances that get into the air, and greenhouse gases. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, “10.3 million tons of sulfur dioxide were released from U.S. power plants in 2004, 95 percent of these emissions coming from coal-fired plants.” Similarly, more than 90% of the 3.9 million tons of nitrogen oxides released each year come from coal-fired units. Coal-fired power plants also put into the air approximately 48 tons of mercury, 56 tons of arsenic, 62 tons of lead, 62 tons of chromium compounds, 23,000 tons of hydrogen fluoride, and 134,000 tons of hydrochloric acid each year.³⁰ Coal produces one-third of all carbon dioxide emitted by human activities in the United States.

As most of us are aware by now, air pollution is a significant cause of death. An analysis by the Sierra Club suggests that in the U.S. alone “cutting power plant emissions by 75% could avoid more than 18,000 of the deaths caused by particle pollution.”³¹ In China, almost 14% of adult deaths result from pulmonary diseases, making these the second-largest single cause of adult deaths.³² Although it is not easy to tie down the relationship precisely, pulmonary diseases appear to be closely related to air pollution and, therefore, to coal burning.³³

Sulfur and nitrogen oxides emitted from burning coal create acids when mixed with water. This acid rain has been shown to affect bodies of freshwater and cause a variety of problems for freshwater life, including developmental malformations of freshwater animals. It is also believed to affect forest and grassland ecosystems, but the evidence is still mixed and not conclusive.

Black Mesa

One of the most notorious and contentious cases of air pollution from a coal-fired power plant in the United States is the Black Mesa project at the Four Corners (where Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah meet) in the U.S. Southwest. Black Mesa mine is three interconnected stories: one about a huge coal strip-mining operation; another about the use of water from the Navajo aquifer to move the mined coal; and the third about the Mojave Power Plant that burned the coal and operated from 1971 until the end of 2005.³⁴

The Black Mesa stories began in 1964 when the Peabody Western Coal Company signed a contract with the Navajo and Hopi tribes allowing the company to strip-mine coal on the Indian lands and pump water from the aquifer on the reservations to transport the coal to a huge new electric power plant. The Black Mesa mine, together with the Kayenta mine nearby, both operated by Peabody Western Coal Company, covered 62,753 acres on Navajo and Hopi land. The original agreement is contentious, with representatives of the two tribes claiming that a few individuals sold out to their own benefit without adequately reviewing the arrangement with the rest of the people of the tribes. The agreement allowed the Peabody Coal Company to remove 670 million tons of an estimated 21 billion tons of coal that lie within the area.³⁵ When operating, the mine produced 4.8 million tons of coal a year. And every day, 3.3 million gallons of groundwater was pumped from the Navajo Aquifer 120 miles away to create a slurry with the coal that could then be pumped to the power station (the only such coal-slurry transportation in operation).

The Navajo Aquifer lies beneath both Hopi and Navajo nations in northeastern Arizona and is considered by them sacred water. Now, however, the water stored in the aquifer has decreased, creating water-supply problems for the Navajo and Hopi. Black Mesa Indigenous Support, a group that describes itself as “350 Dineh residents of Black Mesa,” states that “the Peabody Coal Company pumped 1.3 billion gallons of pristine water a year out of an ancient sandstone aquifer that lies beneath the Hopi and Navajo lands.” This organization also states that, as a result, “wells and springs have dried up and the entire ecology of Black Mesa has changed. Plants have failed to reseed and certain native vegetation has died out.” Water levels have dropped by more than 100 feet in some wells, the group says, and concludes that “these developments threaten the viability of the region’s primary water source.”³⁶

Black Mesa coal fueled the 1,500-megawatt Mojave Power Station operated by Southern California Edison (SCE) and primarily owned by that company. SCE received 56% (885 megawatts) of the power, sharing the rest with three other owners: Salt River Project, which received 20% (316 megawatts); Nevada Power Company, 14% (221 megawatts); and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, 10% (158 megawatts).³⁷ It produced enough electricity for 1 million people in California.

