War On Coal: EPA Rule Could Shut Down One-Fourth of America’s Coal Plants
President Obama came into office promising to bankrupt the coal industry. Through the EPA he has followed up on that promise, and coal producers are warning that the agency’s latest rule may kill off a huge swath of their industry:
It imposes a standard for emissions that is all but impossible for many plants to meet. It requires coal-fired plants to release no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour.
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Environmentalists are praising the new rule as a vital defense against climate change.
“We know what fossil fuel damages do to our public health, the health of our kids, our families,” said Brent Blackwelder at a recent gathering of Friends of the Earth. “We know the damage it does to crops and to buildings. And now the big damage all around the world is climate disruption.”
But coal industry representatives believe they’ve made great strides in reducing emissions through the years — now capturing over 99 percent of particulate emissions released during the combustion process. The EPA’s proposed rule, they say, sets the bar too high and may force the closure of 20 to 25 percent of coal-fired plants across the United States.
In a state known for its bare-knuckles politics, both men vying for the governor’s office have joined forces in fighting this and other EPA regulations that target the coal industry. Incumbent Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin plans to sue the EPA over the rule – a move that his Republican opponent Bill Maloney welcomes.
“Last year at this time, we were looking for 2,000 coal miners to go to work. Now there’s 2,000 laid off,” Maloney said. “We’ve got six coal-fired power plants that are being shut. We’re losing our competitive edge, and it’s wrong.”
In any debate between environmentalists and the US economy, when Obama has his say, the environmentalists always win. He scuttled the XL pipeline on their behalf, and is killing coal on their behalf — despite the fact that the earth hasn’t warmed in the last 15 years, and the global warming story has fallen apart like a Washington Post exposee.
Not only will coal-fired power plants shut down under the EPA’s new rule, the loss of supply will drive energy prices up — they will skyrocket, as the president threatened they would. Families in West Virginia are looking at 30% hikes. Barack Obama is imposing an energy famine on the nation.
He might be surprised, though, to find out how many coal producing states there really are in the US. According to the Institute for Energy Research, coal is not limited to Appalachia.
That’s quite a few electoral votes to give away, waging war on coal.
According to CountonCoal,
133,533 direct jobs are created by coal with an average salary of $77,475 – 37% of which are in danger by the Obama Administrations war on energy. Average salary of a Solyndra employee: $0.00
· 49 states have coal-based power plants
· 46 percent of electricity is derived from coal-based power
· 94 percent of U.S. energy supply is coal
· There is a 249-year supply of energy in the U.S. coal reserves
Against all of that, here is the Obama energy plan.
No coal. The president is systematically killing off our energy supply, for purely ideological reasons. He does not seem to care what that does to jobs or energy prices, or ultimately to the economy and American families. Even after a felon embarrassed him in the West Virginia Democratic primary, it’s full speed ahead in the destructive Obama war on coal.
The quickest way to solve this problem is for all coal fired power plants to shut off the electricity for an hour. Just to show the American people how doing away with coal energy will work in America.
It would be even better if they picked a day that it was above 80 degrees in NY and DC.
That would be a great idea, but it would have to be done with a warning. Many life support systems rely on electricity. How about a planed four hour shut down to give everyone a chance to prepare?
Only problem with shutting the plants down for and hour is that it takes 12hrs to get one back up and online…………..
While I often agree with you, Walt, this time, no.
If coal-based energy providers shut down power to prove a point, they will be held responsible for any and all spilldown effects no matter how unrelated. Remember Obama’s shakedown of BP and oil after the Gulf spill.
As the former EPA admin made clear, Obama, the EPA and the whackadoodles at DOJ are not just willing, they’re EAGER to crucify the industry as an example to the rest of us.
While I agree that a shut down would have some unwanted affects on certain members of society, the idea of DC and particularly the EPA sweltering in reality brings a smile to my face.
My comment was more an expression of frustration than constructive suggestion.
I notice that there is no hydroelectric in BO’s energy plan. Guess who’s next!
As for nuclear, He promised to “look at it” in 2008. And that is all that He and His minions will ever do- look at nuclear plants that are progressively being shut down due to age, and not replaced.
As for the new permits they claim to be issuing, the deep-ecos are already lining up their lawsuits to stop them. With the help of the EPA, of course.
They want everyone to freeze in the dark. Remember that.
clear ether
eon
Always remember that the greens HATE people. Over the last decade tens of THOUSANDS of people died in Europe during both heat waves and cold spells.
The greens probably looked at that and thought it would be a great way to cut down numbers.
Using the enviros as an excuse the regime has slickly done their best to destroy our way of life through any method they can.Deny more oil exploration,pipelines,coal,you name it if it can be stifled or capitalism can be stalled or screwed over they will do it.No surprises here.
