Cheap, abundant coal isn't going anywhere

Standing in the dispatch office of the North Antelope Rochelle Mine near Gillette, Wyo., Scott Durgin pointed at a flat-panel display. The regional vice president for Peabody Energy smiled. The most productive coal mine in the world was on target. Since midnight, about one train an hour had been loaded, each carrying about 16,000 tons of coal. I asked Durgin how long Peabody could continue mining in the region. Easily for five more decades, he replied. "There's no end to the coal here." The Peabody mine, along with the about 1,300 other coal mines in the United States, is being threatened. The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed a rule that, if enacted, would in effect outlaw the construction of new coal-fired power plants in the United States. The EPA's motives are clear: It wants to shut down coal plants, which emit lots of carbon dioxide. But the EPA and the Obama administration know their attack on coal is little more than a token gesture. The rest of the world will continue to burn coal, and lots of it. Reducing the use of coal in the United States may force Americans to pay higher prices for electricity, but it will have nearly no effect on climate change. The proposed EPA rule would cap the amount of CO2 that new fossil-fuel electricity generation units could emit at 1,000 pounds per megawatt-hour. Absent "carbon capture and storage," a process that isn't commercially viable, that standard will rule out coal-fired units, which emit about 1,800 pounds of CO2 per megawatt-hour. (Natural gas units emit about 800 pounds per megawatt-hour.) Prohibiting new coal-fired power plants may please President Obama's domestic supporters, but it would leave global coal demand and CO2 emissions almost unchanged. Indeed, over the last decade, even if CO2 emissions in the U.S. had fallen to zero, global emissions still would have increased. Consider Vietnam, where electricity use increased by 227 percent from 2001 to 2010. Its coal demand jumped by 175 percent during the period, and it had the world's fastest percentage growth in CO2 emissions. Meanwhile, China has about 650,000 megawatts of coal-fired electricity generation capacity (more than twice the capacity in the United States), and it plans to build an additional 273,000 megawatts of coal-fired capacity. Those numbers help explain this fact: Over the last decade, global coal consumption has increased by more than the growth in oil, natural gas and hydro and nuclear power combined...more