I’m not convinced that the demise of coal is as imminent as it might seem. The war on coal began with a bang only eight years ago. Those kinds of impulses can be easily reversed.

It's going to take awhile to burn through all the natural gas made available through the fracking process. Especially since there are a lot of gas wells that are simply turned off because the price of natural gas is so low. There is also another layer of shale (the Utica) under the Marcellus shale that looks promising and is so far untapped.

Another longer term pressure against coal is the dropping price of electricity through solar panels and wind turbines. The price of electric storage is also declining.

There are already examples of coal fired electric plants being propped up (Subsidised) by ratepayers.

Brian

Watching the market - I used to work in energy here in Texas - I expect the export market for coal to increase while domestic use continues to decrease.
South of La Grange, Texas, is a large coal-fired power plant - the Fayette Power Project. It receives multiple unit trains of Powder River Basin coal daily. The problem is that is lies in the middle of a large oil & gas field - there are several natural gas pipelines within only a few miles! How long until it's decided to switch?
At the same time, energy demand in developing nations is doubling every very few years, and America's cheap coal is very attractive where there's few environmental concerns - China, India, etc.

CD

Anyone who is actually in the energy industry will agree with the last two posters, alternative forms of energy from coal, mostly natural gas from fracking, is what is killing coal in the US. Take away all of the EPA restrictions burdening coal, and it still won't come back because natural gas is just that much cheaper and wind and solar are catching up.

I think we need to be very careful about injecting what is really political commentary into a topic such this.

The"War Against Coal" did not begin eight years ago. It began about twenty minutes after somebody realized that there had to be a better way of providing energy than crawling into a tunnel, breaking large rocks into smaller ones, then dragging them back out of the tunnel to burn them and breathing the result.

Rudolf Diesel and his peers defeated King Coal in one of the major campaigns of the War Against Coal by perfecting the internal combustion engine well over a century ago. By the start of World War II the US Navy had NO active coal fired ships and they had to create a new rating for stokers on some of the ships they acquired in a hurry.

The house in Boston where I spent my later childhood received coal deliveries from a horse drawn wagon then an open cab Mack Bulldog and was converted to gas heat early in the Eisenhower administration.

Of the last six administrations, three Presidents have come from the energy industry: one nuclear engineer and two oilmen. Nobody has come from coal. Environmental regulations limiting the use of coal date back to the Nixon administration. The Clean Air Act itself goes back to the Kennedy Administration. Policies favoring the development of oil and gas resources have been key since the gas crisis of the 1970s. (Please show me how to burn coal in my wife's station wagon! It would have paid well back then.) Nuclear power was the dream of the 1950s - to replace coal.

My daughter owns what was her grandparents' house in Cape May County, NJ. On a clear day we can see the chimney at the Beesleys Point power station. I have had occasion to observe that chimney off and on since that (in)famous Thanksgiving Dinner in 1958 http://www.rypn.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=24625&p=109762&hilit=lady#p109762. When I first became acquainted with it the primary fuel was coal with one unit burning oil as a backup. Both fuels were delivered by rail which meant there was fairly heavy traffic on the branch which served the plant. I enjoyed watching the trains as did my father-in-law and my children. The problem was that even with the high stack you could smell the plant and on an overcast day it was absolutely miserable. On a good day it just meant the crud was going somewhere else. If you can smell it you are breathing it. I like watching trains but I enjoy breathing even more and I really do not like breathing black air.

If you can recall any major city which used coal as its primary fuel (Think China in recent times) or remember London in the early sixties or Pittsburgh in the forties you might understand. We have abundant (for now) reserves of gas and oil and are making remarkable strides in wind and solar Until clean coal technology is perfected (and it just isn't there yet) we really should be limiting coal consumption and using other sources.

Its not about politics. Its about oxygen.


GME

Two related responses:

A respectable engineer of my acquaintance, definitely no tree-hugger, said cynically to me long ago, "Coal and oil are far too valuable as petrochemical sources, in a global, inter-planetary sense, to ever set a match to. But until we're either willing to massively reduce our global, homo sapiens standard of living or our population, or go all-out for nuclear energy, it's what we're stuck with for the time being."
Along those lines, the Reading and Northern for a while (and maybe still) was shipping trainloads of coal to Quebec Iron & Titanium in Canada for the production of (I was told) titanium dioxide for paint.

It was pointed out to me in the 1980s that one seldom sees photos of railroading in the steam era in Pittsburgh proper. One example that was shown to me was two B/W shots of a PRR steamer departing the PRR station in a heavy smog that made the photo appear taken at dusk, with some street lights glowing--at two in the afternoon! Any vintage photos of such a city--Altoona, Buffalo, Birmingham, Scranton, etc.--will show an icky brown haze everywhere, and that wasn't from tobacco!

Yep, I also have avoiding wading into this topic because I don't want to ruin RYPN. But here is the decisive battle, which occurred during the second Bush administration with seven of nine Republican appointees on the Supreme Court:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachus ... ion_Agency

In this ruling, the US Supreme Court stated that the EPA must (MUST!) regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the 1970s Clean Air Act. No alternatives. Bush II tried to drag his feet in his last year in office, but the day of reckoning must arrive, when the Supreme Court (which is impatient about foot dragging on its orders) would start holding officials in contempt, regardless of which party they were from. I think Obama agreed with Massachusetts v. EPA, but it wouldn't matter if he didn't.

The upshot: start planning tourist lines on soon to be abandoned coal branches, if you think they are viable.

When making an economic comparison of coal to natural gas, how much of the cost of coal generation is due to the decision to regulate CO2 as a greenhouse gas?

Aside from CO2, what is the quantity and identity of harmful emissions from coal generation using the most modern state of the art?

Although there is now technology to dump CO2 into the ground, the focus for years has been to eliminate the other much more hazardous coal emissions. CO, So2, NoX, worldwide 5000 tons of mercury is released into the atmosphere from burning coal each year.

So far as I can tell it’s not regulations but economics that’s driving coal back.

Coal..
Use heavy equipment to dig it out of the ground, or take the top off a mountain, without killing your workers. Load it onto trains and haul it half way across the country, store it it huge piles to insure a winter supply. Burn it without killing the neighbors with pollutants, then dispose of the mountain of toxic ash after.

Natural gas ..
Pump it through a pipe to the plant, burn it in a gas turbine.

Like Walt Disney told me in 1957, all this fossil stuff will eventually go away forever. After we burn through the easy fuel, and raise the planets temp another 5 or 10 Deg, trust me, our Great Grandkids will go back to coal.