They want everyone to freeze in the dark…except for themselves. You’ll notice the lights are always on in Pyongyang…
Bryan, the facts about the coal industry are incredibly powerful. Is there any way to look beyond jobs directly related to coal to extrapolate the number of jobs indirectly “fueled” by coal?
For example, if 46% of the total power supply is coal based, wouldn’t that indicate that nearly half of all employers and workers could be affected by coal plant shutdowns? Not to mention the impact on households …
This has been discussed at the energy/climate blogs. In reality, this rule isn’t going to change much. The EPA gets a trophy for their wall, but the industry was already moving from coal to gas for economic reasons. There’s a lot of coal generating capacity nearing the end of its life, and the companies are either going to make major investments in new coal-burning plants, or invest in gas. Due to new fracking technology, gas is a lot cheaper, both the buy, and to build for. So the shift to gas was going to happen anyway. Nobody is going to build a new coal burning plant in the US, and you can only keep the old ones together with duct tape for so long.
This doesn’t necessarily mean an end to coal mining, as there’s a healthy export market for coal. We can export the coal a lot more easily than we can export gas.
Needless to say, the environmentalists are planting bombs everywhere they can, including claiming that fracking is going to cause problems (it’s not), and trying to stop exporting of coal. If they get their way on these things, we could end up with some serious problems.
Bottom line: This, in itself, doesn’t mean a whole lot. It’s the rest of the green agenda that could bring us to the stone age.
But the switch to gas is a happy coincidence, and certainly not part of a plan by EPA to orchestrate a switch. What happens if the enviros are successful in banishing the fracking technique or making it prohitively expensive?
The point is, the switch to gas has been obvious for years. The EPA pushed this knowing that it was going to happen for other reasons, anyway.
As I said, a trophy. After all the spankings they’ve been getting in court, this was a safe, albeit pointless victory that nobody was going to challenge.
what do you mean with no challenges. I guess you failed to read the article how they are taking the EPA to court. What do you mean no challenges. Interesting thought, but not based in facts.
Ding, ding. Restricting fracking is already on the EPA agenda, which will increase costs and reduce/block access as you note.
My understanding is that only older coal plants are required to shut down while the newer plants already in compliance with new regulations are not shutting down. Is that right?
Wrong. All coal power plants produce more than 1000lb of CO2 per MW of electricity generated.
To get below the magic 1000lb/MW limit, all coal power plants will need to either use Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) or shut down. They will have no other choice.
And since CCS is a technology that is still in its infancy and it appears that it will be prohibitively expensive even when it is developed, the only economically feasible choice left to the operators will be to shut down all the coal power plants.
Exactly why we need to encourage plug-in hybrids. The more depend on electric power the better.
CraigZ,
You do understand that plug in hybrids will get their power from the electric grid, right? Now a large portion of the electric gird is powered from electricity generated from coal fueled power plants. If we get rid of the coal fueled power plants, then there will be much less electric power to charge those plug in hybrid cars. Those cars will then just sit in their owner’s garages unable to be used.
Is this really what you are proposing?
The big question is whether Santa will bring President Obama a nice lump of coal in his Christmas stocking this year. That would be economical and may be the only remaining use for the wicked stuff.
Santa (the oil and gas industry) brought the American people a huge gift in the form of fracking technology. The Grinch (Obama and the EPA) is trying to steal it.
If so many power plants will be forced to close, and the cost of lighting our homes at night will substantially increase, I guess that Michelle Obama got it exactly backwards when she cooed,”Barack has brought us out of the darkness and into the light.”
I wish someone would come up with a way to de-claw the EPA. Companies sueing them en masse – something! Ricco charges (they certainly are a racket), anything!
The EPA seems to have been given unlimited control over almost every aspect of American life. Until and unless this country finds an efficient substitute for coal and all the other things detested by this administration, I think they should control their urge to control. Most of the alternatives considered have been found to be unworkable by many other countries. Obama, and his much touted powerful intellect, cannot seem to grasp this basic truth.
The enviro-fanatics need to be discredited first, which is already under way. For instance, getting up in arms over some contrived planet fever is gradually losing its cool: Even Saint Albert’s wife of 40 years deserted him! Further electoral defeats of the confused fast talkers and their overheated arguments is what needs to be accomplished next.
A tipping point can be reached when there are no further ataboys to be received when regurgitating talking points so badly in contravention of reason. Keep beating them at the ballot box, and the politicians will desert them, and the EPA will be cut down to size, if not eliminated altogether.
