Ol' King Coal

Ol' King Coal

   Some 300 million years ago, our swampy forests and other vegetation turned to muck and then to peat;  compression from rocks and other forces squeezed out the remaining water and dirt and what emerged was coal...lots of coal.  Some estimates put the figure at 4 TRILLION short tons of coal resting below us;  and when you consider that it takes about 3 to 7 feet of compacted plant matter to make just 1 foot of coal, well, that's one heck of a lot of vegetation.

   Here in the U.S., it is estimated that 27% of that coal is beneath us.  Not all of it is recoverable, of course, but generally it enough to last us for nearly 300 years  (Wyoming's Gillette field alone holds an estimated 182 billion short tons of coal).  But our use of coal is steadily dropping...in 2000, coal accounted for 53% of our electrical generation; by last year, that figure had dropped to 39%.

   So what to do with all that coal (the coal industry still receives $530 billion from the government in subsidies, dwarfed by the oil industry which receives $670 billion)?  Other countries want our coal and it seems natural to increase the 100 million tons of coal we already export.  And China, among others, is on track to build 1200 new coal facilities...but here's the problem.

   Coal "pretty much has to use coal," one fuel analyst told Wired.  China burns almost as much coal as the rest of the world (and in the process emits nearly 25% of all greenhouse gases); in Poland, 86 of their electricity comes from coal...other countries such as Israel, Australia, South Africa and Indonesia are even more dependent on coal for their power.  So are the steel and cement manufacturers...without coal's by-products, there are few options for producing either commodity (the steel industry uses 1 billion tons of coal annually).

   But as you've probably already heard by now, coal is a huge producer of greenhouse gases which is exactly as it sounds, gases making our planet into a greenhouse...trapped heat.  Melting glaciers, warmer oceans, and of course, coal's unseen airborne element, mercury (which is now polluting lakes and soils), are all costs of burning this abundant fossil fuel.  Another by-product of coal is petroleum coke, called by one politician, "the dirtiest of the dirty fuels."  Right now, a mountain three stories high and the size of a city block sits in Detroit...petroleum coke is one of the leftovers from tar sands production (the mountain of pet coke in Detroit is owned by the Koch brothers).

   Our coal is exported primarily in Gulf ports but ideally, exporting from our west coast ports would be beneficial to places such as Wyoming.  The risks of transport are considered large from possible spills and airborne dust during transfer, so ports in Washington and Oregon have either denied such requests or severely limited them.  Ironically, Canada's Vancouver just announced its approval (with much controversy) although allowed amounts are small at just 4 million tons.  So countries demanding coal will likely look elsewhere, primarily to other coal countries such as Columbia, Indonesia and Australia (on a side note, both HSBC and Deutsche Banks have denied funding to expand Australia's Abbot Point port for increase coal exports).

   CCS, or Carbon Capture and Storage, utilizes amine scrubbing which can capture 90% of greenhouse gas emissions.  The trick is bringing down the cost.  Here in the U.S., this scrubbing method is controversial, requiring huge proposed eyesores, costing a fortune and is something that is regarded by lobbying environmentalists as "a sop to the coal industry at the expense of cleaner alternatives like solar and wind," so quoted in the April issue of Wired.  Worldwide, such "demonstration projects" have fallen...except in China.  And now in Vancouver, a company proposed rotating drums inside the smokestacks to help capture the emission gases.

   The conundrum here is that coal is abundant but polluting, in demand but dropping in production, necessary for some industries but not viewed favorably in others, declining in use in the U.S. but increasing in use most everywhere else.  And despite its negative image as a major polluter and user of coal, China appears to be the only country facing all of these questions quite simply...usage will continue so develop the technology to clean the coal's emissions.  It will take such thinking, just facing the facts of usage and demand, to find a solution.  Whether that comes from putting money on the table or simply being creative, it is a worldwide problem that shows little sign of leaving us soon.  As Wired highlighted, "coal can't be ignored."

   This coal was once our forests, once our teeming world of vegetation.  And if we continue to simply pretend a problem doesn't exist, our current world might go full circle...a world turning into muck, then peat, then back to coal.