Controversies about Black Mesa erupted both locally and nationally. Locally, the Navajo and Hopi tribes battled against the use of their water and destruction and pollution of their lands. Nationally, environmental groups battled against large-scale environmental pollution from the Mojave Generating Station, which emitted more than 40,000 tons of sulfur dioxide a year (making it one of the largest sources of this pollutant in the western states), as well as 19,201 tons of nitrogen oxides, 1,924 tons of particulate matter, and about 10 million tons of carbon dioxide.³⁸

In 1998, three environmental organizations—Grand Canyon Trust, Sierra Club, and the National Parks and Conservation Association—filed suit against the owners of Mojave because of widespread pollution from the plant, reaching to the Grand Canyon and affecting visibility there since the 1980s.³⁹ The Navajo and Hopi tribes also sued the owners of the power plant several times.⁴⁰ One result was that the EPA established guidelines to reduce the Mojave Station’s air pollutant emissions. It was estimated that the required pollution controls would cost $1 billion.⁴¹ The plant closed at the end of 2005 because of noncompliance, and it is unclear whether it will reopen.^{42, 43}

Strip mining in the Kentucky Cumberland Mountains and strip mining and coal burning to produce electric power near the border between Arizona and Nevada are similar stories. Both involve large corporations and the people living on land above the coal. The seemingly easy money paid to residents to give up their rights and allow mining on their land destroys the land and its resources. Although a lot is said about making coal into a clean fuel, good for people, that has not been the general history of coal mining. Money from this “black gold” attracts people and corporations. In the past, including the recent past, laws have not been adequate to prevent large-scale environmental damage.

Financial costs of environmental damage from coal

It’s hard to assess the total cost of mitigating environmental damage from mining and burning coal. Under U.S. federal law, funds are available to restore abandoned coal mine lands, as follows:

Title IV of the Surface Mining Law—the Abandoned Mine Land Reclamation Program—provides for the restoration of lands mined and abandoned or left inadequately restored before August 3, 1977. Implementation is accomplished through an Emergency Program (for problems having a sudden danger that presents a high probability of substantial harm to the health, safety, or general welfare of people before the danger can be abated under normal program operating procedures) and a nonemergency program. States and tribes with approved programs carry out these responsibilities. Since 1979, when the states began receiving abandoned mine land administrative grants to operate their programs and construction grants to complete reclamation projects, through September 30, 2004, $3,579,356,901 was distributed from the fund. ⁴⁴

Since 1996, the Federal Surface Mining Law has authorized the government to award grants to regulate coal mining. By 2004, more than $3.5 billion had been paid out.⁴⁵

The future of coal power

One good thing about coal is that there’s a lot of it. Another good thing about coal is that it is cheap, at least with today’s price supports and subsidies, and as long as only the extraction and transportation costs are included; energy from gas and oil costs about 6 times what it costs from coal. But in 2009 the U.S. Energy Information Agency recalculated the costs to mine coal and determined that at $10.50/ton, the cost a few years ago, only 6% of the coal in Wyoming, the country’s largest reserve, would be economically recoverable.⁴⁶ At the time of this writing, the average sale price for Wyoming coal is $11.39 per ton, and the average price of all coal in the U.S. is $43.53/ton.⁴⁷ The present cost in the U.S. is $8.5/ ton. The question is at what cost per ton would the cost of electrical energy from coal equal that produced by wind and solar energy.

Installation costs for coal-fired power plants have traditionally been estimated at $1.50–2.00 per watt. But the cost is rising rapidly; one current report says that in 2010 the costs are on the order of $3.50 per watt.⁴⁸ At present, wind energy costs between $1 and $3 per installed watt. Let’s consider the less expensive case, where the costs are $1 per watt and the average power output from an installed watt is 2.347 kilowatt-hour over a year (a standard value). In the first year of use, the wind turbine would produce electricity at a cost of $0.43 per kilowatt-hour. Assume there are no maintenance or other costs, and therefore the total costs are contained in the installation, the cost after 10 years would be $0.043 per kilowatt-hour. At this cost per kilowatt-hour, wind matches electrical energy produced from coal when coal is $8.12/ton. Making the same assumptions for the wind turbine, after 20 years the cost would be $0.002 per kilowatt-hour, and coal would have to be priced at $0.41/ton to match this.