Let an engineer who has engineered a score of nukes and two score fossil fueled (gas, oil, coal) power plants and spent decades assessing advanced technologies in this field jump in. There is a lot of smoke, and little truth in the political winds. Due to the molecules and heat generating reactions, we know that coal combustion exhausts twice as much carbon dioxide as the combustion of natural gas. We know that coal is abundant in America; we have centuries of high grade fuel widely dispersed over our nation. {But there is even active litigation to stop exporting American coal as it is bad for mother earth.}
In the last two decades, due to the pogrom against coal by the EPA, and the pogrom against Nukes, by the NRC, very little has been built, and all of it was gas turbines. When gas is about $2 per million BTUs (a unit of heat), this made economic sense, but in the Enron era, gas shot up toward $15/ MBTU, and broke many generators. Moreover gas plants are excellent “peakers”; they can go from stone cold to 100% power in minutes whereas large coal plants, or nukes, take many hours to come on line. Big coal units and nukes are like air craft carriers, incredibly powerful but run at one speed; they are not dragsters. Their big advantage is cost; their energy is cheap. IF. If the government does not lard on regulatory costs. These costs comprise ~ 90 % of the user’s price, and regulating games played decades ago, still must be paid by your light bill. One key aspect of their economy is that they run for many decades. Gas turbines, like jet engines, have life times measured in hours. They essentially must be replaced like flash lights batteries,perhaps every 7 years.
Obama occasionally, begrudgingly accepts carbon sequestration, or capture, if coal combustion is permitted. Carbon sequestration does not exist, neither does the tooth fairy. I have designed many stacks and chimneys. The problem is taking an exhaust pipe, perhaps 20 feet in diameter, conducting a 100 MPH gas flow, at ~ 300 deg F, and pumping it economically 7,000 feet down through solid bed rock. The existing chimney fans force perhaps 10″ of water pressure, and are perhaps 10,000 hp. A carbon sequestration plant fans may be so large that the plant will draw juice from the grid, not make any new electricity. No plant was sited ever over acceptable geology, none is known today, so we can forget 42% of our grid supply, under the new EPA demands.
Any “government plant” is going to cost. How much? No one will know until the thousands of never applied regs meet the real world. Obama was a prophet, your energy costs will sky rocket. If your employer does not move to Asia. Our grid is junk status, due to age. Asia is building a massively strong, new, electric infrastructure.
This can has been kicked down the calendar for many decades. It will end in an election or a grid collapse. I fear a five year outage in New England starting in a minus 20 deg blizzard: maximum load, chopped up distribution, and panicked operators pushing old equipment into the red zone. A main transformer weighs 800 tons; they stopped being manufactured in the US decades ago.
Some thing must give, or people will die.
It’s worse than that. They don’t sequester the entire flue gas stream, they scrub the CO2 out using a Benfield-type absorption/desorption process, and then compress and liquify the CO2. Then the liquid CO2 is injected. There isn’t enough room down there for all that nitrogen, and you wouldn’t want to have to compress it all anyway. But the Benfield (or similar) process is a huge energy hog, and I’ve seen numbers indicating 20-30% of the energy output of the plant going into the sequestration process.
It can be done, but not economically.
And then what happens when the downpipe starts to leak? That’s stuff’s under several hundred psi of pressure, and it will be till kingdom come.
“Clean coal” is a political buzzword, not a technology.
Why not going back to the basics, and recognize agriculture as the oldest CO2 sequestration method known to humanity? If agriculture does not absorb enough CO2, what’s wrong with planting more trees?
Why are we supposed to be afraid of CO2, which is a necessary food for the plants, which in turn produce oxygen when they manage to capture it from the atmosphere to meet their own structural carbon requirements (cellulose, etc…)? How can they perform this miracle? By using the energy of sunlight! Why should we bother to create artificial green processes while they already exist in nature? Yes, the farmer’s field is a solar energy collector, a producer of oxygen, a CO2 consuming system, and a producer of food in the bargain! Isn’t this good enough for you environuts?
How many of these enviro-fanatics even begin to understand this? How much suffering is necessary before reason comes back to human affairs?
I can imagine the amount and pressure of liquified Co2 would be much greater than fracking and would cause earthquakes, then what would the ecofasists do?
You are partially, essentially, correct, “clean coal” was both an exactly goal, with precise engineering meanings, but also a political term which means give me the money.
I was in charge of a new engineering way to produce electricity via coal combustion in the 1980s, under the DOE Clean Coal program. My design (an integrated combustion combined cycle for those who care) was a real power plant. It competed with six other prototype designs. They all died due to a common defect. All were too expensive to compete in the real world. The utilities walked away, they would never recoup their investment, and none could get government subsidies. However, Clean Coal is real in that billions have been spend, filled pockets. But it never has contributed to our nation.
Today, indeed at every photo op, clean coal is redefined, driven by political winds. I view it as a shell game, where the money comes to me, and the rate payer, or tax payer, sucks air. Clean Coal is a flim -flam game, “,,,,, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”, except certain high costs to you.
An Engineer myself, I find this limiting CO2 laughable if not so serious. Yes plant many crops and trees, get the 3rd world more efficient. But these new rules are just economy crashers.
We should have a continuing Nuclear Power program where we get more efficient and safer plants developed. Same with coal, develope the best technology possibly that makes economic sense. Hydropower is now strangely non-renewable in the Pacific NW, Northwest it should also be promoted when it makes economic sense. Wind and Solar in some places is good, but I cannot fathom them being 5% combined of the total energy capacity.
Energy Standards for construction I find are good, also get all these appliances to actually turn off or nearly off. One that would p*ss the left off is limit single family residences to 8,000 SF, or the energy usage of a 8,000 SF (Sorry Albert)
I’m rather conservative, but in ’09 I had some hope about the stimulus and the shovel ready jobs. Investing effectively in infrastructure is a value use of debt (basically a mortgage on an asset). But the only thing shovel ready was the money going into what really was day to day spending.
There was a lot of talk about a smart grid etc. I was let down when this turned out to be Point of Use Demand Management. Meanwhile, our primary power grid has no redundance in so many places. CA in its power brownouts (also a real cluster f) could not get one more KW into the state. Texas is not connected to the other grids, etc. Look at the main power lines, hardly a one has been built in 20 years, most were there 50 years ago. It is nearing the end of its life.
A few years ago there was a big east coast blackout, it started with one main line tripping off in Ohio, rippled to Boston. If we had 15% reserve in the grid, it would not have been more than a local blackout.
Engineer myself here, though frankly this is a middle school chemistry problem. I’m trying to make heads or tails of this. The regulation stated seems impossible, barring any sequestration or anything. These are the numbers I’m going off of.
Energy density of Coal: 24MJ/kg (for commercial grade, 80% carbon coal)
CO2 created by burning 1kg of coal: 2.93kg
1MWH = 3600*1MJ = 3600MJ = 3.6 Gigajoules
So lets try this math out. 1MWH per 1000lbs of CO2 created.
1000lbs CO2 ~ 455kg
455kgCO2 * 1kg Coal/2.93kg CO2 = 155kg coal.
155kg coal * 24MJ/1kg coal = 3727 MJ (Presume 100% efficiency)
So with a physical potential of 3727MJ of energy from the 155kg of coal they are permitted to use, they have to generate 3600 MJ of energy?
Coal plants are 35% efficient. 40% at best. So that is more like generating 3600MJ of energy with 1600MJ of extract-able energy, rather than 3700MJ. More precisely, by these numbers coal plants can only physically make about 3.28MJ/1kg CO2 released
So, best potential I see is 3.28MJ/1kgCO2, or roughly 1.5MJ per pound of CO2. To fit this new regulation, they need at least 3.6MJ per pound of CO2.
So, obviously there is a large amount of carbon sequestration, and other techniques that more than double their emission factor. Someone mind filling me (and the rest of PJM) in on how these processes work, what their potential limits are, how much it costs, etc. We need more context and information to determine how absurd or reasonable this regulation is.
We are the saudi arabia of coal here in the USA. There should be ample incentive to take cheap coal, scrub the output clean of particulate that really is pollution and let the damm CO 2 go into the air for Chirst’s sake. How can CO 2 which we exhale and which plants need to grow be a “pollutant” except by some mindless drone enviro wacko idiot. Screw obama and these bastards at the EPA. Even if we are successful in killing our economy with these mindless games of stuffing CO 2 into the earth, the Chinese will continue to produce CO2 at a mind boggling rate, making such efforts futile. The first step is an election, the next step is to get real scientists to come forward with rational solutions using the energy we have rather than the energy of hopey changey (solar wind etc. bs)
Old geezers like me can remember a time when nearly every home in America had a coal burning furnace. Not just some, but nearly all power plants burned coal. Factories and heating plants burned coal, locomotives burned coal. Everywhere you looked there was a smokestack.
Somehow we survived. One reason why the whole nation didn’t croak from clogged lings is that nature provides a wonderful air cleaner. It’s called wind.
If you compare the bad old days to nowadays where in many parts of the country you really have to go out of your way to search out a smokestack, and couple that with good old reliable wind, then the whole co2 non-crisis is just so much hokum being sold to a society that is becoming increasingly unobservant and unable to recognize empirical evidence.
Meanwhile in La-La Land,
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/biden-students-youll-see-solar-energy-cheap-gas-uh-coal-excuse-me-coal