Solar is considerably more expensive, both because it costs more to install and because the yield per installed watt capacity is less. (Wind can blow at night, but the solar cells produce electricity only during the day.) Solar costs are typically estimated to be between $3 and $5 per installed watt. Let’s consider the less expensive case, where the costs are $3 per watt and the average power output is 1.245 kilowatt-hours per watt installed (a standard value). Assuming that there are no maintenance or other costs, and therefore the total costs are contained in the installation, the cost after 10 years would be $0.24 per kilowatt-hour. At this cost per kilowatt-hour, solar matches coal when coal is $462.7/ton. Making the same assumptions for the solar devices, after 20 years the cost would be $0.012 per kilowatt-hour, and coal would have to be priced at $46.27/ton to match this.

In short, wind is already cost-competitive against coal, and solar is approaching being cost-competitive against coal, with installation costs averaged over 20 years. And this does not include direct pollution and land-conservation effects (strip mining, erosion, sedimentation, and so on) are taken into account.

But worldwide, coal is selling at much higher prices, and prices have been rising. We will explain this in more detail in Chapter 13.

Wide recognition of the problems with coal resulted in a decline in building new coal power plants in the U.S. However, since there is so much coal, and since the technology for using it has been around for centuries, and since major power companies have a lot to gain from selling coal and the energy from it, there is now and will be more economic pressure to use coal.

In 2006 there were 476 coal-fired electric power plants in the United States, and they produced 2 trillion kilowatt-hours.⁴⁹ Advocates for coal-fired power plants are working to have 150 more added.⁵⁰ More than 100 conventional coal-fired power plants are in various stages of development in the U.S. By 2007, 28 were under construction, 6 were near the construction stage, and 13 more had received permits. When these are completed, they will increase the number of coal-fired power plants by 10%. The Department of Energy projects that by 2030 the equivalent of 450 new large (300 MW) coal-fired power plants will be completed.”⁵¹

China, too, is adding new coal-fired electric power plants. Right now, 78% of China’s electrical energy is produced from coal. The Natural Resources Defense Council estimates that China’s electrical power generation will increase from 600 billion watts in 2006 to 800 billion watts in 2010, much of it from coal. “China’s coal sector is not only the world’s largest, but also the most dangerous and most polluting,” the NRDC added.

Who is promoting this, and why?

Of course, the coal mining corporations and electric power companies support continued use of coal, as do the U.S. government and other national governments. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 included $1.65 billion in tax incentives for new coal plants, $1 billion of which has been allocated to nine projects around the country.⁵² World coal prices have risen (Figure 3.6), making it more attractive to mine, transport, and sell.

Figure 3.6 The price of coal rose sharply, doubling between 2007 and 2008 due to rising demand around the world. (Source: AP Images/Platts, AP)

In addition, some academics envision the continued use of coal. For example, a recent authoritative report by 13 distinguished scientists and scholars at MIT states that “coal will continue to be used to meet the world’s energy needs in significant quantities.” They go on to say that “CO₂ capture and sequestration (CCS) is the critical enabling technology that would reduce CO₂ emissions significantly while also allowing coal to meet the world’s pressing energy needs.”⁵³ They concede that “no CO₂ storage project that is currently operating...has the necessary modeling, monitoring, and verification (MMV) capability to resolve outstanding technical issues, at scale.” However, they “...have confidence that large-scale CO₂ injection projects can be operated safely.”

This report is one of many that views greenhouse gases as the main concern about coal, and the writers are optimistic that new technology can take care of this. But given the history of the use of coal and the magnitude of its environmental effects, is such faith in an unproven technology justified and a wise risk for the future, in comparison to other energy opportunities?

Technologies to make coal cleaner

Earlier in this chapter I wrote about FutureGen and the possibility that coal might become a “clean” fuel. The technology involved burying (sequestering) the carbon dioxide produced when coal burned. How feasible is this? It’s not easy to bury carbon dioxide that comes off a hot coal fire. It’s much easier to get rid of it the old way, by releasing it into the air from tall smokestacks. In June 2009, Southern Company and American Electric Power withdrew from the project, while that same month, the Obama administration put $1 billion into the project as part of the federal stimulus package.^{54, 55}

Craig Canine, writing for the Natural Resources Defense Council, describes his visit to one of the experimental carbon-sequestering plants near Weyburn, Saskatchewan, built by PanCanadian Petroleum. The plant was using the CO₂ to force oil and gas out of deep wells—4,600 feet down—while at the same time burying the CO₂.⁵⁶ Basin Electric, the company generating electricity from coal, had to pump the CO₂ some 205 miles from the power plant to the oil field and had to pressurize it to 2,000 pounds per square inch to do so, requiring one of the most powerful compressors ever made, and powering these with two 20,000-horsepower electric motors. The plan is to bury 20 million tons of CO₂. Doing this for 20 years is expected to yield an additional 120 million barrels of oil from the field.

The Saskatchewan project is one of about a dozen around the world trying to bury CO₂. The recent report by MIT scholars also focused on technologies to bury carbon dioxide emitted by coal fires, but there are three other approaches to trying to make coal “burn cleaner.” The first is to burn coal as it comes from the ground but use physical and chemical scrubbers to remove some of the pollutants on their way up the smokestack and neutralize acid-causing chemicals by adding limestone to the hot emissions. The second is to turn coal into a gas and then burn that. And the third is to turn coal into a liquid—basically into gasoline or diesel—and burn that. The first is self-explanatory, so let’s start by taking a look at the second.

Turning rock into a gas and then burning it

GreenPoint Corporation, the brainchild of Andrew Perlman, is testing new ways to convert solid coal into a gas that will burn cleaner than the original. As you already know, this is not a new idea—remember the 19th-century gas streetlamp in the chapter’s opening photo. What is new at the GreenPoint facility is a secret catalyst that is supposed to convert the solid coal to methane at temperatures much lower than previously needed and separate the pollutants from the gas. The pollutants still have to be disposed of somehow, but they are kept in one place rather than released into the atmosphere. The plant is experimental and has yet to operate.⁵⁷

Turning rock into a liquid and then burning it

The third method proposed to make coal a “clean” fuel is to make a liquid fuel from it. In the 1920s, two Germans, Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch, developed a way to do this. Their method, which was used by the Nazi government during World War II to provide fuel for military vehicles,⁵⁸ uses a catalyst that is supposed to leave the fuel much cleaner, with fewer particulate chemical pollutants.

Although making liquid fuel and some forms of gas fuel from coal are proven technologies, they add costs to the production of electricity and do not themselves dispose of toxic chemicals, dust, or ash. Therefore, it’s unclear whether they will provide a net benefit environmentally, economically, or to society. At the time of this writing, the future of clean-coal technology seems uncertain but also seems to depend on heavily government subsidies. Funds are going into these technologies and will likely continue to do so. FutureGen, directed by the Department of Energy, is funded to the tune of $1 billion. Is this the best use of federal research dollars in a search for cleaner and secure energy sources for the future?

The bottom line

• Coal is the most abundant fossil fuel and, although not evenly distributed around the Earth, occurs in more nations than do large deposits of oil and natural gas.

• Coal remains a cheap fuel to buy, largely because of government subsidies and other benefits, and especially if the price doesn’t include the costs of polluting the environment and damaging human health.

• Because of its availability and relatively low price, we can be fairly certain that coal use will increase in the next decades, especially to generate electricity.

• However, with few exceptions, the mining of coal, an ancient practice, has taken place at the cost of human lives, damage to health, and sometimes destruction of farms, towns and larger settlements, as well as natural environments—forests, wildlife habitats.

• The burning of coal is a major source of air pollution from soot and toxic chemicals that have affected human health, natural ecosystems, agricultural lands, wildlife, and freshwater fish. Coal dust also decreases visibility in the atmosphere.

• Burning coal is one of the major ways that people are adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Hence, much of the recent concern about coal is about its effects on climate, and much of the current emphasis on “clean coal” is to reduce CO₂ emissions into the atmosphere.

• And finally, mining and burning coal mar the beauty of the land and its diversity of life.